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The Duluth Model
The Journal for Women and Policing page 35
The Duluth Model – What it is and is not:
Clarifying and Correcting Common
Misconceptions
By Betty Taylor (Integrative Community Solutions)
and Brian Sullivan PhD (University of Queensland)
Introduction
In recent years, there has been a growing movement towards the
development of co-ordinated and integrated community responses
to domestic violence.The Duluth Model is perhaps the best known
and most prominent of the successful co-ordinated programs,
gaining international recognition.Many aspects of the Duluth Model
have been replicated both in Australia and elsewhere but do we
really know what Duluth is?
There have been many discussions and debates about the Duluth
Model. Some of these discussions have been based on fact,some
on fiction and others on pure fantasy. It is often misrepresented
as ‘a mandated men’s program’, a ‘pro-arrest approach’ or a ‘no
drop prosecution program’.Recently we were astonished to hear
the claim made in a public forum that the Duluth Model was the
preferred model for male violence intervention used in
Queensland and that it runs for 12 weeks.It has been these kinds
of misconceptions that have prompted us to write this short
apologia for the Duluth Model.While the authors in no way offer
themselves as ‘experts’ on the Duluth Model we both have had
considerable contact with the Duluth Program. One of the
authors has visited Duluth, spending time with the program and
speaking at length with the founder, Ellen Pence.The other has
trained in the Duluth men’s curriculum and program facilitation
and worked for two years in the USA co-facilitating up to four
men’s groups (based on the Duluth Model) per week. We
welcome this opportunity to provide some insight into what
Duluth is and isn’t and raise some questions for our own
interpretation and application to program development.
Background
Duluth is a city in Minnesota, USA, situated on the shores of Lake
Superior. It has a population of approx 90,000 people. In 1981,
Duluth became the first community in the US to develop a co-
ordinated community response to domestic violence. Law
enforcement, criminal and civil courts, women’s services, and
relevant human service agencies (including housing, health,
churches, child protection, etc.) began to work together to make
their community safer for victims and to hold perpetrators
accountable for their violence. Fifteen city, county and private
agencies in Duluth adopted policies and procedures, which co-
ordinated their interventions in domestic violence, assault cases.
Formal agreements with agencies that deal with domestic violence
have been developed including victim advocates, law enforcement
officers and administrators, prosecutors, probation officers, court
administrators, mental health services, policy makers and judicial
officers.The co-ordinating body became known as DAIP (Domestic
Abuse Intervention Program). The aim of DAIP is to make
connection and consistency between agencies so as to knit
together a system response to violence without any weak points or
gaps in service that could further compromise victim safety.
Much of the pioneering work of DAIP is credited to Ellen Pence
who has written extensively on reforming systems and safety &
accountability audits and she continues to provide leadership in the
development of collaborative responses.
Systems Reform
The purpose of developing a co-ordinated community response in
Duluth was to protect victims of domestic violence from further
acts of abuse and to hold abusers accountable for their behaviour.
Systems reform is the pivotal point and foundational underpinning
of the Duluth Model. For nearly 30 years, DAIP has tracked and
monitored domestic violence assault cases, at the same time
working with various agencies to improve their system responses
from the perspective of victim safety. In 1994,DAIP developed the
Domestic Violence Safety & Accountability Audit to change deeply
entrenched practices that often favoured offenders over victims of
domestic violence. Pence (1988) stated clearly that the state has an
obligation to protect its citizens,which includes victims of domestic
violence.We know from the reality of our own work that there are
many victims who do not want to prosecute their partners and are
then seen as a ‘barrier’ to effective intervention against their
abusers. Pence argued that the focus needs to shift to identifying
the problems and barriers within the system rather than becoming
mired in issues surrounding victim’s problematic responses to the
abuse they experience. Agencies and organizations working with
victims of domestic violence interacting with each other need to
have victim safety and offender accountability as the cornerstone of
all procedures and interventions.
This article was first published in the March 2007 Newsletter of the Queensland Centre for
Domestic and Family Violence Research.
