In the last two decades there have been a number of social, medical and legal
initiatives in the UK and elsewhere to provide assistance to women who
suffer violence from their partner. The most recent innovations focus on
responding to the men who perpetrate this violence. In this article we
present the initial results of the first British study of programmes for
violent men. The three-year study used a longitudinal method to compare
the effects of two court mandated programmes with other, more orthodox,
forms of criminal justice intervention (fines, admonishment, traditional probation,
prison). Here we describe the men's programmes, locate the current
study in the context of existing evaluations of similar programmes operating
in North America, outline the methods employed, present the results of the
post-hoc matching used to assess the probable effects of selection bias and
using subsequent prosecutions and the accounts of women, compare the
impact of different criminal justice interventions. The results indicate that
twelve months after the criminal justice intervention a significant proportion
of the Programme men had not subsequently been violent to their partner.
This was in contrast to men sanctioned in other ways (the Other CJ
group) who were much less likely to have changed their violent behaviour.
