Keywords

Domestic violence; domestic violence policy; victims; policy; no drop policy; no drop; criminal justice system; policy satisfaction

Abstract

Over the past few years, much debate has been centered on domestic violence, also known as intimate partner violence (IPV), and how it should be handled in our society and criminal justice system. In previous years, domestic violence has been seen not only as a private family matter, but a situation in which no outsiders should intrude. In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control stated that intimate partner violence is a public health problem with 27% of women and nearly 12% of men who have had some sort of experience with sexual or physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner, being stalked, or had violence impacting their lives in some way. Over the past 20 years, many policies have been enacted that attempt to not only hold offenders responsible for their actions, but also to help victims obtain the resources they so desperately need. While it may seem simple to say that police should arrest more and judges should give harsher sentences in an attempt to control domestic violence, they do need effective tools to help them achieve these results. In this paper, I analyze the satisfaction victims of intimate partner violence have with no-drop policies. These policies do not allow victims to drop charges against a perpetrator. Using data from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), findings indicate that male victims are more likely to be satisfied with the no-drop policy than are female victims. Because victims did not want the criminal justice system response to their victimization to go beyond arrest, future research needs to focus on why victims do not support jailing or therapy for offenders.

Notes

If this is your thesis or dissertation, and want to learn how to access it or for more information about readership statistics, contact us at STARS@ucf.edu

Graduation Date

2015

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Huff-Corzine, Lin

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Sociology

Degree Program

Sciences

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0005898

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005898

Language

English

Release Date

August 2015

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences; Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic

Download

Included in

Sociology Commons

Share

COinS