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Good practice Imported

Partnerschaft ohne Gewalt — Zurich's Court-Linked Learning Programme for Domestic Violence Perpetrators

Switzerland · Zürich · See the Switzerland profile · See the Zürich profile

Evidence: Quasi-experimental Top 17% 89/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

A 16-session group learning programme for men who used violence against a partner, run by the Zurich cantonal justice department; a 2025 peer-reviewed evaluation found IPV recidivism fell from 22.55% to 6.06% over two years.

6.06%
IPV recidivism, intervention group (2-year follow-up)
22.55%
IPV recidivism, comparison group (2-year follow-up)
0.21
Adjusted hazard ratio
under 30
Annual intake before 2020 law change
over 170
Annual intake after 2020 law change
Partnerschaft ohne Gewalt — Zurich's Court-Linked Learning Programme for Domestic Violence Perpetrators

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Canton of Zurich Justizdirektion (Amt für Justizvollzug und Wiedereingliederung / probation and enforcement services)
Period
Running since the early 2010s; expanded nationally from 2020; quasi-experimental evaluation published 2025
Keywords
criminal justice, domestic violence prevention, forensic psychology, probation services

Context

'Partnerschaft ohne Gewalt' is a structured programme of 16 group sessions of 2.5 hours each for men, mostly court-referred, who have used violence against a current or former partner. Men with severe mental illness, sex offences, or acute reoffending risk are excluded.

Activities

Sessions, run by trained social workers, cover self-control and 'time-out' techniques and triggers such as alcohol use and stress, ending with each participant drawing up a personal emergency plan for high-risk situations. Annual intake rose from under 30 before 2020 to over 170 after a 2020 change in federal law allowed courts to mandate the programme before conviction.

Results

A 2025 retrospective quasi-experiment by Kirschstein et al. compared 66 men assigned to the intervention with 204 police-recorded IPV offenders who were not, over a fixed two-year follow-up. Recidivism was 6.06% in the intervention group versus 22.55% in the comparison group, a statistically significant effect after adjustment for confounders.

Conclusions

The model has since been adopted, with local variation, by the neighbouring cantons of Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt and Bern, though the authors themselves describe the evidence as preliminary given the retrospective, single-canton design.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — A few thousand Swiss francs per participant in training cost, against an estimated cost-benefit ratio of roughly 1:6-7.
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years)
Staffing & skills
trained social workers running group sessions, cantonal justice department (probation/enforcement services) administering referrals

Conditions for success

  • structured 16-session, 2.5-hour group curriculum ending in a personal emergency plan for high-risk situations
  • court-mandated referral pathway, expanded in 2020 to allow pre-conviction mandates
  • exclusion criteria to keep out high-risk cases (severe mental illness, sex offences, acute reoffending risk)

Common failure modes

  • retrospective, single-canton design limits causal certainty per the study authors

Where it fits

Governance type
cantonal justice department
Scale
cantonal, replicated in three more Swiss cantons
Income level
high-income

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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