Duluth model

The Duluth model is a pseudoscientific protocol for coordinated intervention of community resources against intimate partner violence (IPV). While it remains the primary means of addressing such violence in many American states, legal, social, and academic critics widely consider the model to be pseudoscientific, less effective compared to other protocols, or biased because it incorrectly categorically rejects women's violence, violence within same-sex relationships, bidirectional abuse, and theoretically unsound as it was not created through academic study. Academics have demonstrated that it is an extreme, negative, and polarized model. The Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) devised the protocol to bring law enforcement, family law, and social work agencies together in a "Coordinated Community Response" ("CCR") to purportedly reduce violence against women and rehabilitate perpetrators of domestic violence. The DAIP developed the curriculum in Duluth, Minnesota, hence its name. The model describes coordinating community agencies to provide a consistent response to female victims of Intimate Partner Violence that has three primary goals: Ensuring survivor safety. Providing a way to hold offenders/abusive partners accountable for their violence. Changing the climate of tolerance for this form of violence. Part of this model is the men's behavior change program Creating a Process of Change for Men who Batter: The Duluth Curriculum. The curriculum is the most common batterer intervention program used in the United States. Advocates of the Duluth model claim it is successful because it is grounded in the experience of female victims, helps offenders and society change, and pulls the whole community together to respond. The Duluth Model Coordinated Community Response has received multiple awards for its grassroots efforts to end intimate partner violence, including the World Future Council's Future Policy Award in 2014. It has been criticized by mental health professionals who focus on individual behaviour and reject a social model of...