What Is to be Done?: Barriers and Opportunities for Partner Abuse Intervention Programs

Background & Purpose: Partner abuse intervention programs (PAIPs) occupy a precarious place within work on intimate partner violence (IPV). While PAIP is essential to ending violence against women, there are longstanding tensions over responsibility for its provision, ideal models and approaches, and appropriate funding mechanisms. Evidence suggests programs vary widely in whether and how closely they work with survivor programs and the models and approaches used, while demonstrating program effectiveness and funding remain challenges. While survey data has offered insight into the range of PAIP practices, we know less about how practitioners make sense of and negotiate these issues. Drawing on multiple sources of data, this study identifies current barriers and opportunities for PAIP stemming from historical decisions about program ownership and funding.

Methods: Data come from a mixed methods study of the social service system for IPV in a Midwestern metropolitan area in the U.S. They include in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 29 key informants with ten or more years of experience direct practice, research, or policy-making related to IPV, over 200 pages of archival material from the state-level IPV coalition, including newsletters and committee meeting minutes, and quantitative data on the characteristics of all known IPV organizations in the region (N = 65). Interviews were transcribed verbatim and, alongside archival materials, coded in accordance with grounded theory principles using Atlas.TI. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS to describe patterns within the IPV field. The analytic approach was informed by inhabited institutionalism, an approach from organizational studies, which focuses on how organizational actors strategically navigate their political and cultural environments.

Results: In this region, as elsewhere, early decisions placed survivors at the center of service development and funding. While some PAIPs existed along with the earliest survivor programs in the 1970s, they were not eligible for coalition membership until the early 1990s. When funding levels for IPV have declined, PAIP have increasingly been established in non-IPV organizations. All PAIP practitioners noted struggles with funding. Of the 65 IPV organizations in the region, nearly half work exclusively with survivors (49%, N = 32), one-quarter work with survivors and offer PAIP (25%, N = 16), and the remaining quarter offer PAIP only (26%, N = 17). Organizations in the latter group are significantly less connected to IPV-focused advocacy groups, disproportionately for-profit, and, at the organizational level, focused on issues like mental health alcohol and other drug use rather than IPV. Field-level conditions favored the growth of this type of PAIP, particularly among organizations with pre-existing ties to the court system—the major source of referrals for PAIP—when IPV-specific organizations were unable to meet existing service needs.

Conclusions & Implications: Findings suggest current funding practices result from efforts to ensure the survival and centrality of programs for survivors, with unintended consequences PAIP. While state licensure and standards form something of a check on program-level practices, the effectiveness of PAIP to eliminate IPV likely depends on conceptualizing these interventions, alongside those for survivors, as central to the field, and adjusting approaches and funding accordingly.