There are solutions. I think it starts with prosecutors using better discretion in identifying the cases they want to use their office resources on to fight. The prosecutor should identify the real abusive situations and let the stupid cases go. The guy who sends his girl to the hospital but now the girl claims she fell down, or the guy who has 5 prior arrests in the past three years but no convictions because of recanting witnesses should be the ones that the prosecutors target and aggressively pursue. The mid-50's guy with no history who got in an argument with his wife and she claimed he bumped into her while exiting the room as she was blocking the door and she felt pain, but looking back on it she thinks she might have exaggerated because she was upset is not a case that the state should waste resources on. The girl who was arguing with her boyfriend and tried to grab his phone away and he got a scratch on his finger does not need to be prosecuted. The couple who were arguing in public and a concerned third party reported that the guy was up real close to the girl and may have bumped her a bit, but the couple claims there was no pushing and shoving, does not need to be prosecuted. Even the case where the 45 yr old with no priors hits his wife and is willing to admit it, you can work a deal where he can get a reduced charge provided he does domestic violence classes.
Unfortunately you have untrained prosecutors living in a bubble world who are afraid to drop the stupid cases and use too much of their resources on cases that should not be prosecuted that the real bad guys get lost in the shuffle.
That's where the focus on reform needs to start. Not with more aggressively criminalizing confrontations between couples, or by being over zealous in every reported incident of abuse no matter how weak the case is, but by allowing the prosecutors to use their discretion to evaluate the cases that deserve aggressive prosecution and those that can be sent away.
But a major problem with this solution is that prosecutor's offices receive grant money for refuses to drop DV cases, so the priority becomes to gain as high a conviction percentage as possible which results in more stupid cases being aggressively pursued to keep the numbers up while many of the more aggregious offenders slip through the cracks. (And by high conviction percentage I really mean a low dismissed by the state percentage, as the state eventually loses most of these cases anyway)