The Duluth Model
page 36 The Journal for Women and Policing
Core Principals and Practices
The foundation of the Duluth Model includes five core principles
and eight activities for interventions to protect victims and end
violence. These are clearly outlined in the document, “Domestic
Abuse Intervention Project:An Overview” (see http://www.duluth-
model.org/).The five core principles are:
1. whenever possible, the burden of confronting abusers and
placing restrictions on their behaviours should rest with the
community,not the victim;
2. to make fundamental changes in a community’s response to
violence against women,individual practitioners must work co-
operatively, guided by training, job descriptions, and
standardised practices that are all oriented toward victim safety
and violence cessation;
3. interventions must be responsive to the totality of harm done
by the violence rather than be incident or punishment focused;
4. protection of the victim must take priority when two
intervention goals clash;and
5. intervention practices must reflect a basic understanding of and
commitment to accountability to the victim,whose life is most
affected by our individual and collective actions.
The eight practices are clearly listed and elaborated upon on the
DAIP website.They are merely outlined below:
1. the intervention project changes how the community thinks
about violence by building an underlying philosophical
framework,which guides the intervention process;
2. the intervention project assists in the development and
implementation of policies and operating procedures of the
intervening agencies involved in the co-ordinated community
response;
3. the intervention project tracks/monitors cases from initial
contact through to case closure to ensure practitioner and
offender accountability;
4. the intervention project co-ordinates the exchange of
information and interagency communication on a need-to-
know basis and co-ordinated interagency decision making;
5. the intervention project ensures that resources and services,
which offer safety and protection from further abuse are
available to victims and other at-risk family members (children);
6. the intervention project utilizes a combination of sanctions,
restrictions, and rehabilitation services to hold offenders
accountable and to protect victims form further abuse;
7. the intervention project works to undo harm done to children;
and
8. the intervention project evaluates the co-ordinated community
response from the standpoint of victim safety and the overall
objectives of intervention project goals
(see http://www.duluth-model.org/).
These are the core principles and practices on which the Duluth
Model is based.To isolate and criticize a single practice and to call
it the Duluth Model is to mistake the part for the whole. In
philosophical thinking, this is known as a categorical error. The
Model is far more comprehensive,sophisticated, and multi-layered
than some critics appreciate.
Creating a Coherent Philosophical
Approach which Centralises Victim Safety
Participating agencies have negotiated a shared philosophical
framework around which they can organise. A commitment to
victim safety and to holding abusers accountable means an end to
the often pervasive victim blaming that exists in many systems and
responses. In Duluth, a philosophy grounded in victim safety
underpins the practice of referring all actions back to the priorities
of victim protection, accountability and deterrence.
It is often the lack of a shared practical philosophical understanding
which impedes the progress of working in a co-ordinated and
collaborative way.
In Duluth, victims of domestic violence interact with the Justice
System through the following:
1. a civil process offering immediate relief;
2. criminal intervention; and
3. no intervention (restricted to those cases where there is no
physical injury to the victim,use of weapon or violation of a civil
protection order).
Pence (1988) suggests one of the biggest challenges of Duluth was
to make a single-incident focused adversarial criminal justice system
responsive to the kind of crime which needs to be understood in
context. Domestic violence is a pattern of abusive behaviour
committed over time rather than a single criminal act dislocated
from prior acts of violence.When victims of domestic violence call
police seeking intervention, they are ringing into a complex
adversarial system that is usually single-incident focused and rarely
takes into account the previous history of violence and abuse.Many
women may stop short of initiating criminal proceedings against
their abuser,afraid of retaliatory violence.This fear is well founded:
studies estimate that a victim's risk of being killed by her abuser
rises dramatically after she separates from him.Abusive partners
often threaten and intimidate their victims following police
intervention.As a result,victims may refuse to testify, ask police to
drop charges, or even recant prior truthful statements regarding
the abuse.
Duluth,San Diego,and many other jurisdictions in the US have been
able to adopt a specific criminal justice reform perspective to
domestic violence utilising the following approaches.
