Social work practitioners are increasingly expected to offer treatment to persons convicted of assaultive and violent crimes. Since the 1970s the focus of treatment of intimate partner violence shifted to include treating batterers with the notion therapeutic interventions may halt future abuse. The prevalence and assessment of causal factors of intimate partner violence is provided. A brief overview of solution-focused brief group is offered. This review focuses only on group models of intervention, as there is very little research into individual models of batterer treatment. Overall, the purpose of this report is to provide a full and critical review of the effectiveness of …show more content…
Michael Planty, chief of the Victimization Statistics Unit, presented domestic violence accounted for 21 percent of all violent victimization from 1994 to 2013 in the United States of America (2014). In Nonfatal Domestic Violence Special Report, intimate partner violence accounted for fifteen percent of all violent victimizations, compared to violence committed by immediate family members (4%) or other relatives (2%) (Truman & Morgan, 2014). The highest rates of intimate partner violence were experienced by females ages 18 to 24 (Planty, 2014). For persons ages 18 to 49, more than forty-five percent of serious violent victimizations and more than fifty percent were committed by a known offender (Truman & Morgan, …show more content…
When the effectiveness of BIPs is questioned it is often due to the inclusion of everyone referred to the program rather than those who completed the program. This begins the debate of how to rate the success of an intervention. Stover, Meadows, and Kaufman (2009) conducted a survey of thirty batterer interventions finding across studies victim reports show attrition in the range between 15%–78%. Attrition rates can be a measure of recidivism because studies have repeatedly shown those who reoffend are individuals who do not complete a program. Attrition rates are most likely due to batterers being mandated by domestic violence court or given an ultimatum by their partners to attend a program. It seems obvious higher dropout rates are inevitable due to the client treatment congruence. Client-treatment congruence defined by Wierzbicki, Pekarik, and Delworth (1993) is the extent to which clients ' assessment of their own problems matches their perception of the potential benefits of the specific treatment they are