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 São Luís, Maranhão, in 2008. Since 2020 the Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ), together with the Colégio de Coordenadores (Cocevid) and the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina'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 - the first run directly by CNJ, covering data collected March-April 2026 - identified 704 active GRH initiatives across every region of Brazil, up 41.4% from 498 in 2023 and 125.6% from 312 in 2020. Growth has been fastest in the Southeast (+173.8% since 2020) and accelerated sharply after Recommendation 124/2022, with new groups founded per year rising from 12 in 2020 (pandemic low) to 117 in 2025.
Scale of reach is large and growing: 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. Combining 2024-2026 (through April), the mapping recorded 70,298 participants and 45,670 completions (65.0% of participants); an independently sourced legal-press report on the same 2026 mapping (Migalhas) confirms the headline 704/498/312 figures.
The mapping is honest about its own evidentiary limits on effectiveness: in 2026, 23.7% of groups reported not measuring effectiveness at all (up from 2.1% in 2020), and the share of groups using formal recidivism checks against justice-system records fell from 46.8% (2020) to 21.3% (2026), which the report attributes partly to facilitators' difficulty accessing judicial data. Most measurement that does happen relies on self-reported, non-standardised methods (end-of-cycle questionnaires, informal case-worker judgement) rather than independent outcome evaluation, and the data themselves are self-reported by facilitators without external validation.
In short, GRH is a large, fast-growing, judiciary-mandated national infrastructure with strong process data on reach and participation, but - by the CNJ's own admission - it does not yet have a rigorous, standardised measure of whether it reduces reoffending; a qualitative report on open-ended survey responses was scheduled for publication in August 2026 to explore this further.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cnj.jus.br/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/relatorio-mapeamento-nacional-grh-2026-v2-20-08-2026.pdf