Aggressively prosecute misdemeanour domestic violence cases
in order to stop the violence.
Provide early intervention at the misdemeanour level in order
to prevent the escalation of offenders' behaviour to felony level
conduct.
The Duluth Model
The Journal for Women and Policing page 37
Shift the focus from victim responsibility for prosecution to a
focus on offender accountability.
Enhance victim safety by safety planning,strong victim advocacy
and use of state-of-the-art technology to assess lethality.
The development of a strong multi-disciplinary, inter-agency
response to family violence.
Promote community awareness about domestic violence, elder
abuse, child abuse,statutory rape and stalking cases.
Hold batterers accountable by not dropping or reducing
charges at the request of victims.
The Perpetrator Program –
Holding Men Accountable
Pence (1997) suggests that a co-ordinated community response to
domestic violence must decide what responsibilities State and
community agencies have in relation to abusers. The Duluth
community engages with violent men through three courses of action:
1. creating safety plans with women which may include refuge
referral or assistance to obtain civil restraining orders;
2. imposing sanctions and deterrents such as arrest,incarceration
or mandatory community service; and
3. providing opportunities for rehabilitation through referrals to
‘batterer’s programs’.
An important component of Duluth and one that is perhaps most
familiar to us is court mandated nonviolence programs for male
offenders.However these programs are not offered in lieu of other
legal interventions or at the expense of victim safety.The Duluth
Model is a many faceted approach that incorporates responses to
victims, perpetrators and children through various interventions –
it is so much more than the ‘men’s groups’ with which we have
become familiar.
Yet so often we hear professional practitioners reducing the Duluth
Model to only the men’s intervention curriculum and program.Even
a recent study (2003) by the eminent National Institute of Justice
(cf. www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/195079.pdf) mistakenly referred to
the Duluth Model as if it was only the men’s violence intervention
program.This is a common misconception and misunderstanding of
the Duluth Model, which is in reality more about clear and
consistent safe principles, policies, protocols, procedures and
practices across the community, as a systemic response to domestic
violence.As Dr Ed Gondolf reminded us during his Australian visit
in November 2006:“it is the system that matters”.
The Duluth Model is first and foremost about reforming system
responses to domestic violence.The men’s violence intervention
program is embedded in the system response and consequently is
accountable to the system. It is not a stand-alone response
(Gondolf, 2002). Without system support, the effect of the men’s
violence intervention program is questionable to say the least.The
success of any men’s violence intervention program relies heavily
on the cohesion and consistency of the civil and criminal justice
systems in monitoring: attendance, participation and progress;
violation of court orders; failure to comply with conditions; and
further acts or threats of violence (cf. http://www.duluth-
model.org/).
Certainly, an important component of the Duluth Model is the
court mandated nonviolence program for male offenders. In
Duluth, Ellen Pence and Michael Paymar developed a specific
curriculum, Power and Control:Tactics of Men Who Batter, which is a
2-hour weekly educational program. A critical aspect of this
program is the fact that it was based on research with over 200
victims,whose stories of abuse,identified men’s common strategies
of control and abuse in intimate partner relationships
(http://www.duluth-model.org/). From this research, the well-
known and widely used Power and Control Wheel and the Equality
Wheels were designed.The curriculum is a gender-based cognitive
behavioural program that focuses on abusive power and control
strategies used by men in intimate relationships.It challenges men’s
beliefs around male privilege and entitlement and presents the
alternative case for respectful, safe, non-abusive relationships
(Pence & Paymar, 1993).The original curriculum was developed as a
26 week program, although many programs now are held over a
much longer period of time (9-12 months)
DAIP Evaluation
Program evaluation activities have been a critical part of the
development of DAIP. Program success is determined by research
with a strong emphasis on evaluating interventions from the
standpoint of victims’ safety.These studies have employed a range of
research methods to examine the project’s effectiveness in enhancing
victim safety and holding offenders accountable for their behaviour.
