The following article is based on research in Hertfordshire regarding sentence planning and offender engagement, undertaken with the support of a Graham Smith bursary. The findings suggest that interpersonal contact and relationships between service users and practitioners are of most significance in encouraging compliance and engagement. This in turn suggests that interactional practice skills should be the key focus of future training and development of staff, in terms of enabling them to plan with service users.

Crises cause social disturbances within their host organisation and the patterns of interpersonal ties that emerge are an important determinant of crisis management efficiency. In this article, social network analysis is used within a construction project context, to demonstrate that efficient crisis management depends upon the design and maintenance of an appropriate social fabric. However, crises have defence mechanisms that make management difficult by inducing forces that encourage people to pursue inappropriate social ties. Purposeful social intervention is therefore an essential part of the crisis management process to confront and avoid disorganisation.

This paper offers reflections on the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme (IDAP), and its implications for the Building Better Relationships programme (BBR), which has now replaced IDAP as the main criminal justice intervention for male domestic violence perpetrators in England and Wales. While the BBR programme should be regarded with optimism, many of the principles underpinning IDAP are of ongoing relevance for practice with abusive men. There has been a tendency to distort IDAP and the broader Duluth model in discussions of interventions for perpetrators of domestic abuse. Although the BBR programme constitutes some changes of direction, its successful implementation requires continuity in the application of facilitator judgement, knowledge of group dynamics, non-judgemental dialogue, willingness to ‘challenge’, and responsiveness to individual service users.

Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews, this article considers the interactive dynamics of two group-based, probation domestic abuse perpetrator programmes. Specifically, the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme and the Building Better Relationships Programme. Perpetrator groups are understood as involving collective emotions and understandings, which are continuously constructed and reconstructed through interactions. These interactions are highly gendered, reflecting men’s desires to present acceptable masculine identities and narratives, which they perceive as being threatened by their presence on a perpetrator programme. This article considers how gendered interactions take place within perpetrator groups, and calls for consideration of how they can support or undermine programme efficacy, and narratives of desistance.