Efficacy of an intervention program for court-ordered intimate partner offenders

Abstract

Violence against women is a serious social and public health problem that has promoted significant legislative changes in Spain during the last years. Batterer intervention programs are some of the measures adopted by the Government to reduce the impact of this problem. Domestic violence treatment programs have a long trajectory in the Spanish prisons and their effectiveness has been evaluated by several studies. However, in the community services a new court-ordered treatment for intimate partner offenders (PRIA) has been implemented recently. The main goal of this research is to evaluate the court-ordered treatment for intimate partner offenders in the community. The sample consists of 770 intimate partner offenders serving a sentence in the community. The subjects were divided in two groups: an experimental group, assessed pre and post intervention, and a control group, assessed in two temporal moments similar to the experimental group. Results show a significant therapeutic change among the intimate partner offenders after the treatment program. These changes are also confirmed by the comparison between the experimental and control group. Finally, the implications and limits of this study are analysed.