PRIA-MA — Spain's National Cognitive-Behavioural Programme for Convicted Intimate-Partner-Violence Offenders

PRIA-MA (Programa de Intervención para Agresores de Violencia de Género en Medidas Alternativas) is a national cognitive-behavioural group intervention run by Spain's Secretaría General de Instituciones Penitenciarias (Ministry of the Interior) for men convicted of intimate-partner-violence offences who are serving community sentences or other alternatives to prison. It was published in 2015 as an update of the original PRIA programme (2010), and is delivered through community-measures management units across Spain, in some regions via partner organisations such as Fundación Diagrama.
According to the Ministerio de Igualdad's 2022 annual gender-violence report, 8,843 convicted offenders began PRIA-MA in 2022, a 13.4% increase from 7,800 in 2021. An independent controlled study by Pérez Ramírez, Giménez-Salinas Framís and de Juan Espinosa (2013), covering 770 participants (635 in treatment, 135 on a waiting-list control), found statistically significant reductions in sexist attitudes, anger and denial of responsibility among treated men relative to controls.
A separate cohort evaluation by Alarcón Delicado (2023), following 101 offenders from 2018–2020, found 6.3% police-recorded recidivism among programme completers compared with 11.7% among those who dropped out, alongside a 21.8% dropout rate — a documented weakness that the government's own programme literature also flags. None of the available evaluations is a randomised controlled trial, and because outcomes are measured through police-recorded reoffending, true recidivism is likely undercounted — a limitation acknowledged in the academic sources rather than concealed here.

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