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Journal for Social Work Scholar-Practitioners

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a global public health emergency with little meaningful reduction in prevalence over the past two decades, despite extensive micro-level interventions targeting perpetrators through batterer intervention programs (BIPs) and legal accountability mechanisms (Arce et al., 2020; Babcock et al., 2004; Shetty, 2025; WHO, 2025). Using a macro social work and epistemological lens, this paper argues that the IPV field and judicial systems, particularly in the United States, have relied on an outdated and largely reactive paradigm that obscures the trauma histories of perpetrators, neglects intergenerational and neurobiological mechanisms, and perpetuates epistemic injustice toward both survivors and those who use violence. Drawing on recent global estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), meta-analytic reviews of BIPs, and literature on trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and children exposed to domestic violence, the paper contends that current approaches have failed to meaningfully reduce the epidemic and may inadvertently increase psychological and emotional abuse while burdening survivors with legal-system-based trauma (Goodmark, 2018; Miller, 2005). It proposes a reimagined macro response that integrates legal accountability with trauma-responsive, brain- and nervous-system-focused interventions for perpetrators, including modalities such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and neurofeedback, as a pathway toward fostering regulation, executive functioning, and genuine behavioral change. The paper concludes by outlining a pilot research design comparing traditional BIPs with integrative rehabilitative models and by advancing an epistemology of justice that treats people who use violence as whole persons with trauma histories, rather than solely as offenders to be managed by the justice system.

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