Female-perpetrated family violence—Effectiveness of a psychodynamic group intervention

Abstract

We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a Finnish psychodynamic group intervention developed for female family-violence perpetrators. The participants voluntarily sought help after using family violence against a partner, child, or both and did not have acute mental health or substance abuse problems. The data sample consisted 134 women before the intervention, 128 women after the 15-week intervention, and 110 at the 6-month follow-up. We found that there were changes in women’s self-knowledge and reduce in family-violence behavior, both of these outcomes persisted after 6 months. Our results may be used to develop low-threshold, preventive interventions for female family-violence perpetrators.