Making the Case for Domestic Violence Prevention Through the Lens of Cost-Benefit
A Manual for Domestic Violence Prevention Practitioners
(and the State and Local Policy-Makers They Present to)
Measuring The Cost Of Domestic Violence Is Challenging
The challenge for violence prevention to address in the years ahead is to systematically establish a solid base of evidence about the costs of interpersonal violence in all societies, and then to feed this evidence into policy making and advocacy where it can complement and strengthen the moral arguments for the prevention of interpersonal violence. [italics ours]
The Economic Dimensions of Interpersonal Violence.
Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention, World Health Organization, Geneva, 2004.
While there is increasing evidence that demonstrates the health consequences of intimate partner violence against women, the precise economic costs of this violence remain largely unknown, especially at the local level. Most programs that seek to make the case for the cost-benefit value of their programs need to have available national and statewide figures to help them explain the reality and profound costs of domestic violence. There are many valuable sources of this information that domestic violence prevention advocates will want to seek out, study and quote when presenting data, while keeping in mind that accurate data (especially local data) are difficult to find. We encourage all readers of this Manual to freely use the various data and quotations we include here along with their sources, and to contact these sources for updates. Please see Chapter 7 for more information on the use of statistics while making your case.
We Have A Common Goal: To Increase The Public Good
Policy-makers and domestic violence prevention practitioners tend to share the same basic goal: To increase the public good.
While policy-makers and practitioners may hold the same goal – to increase the public good – they often have different ways of speaking about the issue and are, of course, making their decisions in vastly different contexts. Practitioners know first hand that efficient, low-cost, effective prevention work happens quite consistently at the community level and that it is highly valuable. Yet, they are often too overworked and/or otherwise unable to collect and organize their data, let alone summarize and convey these data to policy-makers in a way that sells the real front line prevention work. Accounting for costs takes time that many practitioners believe could be better spent on providing services or conducting presentations about domestic violence in the community. Moreover, local level prevention-oriented practitioners have neither been asked, nor encouraged, nor trained, to speak – to use as a tool – a language that resonates so deeply with policy-makers: outcome over dollars and cents.
How does the cost of the violence compare to the cost of the programs responding to the violence?
At the same time, policy-makers are inundated with proposals requesting funding and support for a wide range of health and social issues. Their task is to make the best decisions possible, given limited resources in a tight economy (and varying capacities of lobbyists to influence them). Because they have only a small amount of time or energy to devote to any particular issue, they want to hear or read the most important points in no more than five to ten minutes. After reading through this Manual and completing the worksheet in Chapter 8, you will have a concise case to present.
“When giving testimony to the legislature to try and get funding for a program, you have only a few minutes to tell them what the problem is, how this is an effective program for rural areas (for example), and how much it’s going to cost per unit. It’s important to have examples. Your case must be short, easily read and understood, shown to be effective, and supported by studies.”
John Isaacson,
Office of Emergency Services, Chief of Domestic Violence Section
Family Violence Prevention Program, March 25, 2004