Abstract
Purpose
We investigated intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization level ever in the relationship, as reported by parents at baseline, as a predictor of outcomes within each of three different dispute resolution processes: traditional litigation (n = 67 cases), shuttle mediation (n = 49 cases), and videoconferencing mediation (n = 50 cases).
Method
The sample included court cases of separating or divorcing parents reporting high levels of IPV victimization. Parent and case level immediate and one-year follow-up outcomes were examined.
Results
Within all three dispute resolution types, higher baseline IPV predicted higher levels of ongoing IPV and harassment at follow-up. Results within the traditional litigation group were mixed. Higher baseline IPV was related to parent reports of feeling less safe and more upset during the process, less positive perceptions of the process, less confidence that the other party would follow the resolution, and in the year following case resolution, greater likelihood of re-litigation. But higher mother reported baseline IPV was associated with greater likelihood of sole legal custody being granted to mothers, and higher father reported baseline IPV was associated with greater likelihood of joint legal custody and fewer parenting hours for mothers. Some results raise concerns about videoconferencing mediation (i.e., higher IPV was related to lower levels of party reported feelings of safety, longer time to resolution, and at follow-up, higher levels of concerning interparental relationships). Most results had small effect sizes.
Conclusions
Recommendations for family law professionals to better serve separating parents reporting high IPV are suggested.
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Data Availability
Our data archiving information is currently listed in our author note.
Notes
We interchangeably use the terms “divorce” or “parental separation” to refer to both the legal dissolution of a marriage and the process of parental separation and/or settlement of child related issues among unmarried parents.
High levels of IPV and how they were identified is defined in the “Methods” section, below.
Given the potential importance of coercive control in family law cases (see introduction), note that the coercive control subscale of the MASIC included 14 questions and the sample had an overall mean of 6.90 (SD = 3.43) on this subscale (range from 0 to 14).
The correlation between the coercive control subscale and the ever variety score used as a predictor in the current paper was 0.90 (p < .0001), making it uninformative to include both scores as predictors.
As fathers’ hours were simply the total number of possible hours in a four-week period minus the number of mothers’ hours, we analyzed only mothers’ hours.
Given the relationship between parents, including gender in our statistical analyses’ accounts for the lack of statistical independence of mother and father data in a family. In addition, we controlled for gender as gender was related to some outcomes in the original RCT findings (Holtzworth-Munroe et al., 2021a, b),
Considering both the added complexity of interpreting interaction effects in multi-level models and the multiple levels of nesting in our data (providing additional sources of variability), we did not include interaction terms in any of our models.
Although some work has been done proposing methods to analyze relationships between individual level predictors and case level outcomes using multi-level models (Croon & van Veldhoven, 2007), the approach we used in the current study was selected in lieu of a multi-level modeling approach because we are unable to find any prior research where MicroMacro relationships are modeled for binary outcomes and include up to three levels of nesting (Bennink et al., 2013).
We also changed the order of female and male responses as steps 3 and 2, respectively, but the results did not vary from those reported in this report.
There were 21 outcome variables for both mediation conditions, and 20 for the traditional litigation condition, which did not include the outcome of whether or not agreement was reached.
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This project was supported by Award No. 2013-VA-CX-0044, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice and in part by the VA Office of Academic Affiliations and Health Services Research and Development Service Research funds. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice or the position or policy of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government. Ideas and parts of the data presented in this work have been presented at a national virtual poster session for the American Psychology-Law Society (March 2021) and at a regional conference for the American Family and Conciliation Courts (November 2021). In addition, data from this study are archived at: Holtzworth-Munroe, Amy, and Beck, Connie J.A., Intimate Partner Violence and Custody Decisions: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Outcomes from Family Court, Shuttle Mediation, or Videoconferencing Mediation, Washington D.C., 2017-2018. ICPSR37162-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-01-28. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37162.v1.
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Huber Gifford, H., Jiang, L.J., Beck, C.J. et al. Intimate Partner Violence Predicting Outcomes in Specialized Mediation and Traditional Litigation. J Fam Viol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-023-00599-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-023-00599-3