MOVE Ireland's CHOICES Programme — National Domestic-Violence Perpetrator Behaviour-Change Groups

CHOICES is Ireland's national model for domestic-violence perpetrator behaviour-change work, delivered since September 2017 by MOVE Ireland (Men Overcoming Violence, founded 1996) and partner organisations including the Men's Development Network and NEDVIP. It is a 23-week, six-module rolling group programme run in 11 groups across counties including Dublin, Meath, Louth, Sligo, Athlone, Galway, Limerick, Kerry and Cork, funded by Ireland's Department of Justice and Pobal.
MOVE Ireland's 2022 annual report records 279 referrals that year (up 56% from 179 in 2021): 156 self-referrals and 123 agency referrals, mostly from the Probation Service (76) and child-protection service Tusla (33). Of 263 men screened, 219 (83%) were assessed as suitable; of 174 assessed, 126 were accepted into groupwork. Of 220 total case closures that year, only 51 men actually completed the full programme — most other cases ended through non-attendance, denial/minimisation, addiction or transport barriers. The programme's Partner Contact Service reached 89 women in 2022: 84% said they felt safer while it ran, 95% felt supported, but only 50% reported that their partner's use of violence had actually stopped. 555 children had a father engaged in the programme that year; the service ran on funding of €736,570 with 27 facilitators nationwide.
MOVE Ireland's own report states, in its own words, that 'there is a shortage of research in this area within an Irish context' and that it hopes to participate in a future formal evaluation — no recidivism data exists. An independent peer-reviewed academic analysis (Crowley, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family) separately characterises Ireland's whole perpetrator-programme sector as under-developed by international standards. This entry should be read as evidence of a real, funded, growing national service reaching hundreds of families each year, not as evidence that it reliably stops violence: the referral, screening, completion and partner-survey numbers are hard data, but the causal outcome claims are explicitly unverified by the organisation itself.

Read the full analysis: https://moveireland.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MOVE-Ireland-Annual-Report-2022.pdf