Texts, in particular, can predetermine how the system responds to violence. Texts are created constantly in a legal system; actors record the details of an incident for use by the next actor. In addition, these texts are rarely created anew. Rather, information is entered into forms that ask specific questions. The questions that are asked determine what information is recorded and what information is not.

Ellen Pence provides the following example. An officer of the court making a recommendation on the sentence a defendant should receive may base her decision on a record created by an investigator. The form used by the investigator to create the report might ask any number of questions—it might ask about the history of the abuse, or it might ask about the defendant's criminal history. A recommendation based on a report detailing a history of abuse could be very different from one based on a report detailing a criminal history. The recommended sentence is thus determined in part by the questions asked on the investigator's form. An "understanding of how power works through conceptual practices buried in a textually mediated legal system" can be a critical part of advocacy efforts. From Ellen L. Pence, Some Thoughts on Philosophy, in Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence: Lessons from the Duluth Model 25, 40 (Melanie F. Shepard & Ellen L. Pence eds., 1999). Promoting Women in Development (PROWID) similarly explains in its report, Justice, Change, and Human Rights: International Research and Responses to Domestic Violence, that "the way in which women's complaints (of domestic violence) are recorded can either normalize or criminalize abusive behaviors."

For these and many other reasons, policies and protocols for intervention agencies are an important part of an integrated response. Agencies that come into contact with battered women need to do more than simply change the way they think or be more aware of the problem. Instead, the "actions of those located in different parts of a coordinated system need to be centered toward victim safety and organized in ways that complement rather than undermine or subvert each other. With this goal in mind, practitioners' decisions and actions need to be guided by sets of protocol standards and, in some cases, direct policies." From Ellen L. Pence & Melanie F. Shepard, Introduction, in Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence: Lessons from the Duluth Model 3, 17-18 (Melanie F. Shepard & Ellen L. Pence eds., 1999).