The Development of a Logic Model for the Protection against Family Violence Act: An Incremental Approach

Abstract

On 1 April 2005 the Northwest Territories (NWT) became the seventh jurisdiction in Canada to implement family violence legislation. The NWT Protection Against Family Violence Act (PAFVA) is civil legislation designed to protect victims of family violence, improve access to the justice system, and provide a wider range of remedies than were available under existing civil legislation. It also provides a proactive framework that can be used when the grounds to lay a criminal charge may not exist.

This article describes a process that was followed during the implementation period to clarify the intentions and delivery of the PAFVA program. This process involved the iterative development of a logic model. The process of development had two unique features; first it involved the clarification of a program from legislation, and second, it involved an incremental approach to logic development. Despite attention given to program clarification in the evaluation literature, there is little information on how to handle the translation of legislation through such processes. Thus, this paper is a contribution to this gap in evaluation knowledge by detailing the process followed and the lessons learned. The following section presents a contextual overview of the PAFVA.