NICRO's Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence (PIPV) Programme — South Africa's Court-Referred Behaviour-Change Groups for Men

NICRO (the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders), a South African NGO with roots dating to 1910, runs a Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence (PIPV) programme for adult men, most of whom are referred by the courts after a domestic-violence charge or protection order. Implementation is coordinated through provincial Area Managers, indicating the model is used beyond a single site, though the exact number of active locations is not published.

The programme runs for 20 weeks in weekly 90–120 minute group sessions of 10–15 men, combining psycho-educational and cognitive-behavioural methods explicitly framed, in NICRO's own description, as "feminist-oriented" — targeting attitudes about power and control alongside anger management and communication skills. In parallel, NICRO runs a minimum eight-session structured support group for participants' partners or victims.

A 2017 study in the journal Gender and Behaviour (Maphosa & Rasool, University of Johannesburg) examined the programme through interviews with eight men who had completed it; all eight reported they had stopped physical violence against their partners after the programme, and the authors argued that pairing perpetrator programmes with the legal backing of South Africa's Domestic Violence Act 116 of 1998 was key to compliance and effectiveness.

The evidence base is real but thin: the published evaluation is a small, self-reported qualitative study (n=8) rather than a controlled outcome trial, so its findings should be read as a promising signal rather than proof of effectiveness at scale.