Ontario's Partner Assault Response (PAR) Programme

Ontario's Partner Assault Response (PAR) programme is a court-mandated, 12-week group counselling programme for people convicted of domestic-violence-related offences, delivered by 63 community-agency providers across all 54 provincial court jurisdictions and funded by the Ministry of the Attorney General's Victims and Vulnerable Persons Division. Groups of roughly 15–25 participants work through nine standardised curriculum topics addressing accountability, communication and abuse.
The programme operates alongside Ontario's specialised Domestic Violence Courts (DVCs), established in the early 2000s. A Department of Justice Canada study (Quann, 2006) matched 500 offenders convicted in a DVC in 2001 with 500 offenders convicted of domestic violence in other Ontario courts, tracking reconvictions to the end of 2003. DVC-associated offenders were less likely to be reconvicted specifically of a spousal or other violent offence, and reoffended sooner when they did — but the report's own conclusion was explicit: 'The findings...did not demonstrate the influence of a DVC on reducing the overall likelihood of recidivism.'
Later academic work — including Scott (2006) on attitudinal change across 10 PAR agencies and Johnson & Fraser (2011), which questioned whether specialised domestic violence courts measurably improve women's safety — has continued to probe the same open question about overall effectiveness, even as the programme has remained continuously funded and province-wide for over two decades.
This is included as a large-scale, rigorously studied programme whose own government-commissioned evaluation reached a mixed, not uniformly positive, conclusion — evidence that should inform expectations rather than be read as an unqualified success story.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ontario.ca/page/partner-assault-response-program