Campus News

A coordinated response to short-circuit family violence

Judith Olin speaking at Law School Domestic Violence conference.

Judith Olin, clinical assistant professor of law who directs the law school’s Family Violence and Women’s Rights Clinic, speaks at the conference. Photo: UB School of Law

By ILENE FLEISCHMANN

Published December 5, 2016 This content is archived.

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“We’re one of the few counties that has a high-risk team. ”
Judith Olin, director
Family Violence and Women’s Rights Clinic

How do you stop intimate partners from hurting — even killing — each other? What preventive strategies and responses can make peace in troubled families?

Lawyers, social scientists and activists have long wrestled with those difficult questions, and some specific answers were up for discussion recently at a major conference hosted by the School of Law.

“Domestic Violence Update: Where We Were, Where We Are Now, and the Work Ahead” brought together scholars and practitioners from the fields of law, mental health, substance abuse, advocacy and dispute resolution. The sold-out, daylong forum on Nov. 18 was co-organized by Kim Diana Connolly, professor of law and vice dean for experiential and skills education.

Among the presenters was Judith Olin, clinical assistant professor of law who directs the school’s Family Violence and Women’s Rights Clinic. Olin shared the dais with Lynette Reda, chief of the Domestic Violence Bureau for the Erie County District Attorney’s Office. Together, they discussed an innovative response to intimate partner violence: the county’s Domestic Violence High Risk Team, which takes a multidisciplinary approach in seeking to prevent homicides by identifying possible violent offenders and assessing the risks to the potential victim.

Kim Diana Connolly, professor of law and vice dean for experiential and skills education, speaks at the Domestic Violence conference.

Kim Diana Connolly, professor of law and vice dean for experiential and skills education, addresses the conference. Photo: UB School of Law

The threat, Olin said, is very real. While statewide rates of domestic violence homicide have declined, eight women were killed by their partners or other family members in 2015 in Erie County — more, she noted, than in heavily populated Brooklyn and Manhattan counties.

“The ripple effects from these cases are really intense,” she said, citing the impact on, for example, children left without a mother, but also for the community in terms of the costs of social services, incarceration, medical care and other indirect costs.

In response, she said, the Domestic Violence High Risk Team seeks to prevent family homicides by assessing the risk to potential targets, responding with a multidisciplinary team approach and coordinating an effort to monitor and contain offenders.

Olin went on to review some of the tools responders can bring to bear on sometimes explosive family situations. Massachusetts, for example, allows “dangerousness hearings” for individuals accused of domestic violence; if they are judged to be an immediate threat to the partner, they can be confined during the pre-trial phase. New York, she argued, should institute such hearings. “If more offenders were confined in the immediate aftermath, women’s safety would be enhanced,” she said.

Olin also described the use of a standardized tool called a danger assessment, developed by Jacquelyn Campbell, a faculty member in the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. Responders ask a domestic violence victim such questions as whether her abuser is unemployed, whether there is a child in the home who is not his, whether he has a history of stalking, and whether she felt he was capable of killing her.

Olin described more recent updates to the tool that take into account the special risks faced by immigrant women. This is particularly relevant in Western New York, given the ever-increasing presence of refugees and immigrants, she said.

She also acknowledged what she called “a disconnect between the domestic violence advocacy community and some in the matrimonial and family law bench and law.” As evidence, she pointed to family lawyers’ stock advice to women in marriages affected by domestic violence: If they leave the family home, they are giving the remaining spouse “a huge upper hand” in winning the house in subsequent divorce proceedings, or possibly gaining custody of any children.

“Why should she choose,” Olin said, “and why should we put her in this dilemma? As more attorneys are educated on risk assessment, I hope there will be knowledge and respect for tools like the danger assessment.”

The problem is real, but the response is determined. “We’re one of the few counties that has a high-risk team,” she said. “We know it’s too late for 2016, but we can all work together to make 2017 a year of zero family violence homicides in our community.”

Joining the School of Law in sponsoring the event were the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence; the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, New York Chapter; the law school’s Family Violence and Women’s Rights Clinic; the UB School of Social Work; and the Office of Attorneys for Children, New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Fourth Judicial Department.