Psychosocial Treatment for Domestic-Violence Perpetrators — Croatia's Court-Mandated National Network

Croatia's 2003 Law on Protection against Domestic Violence (LPDV) created "psychosocial batterers' treatment" as one of six protective measures Croatian courts can impose on perpetrators, alongside eviction, restraining orders and firearm confiscation. Delivery runs through a network of Ministry of Justice-contracted providers, the longest-running being Dom "Duga" Zagreb, whose treatment approach was developed with input from Austrian practitioners.
Court-referred (and occasionally voluntary) perpetrators attend either 16 weekly group sessions of two hours or 16 individual one-hour sessions over roughly six months, working on impulse control, taking responsibility and non-violent communication. By 2016 the Ministry of Justice had signed contracts with 33 individual practitioners and 6 institutions, all following one Ministry-approved model, after training more than 150 professionals.
Croatian Bureau of Statistics data compiled by the Work with Perpetrators European Network show 894 adults ordered into psychosocial treatment in 2013, falling to 602 in 2014 and 534 in 2015 — a decline that tracked funding constraints rather than falling need, since reported family-violence offences stayed in the tens of thousands each year. Per-perpetrator treatment cost was cut over the same period from roughly EUR 930-997 to about EUR 250 for six months. Croatian authorities and civil-society monitors have explicitly flagged that treatment access depends on local funding and that programme efficacy has not been rigorously evaluated against international standards — a caution this record preserves rather than smooths over.

Read the full analysis: https://www.duga-zagreb.hr/djelatnosti/psihosocijalni-tretman-pocinitelja/