Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes: An Historical Overview

Abstract

The Duluth Model is one of the most widely known approaches but was designed, not as a perpetrator programme per se, but as a broader systemic response to domestic violence in the city of Duluth, Minnesota, USA. When this ‘co-ordinated community response’ (CCR) was implemented, its success generated a backlog of men who had been arrested but not imprisoned for domestic violence. The men’s programme was developed as a solution to this unanticipated consequence (Pence & Paymar, 1993). There has been relatively little documented about the emergence and development of British Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes (DVPPs). The most substantial British review was conducted in the mid 1990s, which consisted of a telephone survey of 23 British therapeutic and educational programmes for domestically violent men (Scourfield, 1994; Scourfield & Dobash, 1999). This survey found programmes to be predominantly cognitive-behavioural in orientation, with half the programmes taking both criminal justice and non-criminal justice mandated men. The authors note an overall feeling of optimism in the mid-1990s, linked to a strong liberal humanist tradition within the probation service and renewed rehabilitative optimism based on emerging research on the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioural approaches to reoffending.