.
The third wave came in the 1970's as policy focused on protecting women and punishing offenders through formal controls and informal victim services. These informal victim services came in the form of safe houses such as the Rainbow Retreat in Arizona in 1973 and the Haven House in California in 1974. After taking care of the immediate concerns of victim services, policy makers with the urgings of victim advocate groups, made assumptions of "specific deterrence", emphasizing "the application of legal sanctions through arrest and prosecution of assailants or the threat of legal sanctions through civil legal remedies that carried criminal penalties if violated" (Fagan 2). The "criminalization" of domestic violence cases began in 70's, aiming to increase the certainty and severity of legal responses, since police responses at the time were "characterized by indifference" (Fagan 47) or in some cases resulted in class-action suits against the Oakland Police Department and the New York City Police Department in 1976.
One of the legal remedies and formal controls that arose in this wave of legal reform stemmed from the Pennsylvania Protection from Abuse Act in 1976. Pennsylvania became the first state to pass legislation authorizing the use of orders of protection (Cohen 48). By 1980, 47 states had passed domestic violence legislation mandating changes in protection orders, enabling warrantless arrest for misdemeanor assaults and recognizing a history of abuse and threat as part of a legal defense for battered women who killed their husbands (Fagan 7). .
The general failure of state systems to protect women made more federal laws necessary when weak and apathetic enforcement resulted from case law and state statutes. For example, The Family Violence Services and Prevention Act of 1984 provided funding for 23 law enforcement training projects to provide better response to the domestic violence calls, while the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a part of the federal Crime Victims Act, addressed problems of violence by: allocating funds, made changes in criminal law, and added a civil law solution by allowing women to sue assailants for damages.
