Effective intervention in domestic violence in Chinese communities: an eight-year prospective study

Domestic violence is increasing in China. To explore the effective intervention, we intervened three large independent Chinese communities with different approaches over an eight-year period from 2005 to 2012, with a fourth independent community as a peer control.

The intervention approaches included the psychological intervention with traditional Chinese culture characteristics, the social governance and the poverty relief. The statistical analysis was performed in 2017.

We found that while the prevalence of domestic violence kept growing in the control community, it significantly declined in the other three target communities. Among these intervention approaches, the social governance was the most effective, whereas it resulted in the lowest happiness index.

This continuous, long-period, prospective and large-scale study showed that these approaches could significantly reduce domestic violence.