Safety Audits Resources

Planning and Conducting a Best-Practice Assessment of Community Response to Domestic Violence

Two new Best Practice Assessment Tools are available for communities who want to use the lessons learned from CCR efforts and Safety Audits to examine their system's response to battering. The tools will help you analyze your community's response in these areas:

Emergency Communications (911) & Police Patrol

Police Follow-Up Investigations & Prosecution Charging Decisions

The Safety and Accountability Audit Informational Video

This 14-minute DVD features a description of the Audit process as well as feedback and testimony from criminal justice practitioners across the U.S. who have been a part of Audits in their communities.

To request a free copy, email your name and the name of your OVW grantee program.
The cost is $6 for non-OVW funded programs to defray production and mailing costs.

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Domestic Violence Safety & Accountability Audit

A three-page handout briefly describing the Safety and Accountability Audit’s philosophical underpinnings and methodology. This is a use full source of language when describing the Audit in grant applications.

Handout

Domestic Violence Safety & Accountability Audit - Potential Interagency Connections

Mapping is a method used in the Safety & Accountability Audit process to breakdown the steps taken in an agencies response to a case. This is a sample map of potential inter agency connections arising from the processing of a domestic violence case in the criminal justice system.

Sample interagency map

Text Analysis as a Tool for a Coordinated Community Response: Keeping Safety for Battered Women and their Children at the Center

This new guide for Coordinated Community Response (CCR) and Audit teams will help you identify gaps in safety in your criminal justice system response to battered women and their children. All practitioners charged with intervening in cases of battering—from law enforcement officers to advocates to child protection workers—are organized by guidelines, report-writing formats, intake forms, and policies so that they do their jobs with relative consistency. To enhance safety for battered women and their children, a CCR team can examine the gaps between the safety needs of battered women and how an institution has organized its workers, through "text", to respond to domestic assaults.

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Working from Inside and Outside Institutions: How Safety Audits Can Help Courts' Decision Making Around Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment
Ellen Pence and Martha McMahon, 2003
Reprinted with permission from the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Juvenile and Family Court Journal, Vol. 54, No. 4.

As systems begin to work collaboratively to address the overlap of domestic violence and child maltreatment, systems analysis approaches are also being explored to test the effectiveness of collaborative interventions in meeting the needs of victims and their families. This article provides a detailed overview of the Safety Audit model,describe how Safety Audits are being used in the field, and discuss how the courts can incorporate Audit findings into decision-making around domestic violence and child maltreatment.

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Building Safety for Battered Women and Their Children into the Child Protection System
Ellen Pence and Terri Taylor, 2003

This report draws from the experience of three separate communities that wanted to explore the use of the Safety and Accountability Audit in child protection cases where there has been a history of domestic violence. This report shows how to use case files and focus groups to locate systemic problems in the handling of these cases. It is a preliminary examination of the problematic practices in working with battered women within a child protection case.

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Praxis Audit Toolkit

The Safety and Accountability Audit Toolkit is a critical how-to guide for Audit Coordinators. Guides, templates, illustrations and check lists outline the Audit's philosophical underpinnings, clarify the data collection steps and methodologies, and provide a knowledge base for the team's work.

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Safety for Battered Women in a Textually Mediated Legal System
Ellen Pence

Download Chapters 1 - 4
Download Chapters 5 on