Don Dutton Ph.D. Speakers Page

Specialized Topics: Cause and Consequences of Domestic Violence Treatment and Criminal Justice Response to DV Psychological Factors in the Development of Violence

Don Dutton received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1970. In 1974, while on faculty at the University of British Columbia, he began to investigate the criminal justice response to wife assault. He began preparing a government report that outlined the need for a more aggressive response and subsequently training police in “domestic disturbance” intervention techniques. After receiving training as a group therapist at Cold Mountain Institute, he co-founded the Assaultive Husbands Project in 1979, a court-mandated treatment program for men convicted of wife assault. During the 15 years he spent providing therapy for these men, he drew on his background in both social and clinical psychology to develop a model for perpetrators of intimate abuse. He has published over 100 papers and three books, including the Domestic Assault of Women, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile and The Abusive Personality.

He has provided talks at the Sorbonne in Paris, the US Army at Walter Reed Hospital, Navajo Nation in Arizona, the joint ABA-APA Taskforce on DV in Washington, DC and the US Department of Defense. SAFE Speaker Dutton has frequently served as an expert witness in civil trials involving domestic abuse and in criminal trials involving family violence, including his work for the prosecution on the O.J. Simpson trial. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. His latest work, Rethinking Domestic Violence includes an examination of how the gender paradigm developed in domestic violence research and policy.