ttered women has been so obscured that what most commonly acknowledge to be the first shelter for battered women in the nation--a five-bedroom house near St. Paul, Minnesota--was not opened until October 1974; 15 women were waiting at the door (Vobejda, 1994, p. 32). And this was some four years after the first ever shelter, in London, England, had been opened (Binder & Meeker, 1992, p. 9).
A considerable amount of contemporary research into spouse abuse deals with the response of the criminal justice system--police, prosecutors, and courts--to the problem, in particular, of wife abuse. Various examinations of police interventions and legal reactions have been conducted, with decidedly mixed results. One of the pioneering efforts was the Minneapolis Police Experiment conducted by Sherman and Berk (1984), which inspired the U.S. Attorney General's Task Force on Family Violence (U.S. Department of Justice, 1984) to recommend that "family violence be recognized and responded to as criminal activity" (Gelles, 1993, p. 575).
The initial findings of Sherman and Berk indicated that mandatory arrest policies would deter and diminish the incidence of spouse abuse. What happened in the wake of the release of this research was "unusual, if not unprecedented" (Gelles, 1993, p. 575). A large number of police departments and individual states enacted new, or revised existing, policies and statutes which provided for mandatory or presumptive arrests in cases of domestic violence, particularly warrantless misdemeanor arrests. In the light of more recently conducted research intended to replicate the findings of Sherman and Berk in Minneapolis, many investigators, including Sherman, now believe that the concept of mandatory arrest as a deterrent was too hastily implemented and has adversely impacted the problem of spouse abuse (Gelles, 1993; Schmidt & Sherman, 1993). Contemporary observations indicate that incarceration (of male abuse...