These include monitoring,safety audits and interviews.An evaluation
by Shepard (1992) examined many different aspects of the project.
The evaluation found that recidivism rates were significantly lower
after increased project development.Statistical analysis indicated that
greater reductions in abuse occurred when the offender was court
mandated and had completed the men’s program.
Some Evaluation Findings
60% of battered women felt safer when their partner was
attending a group.
80% of battered women thought the combined responses of
police, courts,DAIP and shelter were helpful in ending the abuse.
69% of battered women had not experienced recent physical
abuse and 41% had not experienced recent psychological abuse
at a one-year follow-up.
Recidivism rate was 40% for a five year follow-up using criminal
justice records.
Men who completed the program had better outcomes than
those who did not.
(Shepherd,1988 & 2000)
The Duluth Model
page 38 The Journal for Women and Policing
Conclusion
Over nearly 30 years of action research, evaluation, auditing, and
listening to victims, Duluth has been successful in developing an
internationally acclaimed program of system reform, which
continues to challenge conventional thinking on responding to
domestic violence. It is important to note that the Duluth Model is
not a static, monolithic approach to responding to domestic
violence, but an ever-evolving and developing work of continual
progress, refinement, and attention to enhancing community
responses to safety and accountability. It would be naive, unwise,
and downright dangerous to dismiss 30 years of practice wisdom
and program evaluation.In fact, the Duluth Model may not so much
be in need of challenging and questioning,as do some practitioners’
understanding and implementation of it.
REFERENCES
Domestic Abuse Intervention Project 1996, Coordinated Community Responses to
Domestic Violence Cases: A Guide to Policy Development Domestic Abuse Intervention
Project, Duluth Minnesota.
Domestic Abuse Intervention Project 2002, Creating a Public Response to Private
Violence, Domestic Abuse Intervention Project,Duluth Minnesota.
Duluth Website: http://www.duluth-model.org.
Gondolf. EW 2002,Batterer Intervention Systems: Issues,Outcomes and
Recommendations.Thousand Oaks, Sage, California.
Pence, E.,& Lizdas, 1998, The Duluth Safety & Accountability Audit, MPDI, Duluth
Minnesota.
Pence, E & Paymar, M 1993,Education Groups for Men who Batter:The Duluth Model,
Springer,New York.
Shepard,M 1992,‘Predicting batterer recidivism five years after community
intervention’, Journal of Family Violence, vol 7,no. 3,pp.167-178.
Shepard,M & Pence, E 1999,Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence,
Sage Publications, California.
Taylor, E 2002,‘Churchill Fellowship Report’,Churchill Fellowship Trust.
Betty Taylor
Betty has extensive experience in the area of domestic violence including direct service provision, program development and training.She is a founder
and previous Director of the Domestic Violence Prevention Centre Gold Coast and chaired the Queensland Domestic & Family Violence Council for two
terms, 1994-1997 and 2001-2004.Betty was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2002 to investigate multi-agency interventions to domestic violence
across the USA and Canada and has overseen the successful development of the Gold Coast Domestic Violence Integrated Response. She has written
and developed training programs on domestic violence and was awarded a Centenary Medal for her contribution to domestic violence service provision.
Dr Brian Sullivan
After a number of years working in leadership roles in the education and human services sectors, Brian undertook advanced counselor training in the
USA. He completed his doctorate in counseling and mental health at the College of Health and Human Services, University of Toledo,Ohio in 2000.
Whilst in the USA,Brian also trained in the Duluth Model of Domestic Violence Intervention. He has worked intensely with court-ordered men using the
Duluth Program.Brian teaches at the University of Queensland in the Master of Counselling Program where he coordinates a course in Violence Issues
in Counselling.He also provides training for professionals in Domestic Violence Intervention Programs for men who perpetrate intimate partner violence.
Brian is a member of the Ministerial Advisory Council on Domestic and Family Violence.
Left to right: Dr Brian Sullivan,Betty Taylor with Professor Ed Gondolf
