PRIA / PRIA-MA — Spain's National Programme for Gender-Violence Offenders

Spain's Secretaría General de Instituciones Penitenciarias (Ministry of the Interior) has run the Programa de Intervención para Agresores de violencia de género (PRIA) since 2009 for men imprisoned for gender-violence offences. In 2016 it launched PRIA-MA, extending the same model to men serving community-based 'alternative measures' — suspended sentences and probation — delivered through partner organisations such as Fundación Diagrama in centres across Asturias, Valencia, Alicante, Castellón and Murcia, among other regions.

The programme uses group cognitive-behavioural sessions — typically around 25 sessions of two hours, plus at least two individual sessions, over 6-12 months — targeting sexist attitudes, jealousy, emotional abuse, conflict resolution, anger management, empathy and acceptance of responsibility.

Reach is substantial and growing: 8,843 men began PRIA-MA in 2022 alone, a 13.4% increase on 2021. Fundación Diagrama's centres in four provinces enrolled 104 men in 2025. A quasi-experimental academic study (Pérez Ramírez, Giménez-Salinas Framís & de Juan Espinosa, 2013) followed 770 men — 635 in treatment, 135 on a waitlist control — and found statistically confirmed reductions in sexist attitudes, emotional abuse and impulsivity relative to the control group. Spain's Ministry of Equality then published official police-recidivism tracking for the same PRIA cohort: 4.6% were newly reported to police for gender violence within one year of finishing treatment, rising to 6.8% over a five-year follow-up — compared with an international baseline of roughly 21% (police-recorded) or 35% (victim-reported) among untreated offenders, and around 8.4% among treated offenders internationally.

These are police-recorded reoffending rates, which likely understate true recidivism since many gender-violence incidents go unreported; they should not be read as a full account of harm prevented. A separate, more recent claim by implementing partner Fundación Diagrama (2026) — that 87% of participants showed a 'predisposition to change' — is self-reported by the programme operator and has not been independently verified, so it is treated here as weaker evidence than the government's own recidivism tracking and the peer-reviewed quasi-experimental study.