Systems of accountability for abusive men in a domestic violence context: The nature of abuse, limited effectiveness and intervention strategy improvement

The domestic violence movement had extraordinary success in enlightening society on the scope, predominance, and consequences of battering, but more limited ability in successfully intervening and preventing the abuse of women by their intimate male partners. Taking this perspective, the present study offers four main goals: 1) describe the theories of domestic violence causation and the evolution of the current strategies for intervening with abusive men and why men are abusive; 2) evaluate current domestic violence interventions to understand the rationale has produce the development of these strategies; 3) Describe and critically analyze the limitations of current domestic violence intervention strategies for abusive men; and 4) Present solutions to improve the system. A literature review focusing on the nature of abusive behavior, the effectiveness of current strategies and suggestions on how to develop new intervention strategies to reduce male abusive behavior against their female partners are presented.