PROTOCOL: COURT‐MANDATED INTERVENTIONS FOR INDIVIDUALS CONVICTED OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: A Campbell Collaboration Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: Survey research and analysis of police records, hospital emergency rooms and women's shelters have clearly established the severity of the domestic violence problem and the need to find programs to address this issue. Today, court‐mandated batterer intervention programs (BIPs) are being implemented throughout the United States as one of the leading methods to address this problem. These programs emerged from the women's shelter movement and therefore contained a strong feminist orientation. They developed as group‐based programs, typically using psychoeductional methods. Their aim was to get men to take responsibility for their sexist beliefs and stop abusing their partners by teaching them alternative responses for handling their anger. Objectives: The aim of this systematic review is to assess the effects of post‐arrest court‐mandated interventions (including pre‐trial diversion programs) for domestic violence offenders that target, in part or exclusively, batterers with the aim of reducing their future likelihood of re‐assaulting above and beyond what would have been expected by routine legal procedures. Search Strategies: We plan to search numerous computerized databases and websites, bibliographies of published reviews of related literature and scrutinize annotated bibliographies of related literature. Our goal is to identify all published and unpublished literature that met our selection criteria. Selection Criteria: We plan to include experimental or rigorous quasi‐experimental evaluations of court‐mandated batter intervention programs that measured official or victim reports of future domestic violent behavior. Rigorous quasi‐experimental designs are defined as those that either use matching or statistical controls to improve the comparability of the groups. Given their importance in the literature, we will also include rigorous quasi‐experimental designs that used a treatment drop‐out comparison. Data Collection and Analysis: We plan to code characteristics of the treatment, sample, outcomes, and research methods. Findings will be extracted in the form of an effect size and effect sizes will be analyzed using the inverse‐variance method of meta‐analysis. Official report and victim report outcomes will be analyzed separately as will be the different design types (i.e, random, quasi‐experimental with a no treatment comparison, and quasi‐experimental with a treatment dropout comparison).