Mandatory reporting of intimate partner violence and children's exposure to intimate partner violence: Nurse home visitors' perspectives

Each year in the United States, 4.8 million physical assaults and rapes are committed against 1.5 million women by an intimate partner. An estimated 3.3 to 10 million children are exposed to some form of intimate partner violence (IPV) in their homes annually. Safe and effective strategies for intervening with these women and children have not been established. Although mandatory reporting laws regarding child abuse and/or neglect are accepted as good care, the extent to which these laws are appropriate for IPV between adults and children exposed to IPV is undetermined. The primary objective of this study is to examine the unexplored perspectives of public health nurses involved in home visitation services regarding: 1) the mandatory reporting of IPV between adults and 2) the mandatory reporting of children's exposure to IPV. The most efficacious and rigorously tested nurse home-visiting program in the United States, the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program, will serve as the setting to explore these issues. A web-based survey will be administered to all home visiting nurses from 355 NFP sites across the United States. The survey will inquire about NFP home-visiting nurses' knowledge, attitudes and current practices regarding mandatory reporting of these two controversial issues. Chi-square tests of independence and logistic regression analyses will be used to determine the magnitude and strength of associations between sociodemographic variables and mandatory reporting perspectives. Results obtained from the present study have the potential to inform an IPV intervention that is currently being developed for the NFP program.