Expert Opinions

Description
John Hamel, Ph.D., LCSW, has a Masters in Social Welfare from U.C.L.A., and a Ph.D. from the University of Central Lancashire, U.K., where he is currently a Research Fellow.  He has worked with family violence perpetrators and victims since 1992, and is a court-approved provider of batterer intervention programs in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Dr. Hamel is the author of Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse, 2nd Edition: Evidence-Based Approaches, (Springer, 2014), and other books on domestic violence. He also has had dozens of his research articles published in various peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and is Editor-in-Chief of Partner Abuse, a journal published quarterly by Springer Publishing.  

A frequent speaker at conferences on domestic violence, he has also trained mental health professionals, attorneys, victim advocates social service organizations, law enforcement, attorneys and family court mediators. He is a founding member of the Association of Domestic Violence Intervention Programs (ADVIP), an organization of mental health professionals and researchers dedicated to evidence-based practice (www.domesticviolenceintervention.net). 

Dr. Hamel has provided consultation and expert witness services to prosecutors and defense attorneys, in criminal as well as family law setting. With his wealth of both clinical and research knowledge, he is uniquely qualified to educate attorneys on domestic violence theory, dynamics, causes, and consequences.  He is especially skilled at helping attorneys identify and refute common myths around this topic (e.g., all acts of domestic violence are the same; women are mostly victims and men perpetrators), with implications for varied types of cases, among them those involving battered person syndrome, wrongful arrest, and disputed child custody.
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