Negotiating Truths to “Pass Through the Hoop”: How Men’s Trajectories Shape Their Stories in Batterer Intervention Programmes

Narrative criminology has highlighted the role of storytelling in criminal behaviour and processes of change. In studies of intimate partner violence desistance, micro-social scholarship shows that therapeutic success often depends on negotiations between offenders’ narratives and institutional narratives. Yet this literature has paid limited attention to the material and institutional conditions shaping such negotiations. Drawing on repeated life story interviews conducted with 41 men attending batterer intervention programmes in Argentina and Uruguay, this study compares participants’ institutional trajectories and evolving narratives of change. Through the analysis of three cases, we show that men’s accounts of desistance are shaped by their familiarity with institutional logics (such as programme expectations, timelines, and evaluative practices) as well as by their access to material resources that support change. We argue that the capacity to adapt and stabilise narratives of change is unevenly distributed and rooted in prior life trajectories and social resources, generating unequal possibilities of “successful” desistance (of passing through the hoop ) across social backgrounds.