National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Content Topic Results

This report summarizes researchers' recommendations for improving the relationship between law enforcement and the deaf community, based on results of an investigation of the impact of sexual assault on members of the deaf community.

This article notes the difficulty in recognizing elder abuse in health care settings, provides information about several studies on identifying bruising and other markers of abuse by health care practitioners.

The report also poses questions for future reseach in this area including research on risk factors for both victimization and perptration. Contents include:

This Research in Brief addresses whether sexual and physical abuse in childhood and adolescence are risk factors for becoming a victim of violence against women as an adult. It provides useful information for the application of secondary prevention initiatives - targeted services to select (at-risk) individuals, in an effort to decrease the incidence of violence against women by reducing known or suspected risk factors.

"Does intimate partner violence occur more in disadvantaged neighborhoods? For women, having financial problems in their intimate relationships and living in an economically distressed neighborhood combine to create greater risk of injury and violence. This NIJ Research in Brief (NCJ 205004) discusses who is most at risk and details the role that economic policies and employment practices might play in reducing the risk of intimate violence."

It discusses the fact that many promising sexual assault prevention strategies have not been evaluated, specifically prograns that are targerted for younger children and provide opportunties for primary prevention.

The findings reported here indicate that the Danger Assessment tool can assist in assessing battered women who may be at risk of being killed as well as those who are not.

This documents provides an overview of fatality review, highlighting how this tool may help reduce intimate partner homicide.

This article presents key findings from the Chicago Women’s Health Study about domestic violence, its effects, and women’s responses to violence.

This report addresses the serious issue of the backlog in the analysis of convicted offender DNA samples. The NIJ assembled a task force to assess the delays in existing DNA analysis and develop recommendations for eliminating those delays. The report lists six recommendations for reducing the DNA backlog.

This issue of the NIJ Journal focuses on the topic of intimate partner homicide.