COORDINATED COMMUNITY RESPONSE
WORKING TOGETHER AGAINST FAMILY & DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
In Memoriam
Ellen Pence
Ellen Pence (1948-2012) was a scholar and a social activist. She co-founded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, an inter-agency collaboration model used in all 50 states in the U.S. and more than 17 countries. A leader in both the battered women's movement and the emerging field of institutional ethnography, she was the recipient of numerous awards including the 2008 Society for the Study of Social Problems Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award for significant contributions in a career of activist research.
Known for her generosity, quick wit and sense of humor, Ellen learned from battered women and has worked with and trained thousands of professionals in the domestic violence field. Her work with men who batter is the basis of DAIP's Creating a Process of Change for Men Who Batter.
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pence graduated from St. Scholastica in Duluth with a B.A. She was active in institutional change work for battered women since 1975, and helped found the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in 1980.
She is credited with creating the Duluth Model of intervention in domestic violence cases, Coordinated Community Response (CCR), which uses an interagency collaborative approach involving police, probation, courts and human services in response to domestic abuse. The primary goal of CCR is to protect victims from ongoing abuse.
Pence received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 1996. She used institutional ethnography as a method of organizing community groups to analyze problems created by institutional intervention in families.
She founded Praxis International in 1998 and was the chief author and architect of the Praxis Institutional Audit, a method of identifying, analyzing and correcting institutional failures to protect people drawn into legal and human service systems because of violence and poverty.
Ellen died of breast cancer on January 6, 2012.
The WA Government released the Safety and Accountability Audit of the Armadale Domestic Violence Intervention Program (ADVIP), a comprehensive evaluation of this fourteen-year-old integration response. The WA Audit was modelled on the Praxis Safety & Accountability Audit, designed by Dr Ellen Pence of Duluth for the evaluation of multi-agency interventions. Dr Pence was a chief consultant on the WA Safety and Accountability Audit project and wrote the Report, with Arina Aoina, Chairperson of ADVIP and CEO of Starick Services Inc. with Sherilee Mitchell from the Family and Domestic Violence Unit. The Report demonstrates good practice both in its conception
and implementation.
The Audit focused on two key questions in the development of its investigative framework:
• how does this lead to increased victim safety? and
• how does this enhance offender accountability?
The Audit aimed to uncover whether or not institutional practices are affecting safety and accountability in domestic violence cases. The structures, practices and responses of agencies within the ADVIP were examined and reviewed, locating problems in the system regardless of who was working with a particular woman. Seven agencies involved in the ADVIP agreed to be scrutinised by the audit team, demonstrating commendable willingness to identify problems and areas for improvement.
The Audit methodology involved extensive preparation investigating work over a week, examining all 'cases' with which each of the agencies operating within the ADVIP engaged. Police, Corrective Services, Gosnells Community Legal Services, Legal Aid WA, Starick Services Inc, Relationships Australia WA and the Department for Community Development (now Child Protection) were audited. External consultants assisted ADVIP to develop the audit using a framework of institutional ethnography. Eight audit trails were followed, including case processing routines, systems of accountability and mission articulation enabling discovery of systemic problems rather than individual causes. Three sub-groups of the Audit team were formed under a coordinator to analyse the intersection of three key areas of ADVIP work: child protection; criminal justice; and the role of advocacy. Case files, police summaries, child protection files, minutes, interviews with refuge residents and corrective service files were reviewed. The Audit team represented a cross-section of agencies in the ADVIP - lawyers, case workers, policy officers, academics, police, therapists, domestic violence advocates and researchers.
A key question for the audit was: is the ADVIP helping to keep women and children safe and make offenders accountable? Women and children's views were central to the evaluation in examining how a woman's life experience is retained or disappears in the handling of each case.
Thirty-five specific problem practices were analysed and categorised into five key problem areas, ensuring that outcomes were manageable and achievable for ADVIP agencies. These are discussed in the Report, and include an assessment that at every level of intervention, practice was organised to solicit information from the client and then incorporate it into an existing case-management framework. The Audit found clients were often objectified, blamed or categorised and information documented in a manner compromising safety and perpetrator accountability, particularly regarding the safety of children living with violence. Recommendations emerged from the five key areas. These findings and recommendations resonate for all interagency responses.
The WA Government must be applauded for supporting this benchmark evaluation and for committing to developing coordination and accountability within its piloted interagency response. The Audit was included in the State's Strategic Plan and, therefore, received high-level support across all agencies. The Clearinghouse looks forward to seeing continued funding by the Government for implementation of the Report's recommendations.
Arina Aoina and Mark Glasson's presented the Audit at the Victorian Children's Summit in 2007.
Australian Domestic Violence Clearing House