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The problem of domestic violence is too weighty, both as public health and social issues, to be content with intervention approaches that sound good or look right based on some conceptual model, but that have no empirical support for their efficacy (Gorney, 2007). Unfortunately, this has been the tradition regarding interventions in this field-many earnest appeals and opinions, very little data (Ganley, 2008).
It is important in conceptualizing interventions for partner violence to distinguish between interventions that are inefficacious and interventions that are harmful. The limited available evidence suggests that a lot of partner violence interventions, both lawful and psychosocial, may be relatively inefficacious when scrutinized and compared to no-treatment managed conditions (Hassan, et al 2000), although combined legal and clinical interventions may have small, additive effects on outcome variables such as criminal recidivism (Healey, et. al 2007; Giles-Sims, 1983). To date, no intervention has been shown to have large, powerful effects in ending partner violence in controlled studies. Thus, the search for highly efficacious intervention approaches remains a major and urgent priority in the field.
With respect to the harmfulness of interventions, although a great many articles have warned of the harmfulness of couple’s interventions for partner violence, and many states explicitly forbid the use of couple’s interventions for court-mandated abusers, we know of no empirical evidence indicating that such interventions are, in fact, harmful. Two controlled trials have found couples interventions to be no less effective than the widely promoted gender-specific interventions for wives with a violent husband (Hassan, et al 2000). O 'Leary and colleagues (1999) further demonstrated that