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Background and Purpose: Military-connected domestic abuse (MCDA) shares many features with domestic violence in the general population. However, the policies that determine what constitutes domestic violence and dictate social and legal responses to such abuse vary greatly between military and civilian communities. While considerable scholarship has investigated civilian policies, the extent to which related military policies have been analyzed is unknown.
This systematic literature synthesis helps close that gap by scoping peer-reviewed social science literature to determine the extent to which MCDA-related policies have been analyzed. Specifically, the review sought to identify the policies that had been analyzed, the methods used to analyze them, and the theoretical foundation of such analyses.
Methods: This review complied with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews. Eleven databases were systematically searched using Highfill et al.’s (2023) CSI framework: Context (United States), Scope (military), Issue (domestic violence or abuse). Citation chasing identified additional evidence. All articles were uploaded into COVIDENCE, deduplicated, and screened by two reviewers who resolved conflicts through consensus. The two investigators fully reviewed remaining and extracted data from the included works. Inclusion criteria were (1) peer-reviewed works, (2) social science analysis of policy or policy-driven programs, (3) United States, (4) military, and (5) domestic violence or abuse. Law reviews, legal analyses, and studies of defunct programs were excluded.
Findings: After removing duplicates (n =52) and works screened out by title and abstract (n=219), eight articles were fully reviewed. Six were included in the final review. Dates of publication ranged from 1992 to 2023. Among the Branches of Service studied were the Army (n=5), Navy (n=1), Air Force (n=2), and Marine Corps (n=2). No study employed a theoretical model or policy analysis framework. Five articles were quantitative; one was qualitative. The Family Advocacy Program (FAP) was studied by most articles (n=4), followed by medical programs (n=2), and law enforcement (n=1). Major findings included the acceptability of universal screening to military women, training of dental professionals to recognize domestic violence, lack of bias in the processing of domestic violence crime cases, services offered by FAP, and demographics of MCDA survivors and abusers from the 1990s.
Implications: The findings indicate the need for theoretically based research. The availability of rich, historical demographic data and detailed programmatic information suggests the benefit of, and perhaps capacity for, more transparent reporting than is available in the annual FAP reports. Also, the only qualitative study investigated the experiences of FAP advocates, setting the stage for a large-scale quantitative inquiry. The studies of medical programs and policies are too old to provide useful information about the state of domestic violence interventions; however, they offer a model for future work. Finally, research is needed to reconcile the difference between perceived bias by MCDA survivors and empirically suggested objectivity in the military criminal justice setting.
Highfill, M. C., Covington, E., & Hambrick, C. (2023). United States Department of Defense domestic violence and abuse policies: A scoping review protocol. Open Science Framework. https://osf.io/bgq5u