Abstract:
Background: Survey research and analysis of police records, hospital emergency rooms
and women’s shelters have clearly established the severity of the domestic violence
problem and the need to find programs to address this issue. Today, court-mandated
batterer intervention programs (BIPs) are being implemented throughout the United
States as one of the leading methods to address this problem. These programs emerged
from the women’s shelter movement and therefore contained a strong feminist
orientation. They developed as group-based programs, typically using psychoeductional
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.
Objectives: The aim of this systematic review is to assess the effects of post-arrest courtmandated
interventions (including pre-trial diversion programs) for domestic violence
offenders that target, in part or exclusively, batterers with the aim of reducing their future
likelihood of re-assaulting above and beyond what would have been expected by routine
legal procedures.
Search Strategies: We searched numerous computerized databases and websites,
bibliographies of published reviews of related literature and scrutiny of annotated
bibliographies of related literature. Our goal was to identify all published and
unpublished literature that met our selection criteria.
Selection Criteria: We included experimental or rigorous quasi-experimental
evaluations of court-mandated batterer intervention programs that measured official or
victim reports of future domestic violent behavior. Rigorous quasi-experimental designs
were defined as those that either used matching or statistical controls to improve the
comparability of the groups. Given their importance in the literature, we also included
rigorous quasi-experimental designs that used a treatment drop-out comparison.
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 method. Official report and
victim report outcomes were analyzed separately as were the different design types (i.e,,
random, quasi-experimental with a no treatment comparison, and quasi-experimental
with a treatment dropout comparison).
Main Results: The mean effect for official reports of domestic violence from
experimental studies showed modest benefit whereas the mean effect for victim reported
outcomes was zero. Quasi-experimental studies using a no-treatment comparison had
inconsistent findings indicating an overall small harmful effect. In contrast, quasiexperimental
studies using a treatment dropout design showed a large, positive mean
effect on domestic violence outcomes. The latter studies suffer, we believe, from
selection bias.
Reviewer's Conclusions: The findings, we believe, raise doubts about the effectiveness
of court-mandated batterer intervention programs in reducing re-assault among men
convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence.
domestic violence