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Prosecutors have increasingly adopted mandatory prosecution in domestic violence criminal cases. There is little empirical evidence, however, that the policy is a good match for victims' needs. Interviews with 94 battered women, whose cases were randomly selected from prosecutors' files, focused on their opinions of prosecuting. A logistic regression explores the factors that predict whether victims favor or oppose prosecution. Open-ended responses are coded into themes using the goals of sentencing literature as a framework. Previous published works are also tentatively grouped into the same themes to look for trends in the field. The most frequent reason why victims oppose prosecution is that the crime is too minor to justify a penalty.
Keywords: abused women; domestic violence; prosecution; victims
A primary purpose of criminal law in the United States is to define and control unacceptable behavior; however, the law's impact on victims of crime also must be considered. This is particularly important for domestic violence cases. County prosecutors, who were accused of ignoring domestic violence cases until the mid-1980s, are now encouraged to pursue mandatory prosecution (Friedman & Schulman, 1990; Goolkasian, 1986; Lerman, 1986). Advocates for battered women contend that mandatory prosecution sends a message to the batterers that abuse is criminal. Furthermore, so-called no-drop policies remove the leverage that abusers use on victims to threaten renewed harm unless the charges are dropped (Davis & Smith, 1995). Little empirical evidence supports these claims, however. The one experiment conducted on this matter finds that battered women are safer from revictimization if they have a say in whether or not the case is prosecuted (Ford, 1991; Ford & Regoli, 1993).
Thus, the criminal justice system is increasingly pursuing a policy without empirical support for its effectiveness and without a strong consensus from the victims. Few studies have interviewed victims about their views and experiences with prosecution. There is little understanding of the goals that battered women bring to the prosecution process. What do they want to achieve?
For this article, battered women were asked whether they favored or opposed prosecution of their cases. These findings add to the small number of studies that give voice to battered women. Themes in victims' opinions from the current study and from previously published studies are compared. At this point,...