Law Commons^™

Lawmaking By Public Welfare Professionals, Margaret F. Brinig

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In an era of shrinking state and local resources for domestic violence prevention and detection, governments face a critical question of how to best allocate scarce funds. This paper suggests some answers for treating violence by caregivers and presents a model for evaluating other programs. To reach our conclusions, we analyzed data and survey results supplied by more than 1700 county-level adult protective services (APS) authorities.

We found that some expensive programs produce very few results in terms of reporting, investigating, and substantiating elder abuse. For example, requiring a specific education or experience level (and therefore guaranteeing higher salaries) or …