Second Responder Program for Men — Targeted Post-Charge Intervention in London, Ontario

The Second Responder Program targets men assessed as moderate-to-high risk shortly after a domestic violence charge, offering tailored, practical counselling focused on immediate steps to reduce their dynamic risk of reoffending — distinct from standard longer-format group perpetrator programmes. It is delivered by Changing Ways London, Inc., working alongside London's coordinated domestic-violence-court response and Western University's Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children (CREVAWC), founded in 1994.
Scott, Heslop, Kelly and Wiggins (2015) evaluated the programme with a quasi-experimental design comparing 40 intervention participants to 40 men who received standard policing and prosecution response only. Over a two-year follow-up, intervention participants were significantly less likely to face new domestic charges (12.2% vs. 41.5%), any new charges (25.0% vs. 52.5%), property-offence charges (5.0% vs. 32.5%) and further police-recorded occurrences (52.2% vs. 85.0%); differences in violent-offence charges specifically were not statistically significant. The U.S. National Institute of Justice's CrimeSolutions registry independently rated the programme 'Promising' on the strength of this study.
As a short, targeted add-on to standard justice processing rather than a lengthy standalone programme, it offers a lower-cost complement to longer group interventions such as Ontario's court-mandated Partner Assault Response programs, though — being based on a single site and study — its evidence base has not yet been replicated elsewhere.

Read the full analysis: https://crimesolutions.ojp.gov/ratedprograms/second-responder-program-men-ontario-canada