Rovira Sopeña, MartíRodríguez Menés, JorgePalomo Lario, Carlos2025-10-202025-10-202025Rovira M, Rodriguez Menes J, Palomo Lario C. 'As time goes by': the effectiveness of protection orders in reducing intimate partner violence recidivism. J Dev Life Course Criminol. 2025 Sep 27. DOI: 10.1007/s40865-025-00275-82199-4641http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71568Data de publicació electrònica: 27-09-2025This study investigates the effectiveness of protection orders in reducing intimate partner violence (IPV) recidivism. Protection orders are legal measures imposing restrictions on aggressors to prevent them from approaching or contacting their victims. These legal measures have seen rapid international expansion in recent years. However, understanding the extent to which they work remains an ongoing challenge. To contribute to this debate, we employ Cox standard proportional hazards models and Prentice-Williams-Peterson gap-time models for recurrent events using a new dataset, which includes comprehensive registry data from an entire cohort of more than 6000 aggressors sentenced for at least one IPV crime over a five-year period, followed for at least four years. Our findings unveil an initial, average adverse effect of protection orders on recidivism. This effect becomes non-significant after excluding breaches of the orders and after controlling for judges' tendency to impose these measures on high-risk offenders. Moreover, we observe that the effects of protection orders vary over time: While there is an adverse immediate impact of holding an order, a positive temporal cumulative effect counteracts it after a few months.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/article2025-10-20http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40865-025-00275-8Protection ordersRecidivismIntimate partner violenceEvent-history analysisinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess