Evaluative Outcomes of Connecticut’s Batterer Intervention for High Risk Offenders

ABSTRACT

Evaluations of male batterer interventions (e.g., BIPs) have produced mixed results with many finding little or no positive effects and/or suffering from methodological shortcomings. This study attempted to overcome many of these shortcomings by employing a quasi-experimental research design with a propensity-matched comparison group to test the effectiveness of Connecticut’s batterers’ program for serious male family violence offenders. Using court records, we calculated one-year recidivism effect sizes for program participants and further explored these effects while controlling for demographics, family violence risk, and criminal history. We found that the program participation group had significantly lower one-year arrest rates than the comparison group. While the effect size for any type of arrest was moderate, it remained when controlling for other variables known to influence recidivism such as age, race/ethnicity, family violence risk, and criminal history. These differences, however, applied to any type of new arrest but not specifically to family violence offenses. For family violence offenses, the program group had lower arrest rates, but these were not statistically significant. Overall, our findings show that court-mandated batterer programs can be effective in reducing general recidivism but is inconclusive with battering violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Family violence
• intimate partner violence
• domestic violence
• batterer intervention program
• court-mandated programming
• propensity score matching

Disclosure of Interest

Stephen Cox is a consultant to the Connecticut Judicial Branch. Pierre Rivolta has no conflicts to report.

Ethical Standards and Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. De-identified data were provided electronically to the authors from the Connecticut Judicial Branch, therefore, informed consent was not obtained from study participants.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by a grant from the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch.