Help-Seeking By Mothers Who Experience Intimate Partner Violence: The Role of Child Risk

For victims of intimate partner violence (IPV), concern for the safety and well-being of children are often primary motivations for seeking help. Therefore, the role that children play in women’s service utilization is an important area of empirical research.  Specifically, research on the role that risks to child well-being play in motivating mothers utilize formal assistance through the court system is limited.  Thus, the purpose of our study was to investigate risks to children as possible influencing factors in where women go to receive assistance from court systems.  We focused on a subsample of primarily African American women with children who experienced IPV and sought formal assistance from civil and/or criminal court systems in an urban setting (n=293).

The data were from a longitudinal study of women who sought help for IPV. The focal participants of the current study were seeking help from civil court by filing for a temporary order of protection or seeking assistance from criminal (misdemeanor) court. The dependent variables indicated where a woman sought assistance: civil court, criminal court or both. The independent variables included the following measures of child risk: kidnapping, custody loss, and emotional harm. Children were considered “at-risk” if the mother rated the level of risk as four or higher (1=low risk; 5=high risk).

To test our hypotheses, we utilized logistic regression analyses to examine the relationship between each child risk variable, an overall child risk variable and each court option.  Then, we conducted a sensitivity analysis by utilizing seemingly unrelated bivariate probit.  Finally, we calculated predicted probabilities.

Overall concern for children’s safety was positively associated with seeking a civil order of protection [OR: 1.98; p=.038] but negatively associated with seeking assistance from criminal court [OR: .53; p=.026]. Specifically, as overall child risk increased, the probability of mothers seeking assistance from civil court increased from .35 to .52; at the same time, the probability of mothers seeking assistance from criminal court decreased from .26 to .14.

For some women who experience IPV, the criminal legal system can involve unintended consequences. Women’s fear over what the abuser might do, feeling of frustration that the system moves too slowly and cannot adequately protect women can contribute to a woman not wanting to assist in the prosecution process.  These concerns could be viewed as “noncooperation” with the criminal justice system but women’s hesitancy to utilize criminal court in the context of child risk could instead be seen as conscientious decisions to help maintain safety and protect themselves and their children. Therefore, civil and criminal court systems and service providers that serve victims of IPV must consider and screen for the level of risk their children are facing. In addition, these systems must become more sensitive to the role of child safety in mother’s decision-making processes. Future research should explore the extent that professionals are screening for IPV and child risk. In addition, future research should utilize qualitative methods to better understand women’s motivations for seeking help from civil over criminal court (or vice versa).