Abstract
Relationship violence intervention programs (RVIPs) emerged in the late 1970s from several sources including men’s consciousness-raising groups, social service organizations, and battered women’s advocacy programs. Most early programs emphasized sexism as the root cause of IPV, promoting personal accountability for violence and broader social change in gender relations. Early practice was surrounded by many controversies, including whether programs should be educational or therapeutic; structured or unstructured; and/or delivered by grassroots activists or mental health professionals. Intense debate focused on whether anger should be a key focus of these interventions and whether programs should offer conjoint treatment for couples who want to stay together. During the 1980s and 1990s, changes in policing and prosecution created a large influx of court-mandated participants, and RVIPs proliferated from about 80 US programs in 1980 to over 2500 by the early 2000s. In addition to documenting this history, this chapter reviews the conceptual assumptions, intervention strategies, and dissemination of prominent approaches to RVIP practice, including the popular Duluth model (Pence and Paymar 1993), which encourages RVIP participants to identify gender-based expressions of power and control and develop more egalitarian relationship strategies, and cognitive-behavioral interventions, which focus on changing problematic beliefs and enhancing self-regulation and relationship skills. New and emerging interventions include motivational enhancement therapy, trauma-informed CBT, culturally focused interventions, risk-responsive and forensic interventions, restorative justice approaches, and second-generation CBT approaches such as acceptance and commitment therapy and dialectical behavior therapy.
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Murphy, C.M., Rosenbaum, A., Hamberger, L.K. (2022). Relationship Violence Perpetrator Intervention Programs: History and Models. In: Geffner, R., White, J.W., Hamberger, L.K., Rosenbaum, A., Vaughan-Eden, V., Vieth, V.I. (eds) Handbook of Interpersonal Violence and Abuse Across the Lifespan. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89999-2_134
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