Miami Herald: Domestic violence data, based on gender, will lead to more effective policies, safer homes

BY ALEX R. PIQUERO, MARIA ILCHEVA AND VIVIANA ALVARADO PACHECO UPDATED SEPTEMBER 24, 2023 5:15 PM

Gender-based violence is not just a national and international problem. Data and research from The Women’s Fund Miami-Dade (WFMD) is shining a solutions-based spotlight on the fact that it is also very much a local problem.

This type of violence was magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic, where a range of factors, such as lockdowns, unemployment and problematic drinking, collided to increase domestic and intimate-partner violence nationally and internationally as well as here in Miami-Dade as Alex R. Piquero’s research has shown. And the problem may be even more magnified since about half of domestic-violence incidents are not reported to law enforcement.

In May, the White House released the first-ever U.S. National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence: Strategies for Action. This ambitious plan was a call to action, built on seven pillars: prevention; support, healing, safety and well-being; economic security and housing stability; online safety; legal and justice systems; emergency preparedness and crisis response; and research and data.

The overall framework is designed to help coordinate efforts at both federal and local levels with the main aim of improving our understanding and response toward gender-based violence.

Locally, a range of efforts are focused on this issue. Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has been committed to domestic violence, family and social work since the beginning of her career. Miami-Dade County’s proposed 2023-24 operating budget includes $11.02 million for the Violence Prevention and Intervention Services Division, up from the $10.12 million in the adopted 2022-2023 budget. The budget increase will support the work of the Coordinated Victims Assistance Center (CVAC), providing wrap-around services for victims of domestic violence. There is a clear need for CVAC expansion to include not only the current central location, but additional centers more easily accessible to residents in the north and south of the county. Research from the Women’s Fund Miami-Dade highlights the shortage of gendered domestic-violence data, a key pillar in the U.S. National Plan, in addition to the expansion of services.

The correct assumption of these efforts is that most of the domestic-violence victims are female. Yet, the scale of the problems and the appropriate response cannot be fully understood without gendered data. As the plan posits, “Research and data gaps remain, particularly for historically marginalized and underserved communities.” Miami-Dade County can become a model community for putting the gender lens on domestic violence by creating systems of collecting such data and making it publicly available, with applicable data-privacy protections.

Yet, many in our community may not understand that police departments use a variety of incident reporting systems that might not be well-suited to generate gendered data. While some departments, including Miami-Dade, Miami, and Miami Beach, have platforms that allow for the production of reports on domestic and sexual violence, others either lack the systems or the capacity to extract such statistics. Additionally, domestic-violence data is reported with a significant lag. The most recent data available on the count and rate of such offenses, as shown in The Women’s Fund Gender Equity Dashboard, is from 2020. Aggregating the data from 32 departments (MDPD plus the 31 municipalities with their own police departments) is a painstaking and time-consuming endeavor. It also turned out to be an impossible endeavor if we want to see the data by gender.

In 2021, the FBI switched to a new reporting system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), to provide more detailed victim and offender information. Yet participation rates are not yet over 75% nationwide. In September 2023, only 48 of 757 law enforcement agencies in Florida had reported to this database, up from only two in January 2023. As noted in a recent report by the Criminal Justice Statistics Interagency Working Group of the National Science and Technology Council to President Biden, which Piquero helped lead, the need for participation in this data collection is urgent because policy decisions must be grounded in data, especially disaggregated data.

The newly launched Gender Equity Index (GEI), a WFMD research initiative, measures progress toward gender equity in Miami-Dade County. Based on an international model and applied locally for the first time, the GEI reflects the intersectional challenges women and girls face in each of the WFMD’s four pillars: economic mobility, health and well-being, leadership and freedom from violence.

Domestic and sexual violence metrics were used to calculate the Freedom From Violence score, in which Miami-Dade is 44 points away from reaching equity. The lack of disaggregated data, due to the obstacles mentioned above, became a big limitation. In the end, the number of victims was calculated with data from the Miami-Dade, Miami and Miami Beach police departments. Including only those areas, women accounted for 71% of domestic violence and 88% of sexual violence victims.

Statistics are important, but they are only one requisite for effective solutions. For domestic-violence survivors, there are resources available. People can call or text Miami-Dade County’s Coordinated Victims Assistance Center at 305-285-5900; the State Attorney’s Domestic Violence Hotline, (305) 547-0140; Domestic Violence Division for the Eleventh Judicial District at (305)349-5556; and Florida’s domestic violence 24-hour crisis hotline, 1-800-500-1119.

We are optimistic that Miami-Dade is not just a place where people live free from gender-based violence and where gender equity is the norm, but more important,that Miami-Dade becomes the model for the nation as a whole.

Alex R. Piquero is professor of sociology & criminology and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics appointed by President Biden. Maria Ilcheva is the vice chair of The Women’s Fund Miami-Dade Board and research professor at the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs. Viviana Alvarado Pacheco is the senior research and policy manager at The Women’s Fund Miami-Dade.