GRH — Brazil's Judiciary-Led Reflective & Accountability Groups for Domestic-Violence Perpetrators

Brazil's Maria da Penha Law (Lei 11.340/2006, amended by Lei 13.984/2020) allows courts to refer men who commit domestic and family violence to Grupos Reflexivos e Responsabilizantes (GRH) -- reflective and accountability groups -- as a protective or sentencing measure. The first groups began in Sao Luis, Maranhao, in 2008.

Since 2020 the CNJ, with the Colegio de Coordenadores (Cocevid) and UFSC's Grupo Margens, has run a systematic national mapping every few years, and CNJ Recommendation 124/2022 formally urged all state courts to institute and maintain such programmes.

The 2026 national mapping identified 704 active GRH initiatives across every region of Brazil, up 41.4% from 498 in 2023 and 125.6% from 312 in 2020. In 2025, 44,140 men were referred to GRH groups, of whom 32,257 (73.1%) actually participated and 22,013 completed the full cycle.

The mapping is honest about its own evidentiary limits: in 2026, 23.7% of groups reported not measuring effectiveness at all (up from 2.1% in 2020), and formal recidivism checks against justice-system records fell from 46.8% (2020) to 21.3% (2026) -- so GRH has strong process data on reach and participation, but by the CNJ's own admission does not yet have a rigorous, standardised measure of whether it reduces reoffending.