Court‐mandated interventions for individuals convicted of domestic violence: An updated Campbell systematic review

Abstract

Executive Summary/Abstract Background Survey research and analysis of police records, hospital emergency rooms, and women's shelters have clearly established the severity of the intimate partner violence problem and the need to find programs to address this issue. Roughly 1 in 4 women in an intimate relationship is a victim of intimate partner violence. Court‐mandated batterer intervention programs (BIPs) have been implemented throughout the United States as a leading method to address this problem. These programs are also now implemented in Canada and Europe. These programs emerged from the women's shelter movement leading to programs with a strong feminist orientation, such as the Duluth Model. The programs that were developed were group‐based and relied on psychoeducational methods. Their aim was to get men to take responsibility for their sexist beliefs and stop abusing their partners by teaching them alternative responses for handling their anger. More recent programs draw from cognitive‐behavioral therapeutic principles or a mix of the latter with feminist components as well. Objectives This is an update of our prior review. The aim was to assess the effects of postarrest court‐mandated interventions for intimate partner violence offenders that target, in part or exclusively, male batterers. Our focus was on studies aimed at reducing intimate partner violence, above and beyond what would have been expected by routine legal procedures (e.g., probation monitoring, etc.). Search Methods We searched numerous databases and websites, bibliographies of published reviews of related literature, and a scrutiny of annotated bibliographies of related literature. Our goal was to identify all published and unpublished literature that met our selection criteria. The original review identified nine eligible studies. The updated search identified two new studies. The total sample size across these 11 studies was 4824. Selection Criteria We included experimental (random assignment) and quasi‐experimental evaluations of court‐mandated BIPs that measured official or victim reports of future intimate partner violence. Rigorous quasi‐experimental designs were defined as those that either used matching or statistical controls to improve the comparability of the treated (program) and untreated (comparison) groups. The original review also included quasi‐experimental designs that used treatment drop‐outs as the comparison group. Given the serious selection bias of such studies, these have not been included in this update. Data Collection and Analysis We coded characteristics of the treatment, sample, outcomes, and research methods. Findings were extracted in the form of an effect size and effect sizes were analyzed using the inverse‐variance weight method of meta‐analysis. Official report and victim report outcomes were analyzed separately as were the different design types (i.e., random assignment and quasi‐experimental designs with a no treatment comparison). Results The mean effect for official reports of intimate partner violen...

Changes in Violence and Clinical Distress Among Men in Individual Psychotherapy for Violence Against Their Female Partner: An Explorative Study

“…Another systematic review of court-mandated programs, found a modest but nonsignificant mean effect in favor of the program when outcome were based on official reports. However, the overall mean effect based on victim reports were either no difference or in favor of the no treatment condition, leaving the authors to determine that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that these programs are effective (Wilson et al, 2021). In sum, although the overall results are in a positive direction, it seems there is still some uncertainty as to the general efficacy of such court mandated programs, especially regarding the psychoeducational Duluth based models (Miller et al, 2013;Karakurt et al, 2019;Arce et al, 2020).…”

“…Over the years various treatment approaches based on different theoretical frameworks, settings and formats have been developed in an effort to stop and prevent partner violence, especially male-to-female IPV. The majority of these interventions have been based within a criminal justice context, where men convicted of domestic violence are mandated to attend a group-based batterer intervention program (e.g., Eckhardt et al, 2013;Wilson et al, 2021), constituting a combination of legal sanctions and therapeutic interventions. Although these programs vary in their methodology and stated goals, the majority have their origins in the Duluth model grounded in a sociocultural feministic framework evolving around men's attitudes and use of power and control (Pence and Paymar, 1993;Pence, 2002;Gondolf, 2012).…”

Treatment for perpetrators of intimate partner violence: What is the evidence?

“…Arias et al, 2013; Arce et al, 2020), where the “other” categories are comprised of such heterogeneous samples of different treatment modalities that it is not possible to assess differential effectiveness by program type. This problem is confounded by many of the programs consisting of a blend of techniques from different modalities (Wilson et al, 2021), complicating a situation where the distinction between Duluth and CBT treatment programs was already unclear. Nevertheless, Miller et al (2013), in their review of 11 studies in the United States and Canada that rigorously evaluated the effect of IPV group‐based treatment for male offenders on recidivism, found that six studies that tested the effectiveness of Duluth‐like treatments had no effect on DV recidivism, whereas the five other studies of non‐Duluth group‐based treatments collectively reduced recidivism by 33%.…”

“…More recently published reviews and meta‐analyses of controlled studies of IPV interventions (Arce et al, 2020; Arias et al, 2013; Cheng et al, 2019; Eckhardt et al, 2013; Karakurt et al, 2019; Miller et al, 2013; Travers et al, 2021; Wilson et al, 2021) have continued to find that in general the evidence for their effectiveness is inconclusive. The majority of trials included in these reviews were of interventions that were based on Duluth and/or CBT models and delivered in a group format.…”

“…Wilson et al's (2021) more recent review of court‐mandated IPV treatments identified only 11 studies fulfilling their selection criteria. All of the studies evaluated a psychoeducational (Duluth‐style) approach, CBT approach, or some mix of the two approaches, and, as in previous reviews, found there was insufficient evidence to conclude that these programs are effective.…”