The Freedom Programme is a domestic abuse programme which was created by Pat Craven and evolved from her work with perpetrators of domestic violence.
The Programme was primarily designed for women as victims/survivors of domestic abuse, since research shows that in the vast majority of cases serious abuse are male on female.
The Freedom Programme examines the roles played by attitudes and beliefs on the actions of abusive men and the responses of victims and survivors. The aim is to help them to make sense of and understand what has happened to them, instead of the whole experience just feeling like a horrible mess. The Freedom Programme also describes in detail how children are affected by being exposed to this kind of abuse and very importantly how their lives are improved when the abuse is removed.
The programme is usually run over 11 sessions each lasting 1.5 hours and historically have been run face to face in group settings. However, more recently and since the inception of COVID-19, the programme has been run as a group setting over Zoom which has allowed many more women to participate.
