With funding from the US Office on Violence Against Women, the Urban Institute conducted a mixed-methods, multisite study on the perceptions of justice, accountability, safety, and healing held by diverse survivors of domestic violence. In January 2024, the project team convened a roundtable of survivors, practitioners, and policymakers to explore key themes from the study and develop practice-oriented guiding principles for enacting—or improving—justice responses to domestic violence. This brief summarizes the principles that emerged and recommendations for applying them in communities.

Why this matters

Domestic violence affects millions of people and causes serious consequences for survivors and their communities. It is also clear that survivors with certain intersecting identities experience higher rates of violence and greater barriers to seeking and receiving help. Yet the field lacks evidence of survivors’ diverse experiences and needs, and as a result, systems designed to provide safety and justice often fall short. Adopting guiding principles that are evidence-based and survivor-informed can improve justice responses to domestic violence, whether in the legal system, alternative justice programs, or community-wide governing bodies.

Key takeaways

Based on a review of existing related principles, analysis of the study’s interviews, and recommendations from the stakeholder roundtable, we identified nine guiding principles for a justice response to domestic violence. The principles are survivor empowerment and agency; being survivor-centered and trauma-informed; responsiveness to survivors’ needs; providing culturally responsive and appropriate responses; an understanding of domestic violence; accountability; communication and transparency; fairness and respect; and social awareness and systemic change. Our vision is that whole communities will adopt these principles as overarching goals, recognizing that the resources and steps needed to enact them will differ for different types of systems.