The focus of the assessment is on advocacy efforts to create civil and criminal court responses to domestic violence that effectively protect women victims, as well as efforts to change the criminal court system's historic hands-off approach toward men who beat their wives and partners. Almost three decades after the first battered women's shelters opened in the United States, advocacy for battered women has reached a critical juncture. Having fueled policy changes in the criminal justice system vis-a-vis domestic violence cases, advocates for battered women must now focus on the ways in which criminal justice domestic-violence policies are implemented; for example, women are being arrested for using self-defense against their attackers, and women are being charged with child neglect for failing to stop their batterers from using force against them. New laws require shelter advocates to report women for child neglect when they fail to stop their batterers' use of violence and are unable to leave them. At the same time, judges grant unsupervised visitation to men who have brutally assaulted their children's mothers, but judges themselves are not charged with failure to protect children. The tasks of the advocacy movement involve rebuilding its efforts to critique the criminal justice system's handling of domestic-violence cases and develop appropriate recommendations and strategies for needed change. The author recommends specific actions that can return advocacy programs to their more radical roots while still capitalizing on the growth of the past three decades. 3 notes and 2 references