Ellen Pence

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Ellen Louise Pence (April 15, 1948 – January 6, 2012) was an American scholar and social activist who fought domestic violence. She co-founded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, a model used in all 50 U.S. states and in many countries, and it helped create the Duluth Model and the Coordinated Community Response (CCR). CCR is an interagency approach that brings together police, probation, courts, and human services to protect victims from ongoing abuse. In 2008, Pence received the Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award for her work.

Pence was a leader in the battered women's movement and used institutional ethnography to study how institutions affect families. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she earned a BA in arts from St. Scholastica College in Duluth and began working to improve safety for battered women in 1975. She helped start the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in 1980.

She earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Toronto in 1996. Pence founded Praxis International in 1998 and developed the Praxis Institutional Audit, a method to identify and fix failures in legal and human service systems that hurt people affected by violence and poverty. Her work focused on laws, reforms, shelters, advocacy programs, and training for judges, police, and social service providers.

She wrote educational materials for programs for battered women, men who batter, and law enforcement, and co-authored two books: Educational Groups for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Model and Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence: Lessons from the Duluth Model. She led Praxis International until late 2011 and helped build a national team to strengthen advocacy work to end violence against women. Pence died of breast cancer on January 6, 2012, in St. Paul, Minnesota, at age 63.