By Malore Dusenbery, Andreea Matei, Claudia Nmai, Susan Nembhard, Marina Duane

With funding from the US Office on Violence Against Women, the Urban Institute conducted a mixed-methods, multisite study on the perceptions of justice, accountability, safety, and healing held by diverse survivors of domestic violence. The project team interviewed 54 survivors (37 of whom also completed a survey) and 42 practitioners. We aimed to understand how historically underserved survivors (specifically, survivors from immigrant, rural, LGBTQ+, and Native American communities) define justice, accountability, and safety; how they describe their needs, experiences, and preferences; and what strengths and challenges they associate with traditional and alternative approaches to justice.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Domestic violence affects millions of people and causes serious consequences for survivors and their communities. It is also clear that survivors with certain intersecting identities experience higher rates of violence and greater barriers to seeking and receiving help. Yet the field lacks evidence of survivors’ diverse experiences and needs, and as a result, systems designed to provide safety and justice often fall short. The findings from this study can prompt stakeholders across sectors to consider how they are meeting the needs of all survivors and how they are contributing to survivors’ sense of justice.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Our goal was to highlight the diversity of survivors’ backgrounds and experiences while identifying their shared needs and perspectives regarding justice, accountability, and safety. Survivors and practitioners define justice broadly, in ways that range from punitive consequences to acknowledgement of harm. Moreover, safety is inextricably linked to perceptions of justice, as is survivors’ sense of individual recovery and economic security. All survivors need safety, healing, and justice, but aspects of their identities clearly affect their perceptions of and experiences with the different systems and professionals that are supposed to help them get safety, healing, and justice.A key recurring theme was that it takes a village to achieve justice and accountability in domestic violence cases. Service providers affect survivors’ perceptions of whether their partners are held accountable as much as the legal system helps survivors heal. And less traditional stakeholders, including health and mental health providers, religious institutions, employers, and other community groups, also play important roles.We identified actionable recommendations that stem from the participants’ desire for empowerment and choice and for practitioners to take all forms of domestic violence seriously. They are also designed to address some of the pervasive barriers we identified to achieving justice in the community or legal system, such as a lack of awareness of services or legal options among survivors and practitioners, language inaccessibility, and a lack of culturally informed and appropriate responses.Washington DC: Urban Institute, Urban Justice Center, 2024. 60p.