Duluth Model

The Duluth model offers a method for communities to use in coordinating their responses to domestic violence. It is an interagency approach that brings the justice and human service interventions together around the primary goal of protecting victims from ongoing abuse. It was conceived and implemented in a small working-class city in northern Minnesota from 1980 to 1981. The original Minnesota organizers were activists in the battered women's movement. They selected Duluth as the best Minnesota city in which to try to bring criminal and civil justice agencies together to work in a coordinated way to respond to domestic abuse cases involving battering. By battering they meant an ongoing pattern of abuse used by an offender against a current or former intimate partner. Eleven agencies formed the initial collaborative initiative. These included 911, police, sheriff's and prosecutors' offices, probation, the criminal and civil court benches, the local battered women's shelter, three mental health agencies, and a newly created coordinating organization called the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP). The initiative's activist, reform-oriented origins shaped its development and popularity among reformers in other communities. Over the next three decades this continuously evolving initiative became the most replicated woman abuse intervention model in the country.

The Duluth model engages legal systems and human service agencies to create a distinctive form of organized public response to domestic violence. It is characterized by the following:

• clearly identifiable and largely shared assumptions and theories about the source of battering and the effective means to deter it
• empirically tested intervention strategies that build safety and accountability into all elements of the infrastructure of processing cases of violence
• well-defined methods of interagency cooperation guided by advocacy programs

The Duluth model holds that public intervention in domestic violence cases should include several key elements. It must protect victims of ongoing abuse (battering). It must hold perpetrators and intervening practitioners accountable for victim safety. It must offer offenders an opportunity to change (including punishment if it enhances victim safety), and it must ensure due process for offenders through the intervention process. The focus of intervention is on stopping the violence, not on fixing or ending interpersonal relationships.

The Duluth model asserts the following:

• The primary responsibility of placing controls on abusers belongs to the community and the individual abuser, not the victim of abuse.
• Battering is a form of domestic violence that entails a patterned use of coercion or intimidation, including violence and other related forms of abuse that may be legal or illegal. To be successful, initiatives must distinguish between and respond differently to domestic violence cases that constitute battering and cases that do not, and the intervention must be adjusted for the severity of the violence.
• Intervention must account for the economic, cultural, and personal histories of the individuals who become abuse cases in the system.
• Both victims and offenders are members of the community; while they must each act to change the conditions of their lives, the community must treat both with respect and dignity, recognizing the social causes of their personal circumstances.

The Duluth model offers four primary strategic principles of interagency

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