The level of attrition in domestic violence: A valid indicator of the efficiency of a criminal justice system?
| Author | Julien Chopin,Marcelo F. Aebi |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370818792477 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370818792477
European Journal of Criminology
2020, Vol. 17(3) 269 –287
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370818792477
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The level of attrition in
domestic violence: A valid
indicator of the efficiency of a
criminal justice system?
Julien Chopin and Marcelo F. Aebi
University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract
This article studies the process of attrition through a follow-up of all cases of domestic violence
registered by the police forces of one Swiss canton in the first half of 2012 (N = 592) as they
pass to the prosecution and the court stage of criminal justice proceedings. The results show that
the attrition rate found in Switzerland (80 percent) is lower than the rate usually found in the
United Kingdom. This rate is explained by the fact that domestic violence is usually treated by
academics as a homogeneous construct, but it is in fact composed of a large variety of offences
and, in practice, the vast majority of those that are reported to the police would not entail a
custodial sentence.
Keywords
Attrition, construct, conviction rate, domestic violence
Introduction
The term ‘attrition’ finds its roots in the Latin attritio, which means ‘to rub’ (Merriam-
Webster, 2017). Gradually, the word took different meanings, keeping however the
image of the gradual diminishing or weakening of something by abrasion or friction. In
the field of criminology, attrition has been defined as ‘the process whereby cases drop
out of the criminal justice system at one of a number of potential points of exit from that
system’ (Lea et al., 2003: 583). Instead of using the concept of ‘drop out’, some authors
refer to the ‘loss’ or the ‘filtering out’ of cases throughout the criminal justice system
(Heiskanen et al., 2014: 151; Jehle, 2012). Criminologists have been applying the con-
cept of attrition mainly since the publication, in 1967, of the report on The Challenge of
Corresponding author:
Julien Chopin, School of Criminal Sciences, University of Lausanne, ESC - Sorge - BCH, Lausanne, CH-1015,
Switzerland.
Email: julien.chopin@unil.ch
792477EUC0010.1177/1477370818792477European Journal of CriminologyChopin and Aebi
research-article2018
Article
270 European Journal of Criminology 17(3)
Crime in a Free Society by the US President’s Commission on Law Enforcement. That
report illustrated the attrition process through a representation of the criminal justice
system as a funnel that received 2,780,180 index crimes in 1965, of which only 6.5 per-
cent led to a sentence (President’s Commission on Law Enforcement, 1967: 8–9). A
‘sieve’ would be a better metaphor, however, because the mesh blocks some particles,
whereas a funnel only slows their passage and, in the end, allows them all to pass (Killias
et al., 2012: 344).
The fact that the criminal justice process has the structure of a sieve means that only
very few of the crimes committed end up with their perpetrator being incarcerated. In
that perspective, the literature on punitiveness considers that a low incarceration rate per
crime may reflect the limited ability of a system to solve crimes, but it may also reflect a
low level of punitiveness, something that is usually seen by criminologists as a positive
characteristic of a criminal justice system (Blumstein et al., 2005). For example, Finland,
and the Nordic countries in general, have repeatedly been presented as a model for the
rest of the world because of their limited use of incarceration (Lappi-Seppälä and Tonry,
2011; Pratt, 2008). In contrast, the literature on attrition, and in particular that studying
attrition in domestic violence (DV) offences, tends to focus on low incarceration rates
per crime as indicators of the inefficiency of the system (see, for example, Hester, 2006;
Walby et al., 2011).
Attrition should be operationalized through research designs that follow offences,
offenders or cases throughout the criminal justice system and estimate the percentage
that are disposed of at each stage of that system. This percentage is commonly known as
the ‘attrition rate’ and corresponds to the percentage of offences (or offenders, or cases)
that do not reach a specific stage (for example, prosecution, court or prison) of the crimi-
nal justice system. Nevertheless, there is a risk of confusion in the specialized literature
because sometimes the attrition rate is presented as the percentage of offences that effec-
tively reach one of these stages (Walby et al., 2011). Technically, the latter should be
considered not as an attrition rate but as an indicator known as ‘certainty of conviction’,
when it refers to the percentage of offenders known to the police who have been con-
victed, and as ‘certainty of punishment’, when it refers to the percentage of offenders
known to the police or convicted who have been incarcerated (Blumstein et al., 2005).
For example, in the year 2005, in eight West European countries, there were 35 persons
convicted of homicide per 100 persons known to the police for that offence (Aebi and
Linde, 2012b), which corresponds to an attrition rate of 65 percent and a certainty of
conviction of 35 percent. Moreover, the indicator of the certainty of conviction is some-
times referred to as the ‘conviction rate’ (Council of Europe, 2016; Walby et al., 2017) or
the ‘conviction ratio’ (Jehle, 2012).
This article analyses the level of attrition, from police files to prosecution services and
court records, for all DV cases recorded by the police forces of the canton of Vaud,
Switzerland, during the first six months of 2012 (N = 592).1 According to the classifica-
tion used in Swiss criminal justice statistics (Zoder, 2012), DV is defined in this article
as physical and psychological violence committed between intimate partners (current or
ex-husbands or boyfriends/girlfriends, within a year of the breakup of the relationship).
In particular, the article tries to answer the following questions: What is the rate of attri-
tion? How can that rate be explained? Is that rate comparable to the one observed in
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