NEUSTART Gewaltpräventionsberatung — Austria's Mandatory Perpetrator Counselling After Protective Eviction Orders

Austria's 1997 Gewaltschutzgesetz (Violence Protection Act) pioneered police powers to evict perpetrators from a shared home; a 2022 amendment closed a gap by requiring that, from 1 September 2022, anyone subject to a police eviction or no-contact order attend at least six hours of Gewaltpräventionsberatung (violence-prevention counselling) delivered by NEUSTART, Austria's national probation and victim-offender mediation service (founded 1957).
Social workers carry out an initial risk assessment and hold conversations focused on the immediate act of violence, aiming to build awareness of wrongdoing and motivation to change; roughly 90% of those referred are men. For higher-risk cases, NEUSTART offers a longer Anti-Gewalt-Training of 50–60 units of 45 minutes spread over six months to a year; around 50 such trainings start nationwide each year, reaching roughly 400 participants.
NEUSTART and Austrian authorities have published participation figures and programme descriptions, and the six-hour counselling is now compulsory nationwide, giving the programme statutory continuity and funding. However, no independent recidivism or outcome evaluation of the post-2022 mandatory counselling has yet been published, so its effect on repeat violence remains unmeasured — a gap shared by many first-generation perpetrator-counselling mandates in Europe.

Read the full analysis: https://www.neustart.at/gewaltpraevention/