Pilot study finds teaching women not to hit men isn't just good for men, it also reduces violence against women (and vice versa).

It's an interesting idea and there might be some value to it, but the researchers don't do a good job of collecting evidence to support their claims or writing a report that strongly makes their case. I imagine that's probably why the field has apparently completely ignored the paper, with practically no citations and no attempts to continue research into the treatment.

The "field" (other than people writing essays about other people's essays) is embarrassingly small, and has severe methodological issues - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1525343/

Recent reviews have reported only small average effect sizes for BIPs, with the small number of randomized trials showing little benefit of BIP attendance in preventing future abuse. The most widely adopted BIP intervention model has little empirical justification to support this dominance, yet states with standards governing the content of BIPs often mandate this approach as a contingency for state funding. Little data exist concerning the moderators and mediators of BIP effects on IPV recidivism, and a variety of factors threaten to impede future design advancements, including “turf” battles regarding the causes of IPV and limited funding outlets. Given this discouraging summary, the authors argue that research efforts concerning BIP effectiveness should borrow the design strategies and programmatic research efforts that have proven successful in psychotherapy research, in which significant advances have been made with regard to the evaluation and validation of empirically supported treatments for a wide variety of mental health problems. They conclude by calling for a new generation of IPV researchers to work across professional boundaries in a multidisciplinary manner to design the sophisticated evaluation studies that funding agencies would readily support, and that would provide the substantive answers to the many IPV-related public health questions that remain.

/r/MensLib Thread Parent Link - psycnet.apa.org