About the Link Research Project
Project Information | Current Research | Project Reports
The Link Project began as a series of studies, by Drs. Jeffrey Edleson and Sandra Beeman and their students, of families in which women had been abused and their children had been exposed to the violence or themselves abused. The studies sought to understand how forms of violence develop in families and how both informal and formal social systems respond. The goal of this multi-phase project was to help develop new and empirically-based, multi-system interventions for families where both mothers and children experience violence. The data are housed at MINCAVA - the Minnesota Center Against Violence & Abuse, part of the School of Social Work, on the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota.
This early research was funded by the Allina Foundation (Minnesota) with additional support from the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare and the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station. The project entailed analyzing administrative data on child maltreatment and domestic violence reports made by police to a county child welfare agency. Approximately half of the reports studied involved families with previous police reports of both child maltreatment and adult domestic assault. The remaining reports were of families in which only a child maltreatment report was found in police records. Information was collected regarding family characteristics, maltreatment case history, service responses, and case outcomes.
In addition, two dozen battered women’s advocates and child protection workers were interviewed concerning their interventions with dual-violence cases. These focus groups provided an in-depth understanding of both the barriers to collaboration and the visions for working more effectively toward family safety.
The second phase of this study explored the co-occurrence of child maltreatment and adult domestic violence from the mothers’ perspective and how these battered mothers utilize supportive services. Over 110 battered women from Pittsburgh, Dallas, San Jose and Minneapolis were interviewed by telephone between June 1998 and March 1999. Also in 1999 in depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Central Minnesota with a different group of mothers, their children and available male partners. In this component of the study, systemic information from the battered women’s perspective was compiled concerning the development of violence in their families, their children’s exposure to and/or involvement in the abuse, and the responses of social systems to their situations. An effort is being made to disseminate the findings of this research to policy makers, program designers, and others working with battered women and their children. This website is part of that effort.
The Link Project’s current research has involved developing a new clinical and research measurement tool that assesses child exposure to domestic violence and related events. This two year collaboration between Dr. Edleson and several students began with a literature review of the key issues of child exposure to domestic violence, followed by a review of how well current assessment tools gauge the amount of exposure to domestic violence a child has experienced. The research team found that assessment tools are a fundamental, albeit often neglected, component in helping advocates and others make decisions concerning the well being of children in domestic violence situations. We also concluded that current tools inadequately assess child exposure. These results were compiled into an article, which was submitted in the fall of 2003 for publication.
Based on the findings of this research, the team drafted an assessment tool, The Child Exposure to Domestic Violence Scale (CEDV), which specifically measures the extent to which a child has been exposed to domestic violence, including the degree and type of exposure, and the presence of other risk factors in the child’s situation. In November 2003, the team filed an application with the Institutional Review Board at the University of Minnesota to test the draft measure. The proposal was approved, and a study to refine the CEDV and establish its psychometric properties has begun. The draft tool will be administered to approximately 200 children affiliated with domestic violence shelters in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area.
Case Assessment and Service Receipt in Families Experiencing Both Child Maltreatment and Woman Battering by Sandra K. Beeman, Annelies K. Hagemeister, and Jeffrey L. Edleson. Published in the May 2001 issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Sage Publications.
Child Maltreatment, Volume 4, Number 2, May 1999 is a Special Focus Issue: Interventions and Issues in the Co-Occurence of Child Abuse and Domestic Violence, Guest Editor: Jeffrey L. Edleson. Child Protection and Battered Women's Services: From Conflict to Collaboration , by Sandra K. Beeman, Annelies K. Hagemeister and Jeffrey L. Edleson, can be found on pages 116-126. Child Maltreatment is available through Sage Publications, Inc..
How Children are Involved in Adult Domestic Violence: Results From a Four City Telephone Survey This article, which was published in Vol. 18, No. 1 of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence (2003), summarizes a study that collected direct reports on domestic violence events. Information was gathered through anonymous telephone interviews with 114 battered mothers in four metropolitan areas across the United States, eliciting detailed information from the women on their children’s observations and responses to the violence being committed against the mothers. The article concludes with recommendations for a greater emphasis on careful assessment of children’s involvement in domestic violence incidents and on assisting mothers to achieve economic stability as well as safety.
Responding to the Co-Occurrence of Child Maltreatment and Adult Domestic Violence in Hennepin County by Jeffrey Edleson and Sandra Beeman of the University of Minnesota. This report reviews local data on the co-occurrence of these two forms of violence and suggests key strategies for improving the response of county and municipal government agencies and community-based non-profit organizations to these families. Word version also available.
Should Childhood Exposure to Adult Domestic Violence be Defined as Child Maltreatment Under the Law? Published as a chapter in Protecting Children From Domestic Violence: Strategies for Community Intervention (2004), this article reviews the research on childhood exposure to domestic violence and emerging laws aimed at protecting these children. The author concludes with an argument against assuming that childhood exposure to violence is automatically a form of child maltreatment and suggests the need to modify child protection services and the expansion of primarily voluntary community-based responses to these children and their families.
File Last Modified:
Wednesday, 05-Dec-2007 11:02:27 CST
© Copyright 2000 - 2004 Link Resource Project,
Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse
This website is sponsored by the Link Research Project, a project of the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse. Both the website and the Link Research Project were established with grants from the Allina Foundation (Minnesota) for the first phase of the project, and by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation (California) for the second phase. For more information or to contact project staff, please contact us via the MINCAVA email submission form.