PAVD — Portugal's National Programme for Domestic Violence Perpetrators

Portugal's Direção-Geral de Reinserção e Serviços Prisionais (DGRSP) has run the Programa para Agressores de Violência Doméstica (PAVD) nationwide since 2011, ordering men convicted of, or facing prosecution for, domestic violence into a structured accountability and behaviour-change programme as a condition of sentencing, probation, suspended prosecution or parole. A parallel island programme, CONTIGO, serves the Azores, and a prison-based variant, VIDA, was added in 2018 and had expanded to ten prison facilities by 2020-2021.
The programme has a minimum duration of 18 months across three mandatory phases: a six-month stabilisation phase using individual case management and motivational-interviewing techniques; a psychoeducational phase of 20 group sessions addressing conjugal violence, legitimising beliefs and alcohol misuse; and a relapse-prevention phase of individual follow-up.
Participation has grown steadily and hit successive records: from a 2011-present cumulative total of 10,696 men, enrolment reached 2,494 in Q4 2023, then 3,200 in 2024 (a 7.7% year-on-year rise), and 3,954 across all of 2025 - the highest figure to date. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 3,168 men were enrolled, up from 2,909 in the same period of 2025.
An external evaluation commissioned from CESPU (Instituto de Ciências da Saúde do Norte) found the programme achieved a reduction in violence risk, a reduction in beliefs that legitimise violence, a reduction in addictive behaviours - particularly alcohol misuse - and an increase in offenders' self-accountability for their criminal conduct, which CESPU linked to increased recidivism prevention.
The evidence has real limits: CESPU's findings are reported qualitatively, without a published quantitative recidivism rate or a control group, and Portugal's own Justice Minister has separately announced a dedicated recidivism study using archived case files precisely because this gap remains open. DGRSP itself has acknowledged that despite record enrolment, "the number of inmates who attend them is still low" relative to the total number of domestic violence convictions, and is using a EUR 3 million EEA Grants award (from Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) to build a new national training academy to strengthen facilitator capacity and monitoring.

Read the full analysis: https://executivedigest.sapo.pt/nunca-houve-tantas-pessoas-a-frequentar-programas-de-violencia-domestica-3-200-agressores-estao-sob-acompanhamento/