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

'Partnerschaft ohne Gewalt' (Partnership Without Violence) 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. Sessions, run by trained social workers, cover self-control and 'time-out' techniques, triggers such as alcohol use and stress, and end with participants drawing up a personal emergency plan for high-risk situations. Annual intake was under 30 participants before 2020 but rose to over 170 after a 2020 change in federal law allowed courts to mandate the programme before conviction.
Kirschstein, Endrass, Rossegger, Graf and Gerth (2025, Journal of Interpersonal Violence) evaluated the Zurich programme with a retrospective quasi-experiment comparing 66 men assigned to the intervention with 204 police-recorded IPV offenders who were not, tracking any new IPV re-offence recorded by Zurich Cantonal Police 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 (Cox regression hazard ratio 0.21, p=.003, 95% CI [0.07, 0.59]). Contemporary Swiss media reporting on the same programme cited an estimated cost-benefit ratio of roughly one franc invested to six or seven francs saved in avoided reoffending costs, against a per-participant training cost of a few thousand francs.
The model has since been adopted, with local variation, by the neighbouring cantons of Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt and Bern, giving it demonstrated within-country transferability beyond its Zurich origin, and the authors themselves describe the evidence as preliminary given the retrospective, single-canton design.

Read the full analysis: https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/partnerschaft-ohne-gewalt-leid-verhindern-wie-ein-training-gegen-haeusliche-gewalt-hilft