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The Duluth model is a pseudoscientific protocol for intimate partner violence (IPV). The model is biased because it neglects women's violence, violence within same-sex relationships, bidirectional abuse, and was not created through academic study. Academics prove it is an extreme, negative, and polarized model.
It was purportedly devised to bring law enforcement, family law, and social work agencies together in a Coordinated Community Response to work together to reduce violence against women and rehabilitate perpetrators of domestic violence. It is named after Duluth, Minnesota, the city where it was developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP). The model provides a method of coordinating community agencies to provide a consistent response to female victims of Intimate Partner Violence that has three primary goals:
The Duluth Model Coordinated Community Response has received multiple awards for its grassroots efforts to end intimate partner violence, including the World Future Council's Future Policy Award in 2014. It has been criticized by mental health professionals who focus on individual behaviour and reject a social model of battering. Edward Gondolf critiques the narrow forms of evidence used to evaluate interventions, arguing that the biomedical research model is inappropriate for evaluating the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions.
The program's philosophy is intended to help batterers work to change their attitudes and personal behavior so they would learn to be nonviolent in any relationship. The Domestic Abuse Intervention Project was the first multi-agency program designed to address the issue of domestic violence. This experimental program, conducted in Duluth in 1981, coordinated the actions of a variety of agencies dealing with domestic conflict. The Duluth model curriculum was developed by a "small group of activists in the battered women’s movement", (1993). 9780826179906, Springer Publishing Company. ISBN 9780826179906 with five battered women and four men as subjects. The program has become a model for programs in other seeking to deal more effectively with domestic violence.
This study had considerable shortfalls, and the National Institute of Justice said in its introduction that "response rates were low, many people dropped out of the program, and victims could not be found for subsequent interviews. The tests used to measure batterers' attitudes toward domestic violence and their likelihood to engage in future abuse were of questionable validity."
A 2003 longitudinal, four-year evaluation by E. W. Gondolf, covering four cities, shows clear deescalation of reassault and other abuse, with 80% of men reaching sustained non-violence. A 2005 study led by Larry Bennett, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an expert on batterer intervention programs, found that of the 30 batterer intervention programs in Cook County, Illinois, 15 percent of batterers who completed the programs were rearrested for domestic violence, compared with 37 percent of those who dropped out of the programs. Bennett said the studies are largely meaningless because they lacked a proper control group. He added that participants who complete domestic violence programs are likely to be more motivated than others to improve behavior and would be less inclined to offend again.
A 2011 review of the effectiveness of batterers intervention programs (BIP), primarily the Duluth model, found that "there is no solid empirical evidence for either the effectiveness or relative superiority of any of the current group interventions," and that "the more rigorous the methodology of evaluation studies, the less encouraging their findings." That is, as BIPs in general, and Duluth model programs in particular are subject to increasingly rigorous review, their success rate approaches zero. A 2014 news report reported zero percent recidivism within five years for a batterers intervention program based on Nonviolent Communication, and contrasted this with a recidivism rate of 40 percent within five years for a batterers intervention program based on the Duluth model as reported by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> “Men & Healing: Theory, Research, and Practice in Working with Male Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse.” The Men's Project, Funded by the Cornwall Public Inquiry
Others criticize the Duluth Model as being overly confrontational rather than therapeutic, focusing solely on changing the abuser's actions and attitudes rather than dealing with underlying emotional and psychological issues. Donald Dutton, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied abusive personalities, states: "The Duluth Model was developed by people who didn't understand anything about therapy." Dutton also observes that "lesbian battering is more frequent than heterosexual battering". Philip W. Cook comments that in the case of homosexual domestic violence, the patriarchy is absent: there is no male dominance of women in same-sex relationships, and in fact female on female abuse is reported more than twice as frequently as male on male abuse. Furthermore, some critics argue that the model ignores the reality that women can be the perpetrators of domestic violence in heterosexual relationships. Its proponents counter that the Duluth model is effective and makes best use of scarce resources.Michael Paymar and Graham Barnes, " Countering Confusion About the Duluth Model ", Battered Women’s Justice Project, Minneapolis, Minnesota Ellen Pence, co-founder of the DAIP, writes:
The Duluth model is featured in the documentary with commentary from its authors, as well as its main critics, such as Dutton.
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