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Our Future Depends Upon How We Live Today:
Building Lives Free From Violence In North Dakota
North Dakota State Plan on Domestic Violence and Sexual
Assault
Creating an Environment of Safety, Accountability and
Mutual Respect
The purpose of the State Plan is to create “a state that
is safe through an integrated, coordinated continuum of
response to domestic violence and sexual assault.”
The recommendations of the State Plan are intended to
be used as guidelines for initiating developing, sustaining,
and implementing effective intervention, prevention, and
public policy strategies to ensure a coordinated, community
and statewide response to violence against women in North
Dakota.
View State
Plan (PDF)
For over 20 years, North Dakota, like
other states, has made various attempts to document,
verify, and analyze patterns of domestic and sexual
violence. These attempts were usually initiated by
victim service providers and then by law enforcement
agencies. Over the years, other partners, such as health
care and mental health providers, have also begun to
screen and count patients presenting with “intentional
injuries.” Within recent years, the courts and
prosecutors have begun to create databases to track
cases within their systems. As a result, North Dakota
now has access to a variety of data sets – which
are at various stages of development, designed for a
variety of purposes, and contain their own biases and
assumptions.
Because of this variety in data
collection, the ND Council on Abused Women’s Services
and the ND Department of Health have now collaborated
with the Rural Crime and Justice Center at Minot State
University. This collaboration has resulted in the
collection and analysis of existing data sets, in
order to better understand the phenomena of domestic and
sexual violence in North Dakota. The intention is that
this report will enable systems, agencies, and
organizations to develop an increasingly cohesive
response to domestic violence, and thus meet the
objectives of the “State Plan.”
Limitations
This document
cannot offer a complete profile of domestic or sexual
violence in North Dakota. Each participating agency
collects data in its own fashion to meet its own goals
and obligations. Therefore, because data is not
collected in a standardized manner across agencies,
data cannot be presented – or analyzed and compared – in
a uniform format. Inevitably, gaps exist in the data
that is presented here. These gaps in available data
represent the major limitations of this document.
However, this document exists not only to present the
data that is available, but also to identify areas where
further, more coordinated data collection may be
beneficial. The limitations signal a need for further
research and collaboration.
View
Domestic
and Sexual Violence in North Dakota: A Compilation and
Analysis of Data (PDF)
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