Programa Contexto — Valencia's Court-Referred Programme for Convicted Intimate-Partner-Violence Offenders

Programa Contexto is a community-based intervention programme for men convicted of intimate-partner violence against women, run jointly since 2006 by the Universitat de València's Department of Social Psychology and the Asociación PSIMA in Valencia, Spain. It was created partly because the Valencia region lacked enough treatment places to implement Spain's Organic Law 1/2004 on Integral Protection Measures against Gender Violence, under which courts can divert convicted offenders serving sentences of under two years, with no prior criminal record, into supervised group treatment as an alternative to (or condition of) a suspended prison sentence.

A structural-equation-model evaluation of 212 court-mandated participants tracked three change indicators: perceived severity of the violence committed, assumption of responsibility, and estimated risk of recidivism. Reduction in recidivism risk — the strongest predictor of avoiding reconviction — was greatest among participants who had lower alcohol consumption, shorter sentences, lower impulsivity and higher life satisfaction. The programme has since hosted a study visit from the European Network for the Work with Perpetrators and received continued regional research funding through the Generalitat Valenciana's Prometeo Programme.

Caveat: the published evaluation measures within-programme change and predictors of that change among participants, not a randomised comparison against a no-treatment control group, so its effect size relative to receiving no intervention at all is not established by this evidence base.

Read the full analysis: https://www.programacontexto.org/en/