LaHeRS Penal-Mediation Counselling for Domestic-Violence Perpetrators — Crete, Greece

Greek Law 3500/2006 created 'penal mediation' for family-violence cases: with a victim's unreserved consent and a perpetrator's willingness to stop the violence, a prosecutor can suspend criminal proceedings for three years while the perpetrator attends counselling; if the perpetrator reoffends or drops out, prosecution resumes.

On Crete, the Prosecutor's Office and Court of First Instance in Heraklion refer these cases to LaHeRS, a violence- and injury-prevention research lab at the Hellenic Mediterranean University. LaHeRS runs a minimum 24-session pathway per case -- assessment, individual/couple/group therapy on power and control, anger management, trauma and communication, and evaluation sessions with six-month follow-up over a three-year period.

A study published in the European Journal of Public Health in October 2024 profiled the first cohort referred between February 2022 and December 2023: 70 intimate-partner-violence cases, 65 with male perpetrators (mean age 43.4 years), including 54 cases of physical violence and 43 of verbal aggression.

This is a genuinely new, EU-linked initiative -- LaHeRS has a track record in gender-based-violence research through past EU Daphne III funding -- but the published study is a baseline clinical profile of the referred cohort, not yet a completion-rate or reoffending outcome evaluation.