CSCS: Separating the Truth from the Hype

Article by Arwen Bird and Terrie Quinteros

Advocates who work to help survivors recover from violence and crime are busy people, often working with hundreds of survivors a year. The pressure of daily work often means that policy development moves to your back burner. But, proposals still abound in the legislature and on the ballot. How will you, as an advocate, analyze the myriad proposals that pop up claiming they’re going to assist survivors? Our Community Safety Strategy Tool asks critical questions about new proposals that are supposed to ‘help’ crime survivors to see what their real-life impact will be.

The Community Safety Strategy Tool’s questions center around three values (safety, accountability, and healing). In this article, we’re going to focus on two of these values (safety and healing), and the questions that relate to them.

Safety: Does the proposal prevent violence and crime? Does it increase the safety of every person in the situation—including the survivor, enforcement personnel, perpetrators, and witnesses? Is the proposal more likely to create safety in our communities than what already exists?

Healing: Does the proposal facilitate individual survivors’ empowerment to find and incorporate the tools that they need to heal? Does the proposal create resources for healing? Are those resources available to all people?

Many proposals that initially sound good wilt under a bit of scrutiny. Let’s take a few of these questions and apply them to a law that was initially proposed to ‘help’ survivors: mandatory arrest laws, which require police to arrest someone when they arrive at the scene of a domestic violence situation.

Mandatory arrest laws seemed like a great idea when they were originally proposed by advocates and survivors who were struggling for recognition that violence between intimate partners was even a problem. These laws have been implemented across the country in the last few decades. Let’s stop to examine the mandatory arrest laws using the Community Safety Strategy Tool.

Safety: Does the proposal prevent violence and crime? Does it increase the safety of every person in the situation—including the survivor, enforcement personnel, perpetrators, and witnesses? Is the proposal more likely to create safety in our communities than what already exists?

• Requiring arrest and leaving it to the discretion of officers on the scene (who are pressured to make decisions as quickly as possible) has led some police to arrest both adults on the scene, or arrest the survivor.
• When called to a scene, many police are still applying filters on the scene that are colored by racism, class prejudice, or other forms of oppression. Requiring arrest can wind up facilitating racist actions by police officers on the scene.
• If a police officer does not take domestic violence seriously and want to provide safety to the survivor, he/she is more apt to arrest the survivor.
• The threat of arrest is only an incentive not to get caught, not necessarily an incentive to end the violence in the relationship.

Healing: Does the proposal realistically create resources for healing? Are they available to all regardless of status?

• Mandatory arrest laws are only focused on finding someone to arrest, and don’t address the ongoing needs of survivors and communities.
• Police officers who are required to make an arrest still often don’t have time to provide appropriate support to the victim/survivor.
• Many domestic violence survivors are less interested in seeing someone punished and more interested in having the violence stop and healing their families.
• Only a fraction of the resources that exist are devoted to meeting the short and long-term healing needs for survivors and communities. What this amounts to is that punishment is very much prioritized over and at the expense of healing.

Given these answers, it’s our view that mandatory arrest is a problematic strategy to address the issue of domestic violence. Our Community Safety Strategy Tool materials include an example of using these questions to analyze pro-active policies that can prevent violence and serve the real needs of survivors.

The issues that we work on have a visceral connection for many of us; we are survivors and have strong feelings about wanting to prevent what happened to us from happening to another person. But the passion we feel should lead us to pursue strategies that move us closer to our long-term goal: families and communities without violence or the threat of violence. Asking the questions in the Community Safety Strategy Tool gives us the ability to evaluate policies and take an informed position that reflects our intention to prevent future violence. Through a careful measure of whether the proposal creates safety, accountability and healing, we can see if it actually helps us get closer to our vision of a world without violence.

In the last month we have begun meeting with domestic violence advocates to consider using the questions of the Community Strategy Safety Tool for evaluating policy proposals. If you are interested in bringing in CSCS to explore using the tool in your work, or have questions about it, please contact us.

This article originally appeared in Survivors Speak, the newsletter of Crime Survivors for Community Safety.