Our certified Intimate Partner Abuse Education Program is a forty-week program, which provides educational groups for perpetrators of intimate partner abuse and resource information to partners and victims as part of a coordinated community response. Since 1999, our IPAEP has represented a critical component of a coordinated community response to domestic violence by documenting abuse, assessing dangerousness, monitoring behavior, creating a paper trail regarding compliance with conditions of probation and providing information and resources to the victims. Our program can give offenders a reason to change and a method for doing so, but it is up to the individual abuser to decide whether or not he or she will continue to be violent.
Our curricula examine all forms of abusive behavior and their impact toward intimate partners and children, and the cultural and social influences that contribute to violence. The female/male co-facilitators encourage offenders to adopt respectful and non-abusive behaviors toward their intimate partners and children, in part by modeling equal relationships. In the IPAEP, power and control are viewed as the primary problems, unlike anger management programs, where anger is viewed as the primary problem. Groups are held for two hours, once a week, for forty weeks.