Advancing a Coordinated Response to Intimate Partner Violence: A Systemwide Assessment from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

By Marina Duane, Storm Ervin, Susan Nembhard, Roderick Taylor

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is one of the most populous counties in the United States, 1 and the sheer number of people who appear in courtrooms and need services there presents several challenges for responding to intimate partner violence (IPV). For example, in the Pittsburgh Municipal Court alone, 10,200 cases were filed in 2018, of which IPV cases constituted 16 percent (or 1,687 cases).2 The same is true for the child welfare system and family court, where IPV is one of the many issues clients face. To tackle this challenge, Allegheny County partners have made several notable strides in responding to IPV, including the following innovations: ◼ creating resource specialist positions in magisterial district judge (MDJ) courtrooms who now help divert aggressors into interventions and otherwise offer expedient connections to social services, which creates more options other than punishment ◼ becoming more trauma informed and family friendly at the family division of the Court of Common Pleas for survivors and families filing for Protection from Abuse (PFA) orders (figure 1 provides an example of a child-friendly playroom available to parents who come to the court to file a PFA order) ◼ initiating early screening for IPV at the Office of Children, Youth and Families and creating IPV specialist positions with the goal of helping families address IPV and reducing its negative impact on children without separating family members from one another From June 2018 to December 2020, researchers from the Urban Institute conducted a systemwide assessment of Allegheny County’s response to IPV. Based on a variety of data collection activities described in this report and in consultation with local partners, we developed the following three priority areas to improve interagency coordination and respond to IPV more effectively and efficiently: 1. Get the county’s top leaders to prioritize IPV over a defined period. Attention to the issue from the top can help mobilize individual agencies, enable IPV experts to turn recommendations into policies and practice, and direct resources where they can make the most impact. 2. Shift the focus from case outcomes to people’s experiences, especially during early encounters with formal services. Focusing on experiences can help overcome hesitancy and increase buy-in among aggressors and survivors. In turn, improved experiences can alleviate many survivors’ reluctance to turn to authorities or aggressors’ hesitancy to get help, through Battering Intervention Programs (BIPs). 3. Reinstitute and sustain IPV-focused fatality reviews and ensure they embrace a nonblaming culture. Moreover, identify the most critical system gaps and get assistance from leaders to implement the changes that the review team recommends. In addition to these interagency priorities, we also recommend that Allegheny County partners consider taking the following agency-specific steps: ◼ Establish a specialized IPV unit in the Allegheny County Public Defender office. ◼ Differentiate IPV from DV in the 911 system, in the PFA office, throughout the family division, and in all IPV-related cases coming through the child welfare system ◼ Record survivors’ information (including full names, date of birth, and other identifiers) consistently, and when possible ensure law enforcement and/or assistant district attorneys can safely and securely share survivors’ information with criminal and family division actors, the probation office, the Department of Human Services, and BIP providers. ◼ Prioritize and improve referrals to BIPs and play an active role in encouraging participants to view them as help (not as admissions of guilt) and in monitoring and encouraging attendance. ◼ Create a mechanism to consistently track aggressors’ and survivors’ experiences at system entry points.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 47p.