The Duluth Model provides a method for communities to coordinate their responses to domestic violence through an inter-agency approach that brings the justice and human service interventions together with the primary goal of protecting victims from ongoing abuse.

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

• 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 inter-agency cooperation guided by advocacy programs.

The Duluth Model holds that the goals of public intervention in domestic violence cases should include several key elements. Learn more about these here.