At 21:59 19-12-01 +1030, Edith Pringle wrote: > From studies carried out in Australia it would seem that counselling of >men following domestic violence yields poor results. It seems to be >more effective in convincing judges to reduce sentences though (my own >observation). The article posted below shows that UK research has led >to policy action. I would love to see this topic discussed on the list.
Please note that the Observer article quoted is from May 28, 2000, not 2001. See http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,319411,00.html [***Moderator's note: The date should indeed have read May 28, 2001 and not May 28, 2000. Our apologies for this editing error.***] The research quoted and decision taken correlate with our own experience here in Quebec, Canada, where programs for wife-beaters are probably more numerous than anywhere else in the world - 42 programs for a population of 7 million in 1998, according to Health Canada. Interesting articles on batterer programs appeared last year in the journal Violence Against Women, Vol. 6, No 9, September 2000 (Sage Publications). Quebec social worker Juergen Dankwort and psychologist Rudolf Rausch offered a sobering view of how most batterer programs operating in Canada based their work not on feminist analysis of power relationships but on "men's identity" politics, redefining abusers as "men in difficulty" or even "battered men". ("Men at Work to End Wife Abuse in Quebec : A Case Study in Claims Making", pp. 936-959) As with so-called "mediation" leveled against women's and children's legal entitlements, we ourselves have seen masculinist activists set up so-called "counselling" programs that merely advance their agenda, attack women's programs as "discriminatory" and (in a twisted version of equality) appropriate for men charged with wife-beating, rape and incest already scarce public health resources. In that light, we applaud the Australian decision to redirect toward crucial support for women the funds that had come to be expended on pseudo-therapeutic men's programs. In our experience, these only "work" in allowing wife-beaters to not only obtain reduced sentences but to often avoid charges and sanctions altogether, tying down many women in support of their much-touted "recovery" and maintaining patriarchal privilege in a system too eager to re-privatize conjugal violence. Most of my own "Limits and Risks of 'Programs for Wife Batterers"(1995), based on what program providers themselves acknowledge of their programs' shortcomings, can be consulted on-line at http://www.umn.edu/mincava/papers/limits.asp The MINCAVA site offers a number of other fascinating papers, notably those of U.S. author Barbara Hart, who first coined the notion of Accountability to women. Martin Dufresne, Secretary Montreal Men Against Sexism [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***End-violence is sponsored by UNIFEM and receives generous support from ICAP*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe end-violence OR type: unsubscribe end-violence Archives of previous End-violence messages can be found at: http://www.edc.org/GLG/end-violence/hypermail/
