In Part II of this article, we present the results of a systematic review of European evidence on the effectiveness of domestic violence perpetrator programs. After searching through 10,446 titles, we discovered only 12 studies that evaluated the effectiveness of a perpetrator program in some systematic manner. The studies applied treatment to a total of 1,586 domestic violence perpetrators, and the sample sizes ranged from 9 to 322. Although the evaluations showed various positive effects after treatment, methodological problems relating to the evaluation designs do not allow attribution of these findings to the programs. Overall, the methodological quality of the evaluations is insufficient to derive firm conclusions and estimate an effect size. Accordingly, one cannot claim that one programmatic approach is superior to another. Evaluation of domestic violence perpetrator treatment in Europe must be improved and programs should become more tailored to the characteristics of the participants.
Most research on domestic violence perpetrator programs has been carried out in North America. It does not yet provide a clear picture on what works with these offenders and cannot be generalized to other cultural and legal systems. Therefore, in Part I of this article, we present the results of a survey of 54 programs that were in place in 19 European countries that addressed the programs' practice and effects. The survey captured data about program design, delivery, administration, infrastructure, and other features. Most programs applied cognitive-behavioral, profeminist, or psychodynamic treatment, or a combination of multiple treatment types. There was a wide disparity in approaches to handling domestic violence perpetrators, and a particular dearth of high-quality evaluation throughout the continent. Possible explanations for this disparity and avenues for improvement are discussed, related to a systematic review of European outcome evaluations (Part II).
In Breaking the Pendulum, Goodman, Page, and Phelps (2017) advance an “agonistic” perspective that contends struggle drives penal change, and that it does so through perpetual conflict. Yet studying only manifest struggles, when an actor made their resistance to a penal status quo known, presents thorny problems in conceptualizing conflict. One such problem is that conflict among agonists advocating competing penal policies presupposes consensus between those who threaten penal order’s basic conditions. Understanding penal agonism’s corollary, penal antagonism, offers a more complete starting point from which to theorize penal history and penality.
In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ultimately developed into the full‐fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholarship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions: “Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law enforcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with community activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on oral histories and archival data permits a neo‐institutional analysis of how each of these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berkeley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and criminal justice policy's disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.
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