I have a couple of comments to make about this. Both (hopefully) brief and certainly not conclusive, yet nevertheless, I feel compelled to add something.
I work as the Director of Program Evaluation for a DV agency in Dallas, Texas (USA). As such, I am responsible for measuring outcomes for all of our programs, including our battering intervention program (BIPP). This will be the first year that we are tracking recidivism for clients who both complete and do not complete the program. The last couple of years we have been tracking processural outcomes. This is not an easy program to evaluate for a couple of reasons: 1) cannot trust the clients to be honest about their behavior 2) have not been able to effectively make contact with partners to gauge any progress a client may be making. Besides some procedural difficulties in ensuring partner safety, there are ethical concerns about surveying partners about a batterers' behavior. Lastly, even though we will be collecting recidivism data this year, we all know that most battering takes place without the perpetrator being sanctioned, so it is a best, a very gross measure of behavior change. Second comment is that I think the entire approach to "counseling" men is mis-directed. Good intentions, but it is like the band aid vs the cure analogy. What needs "counseling" are not individual men, but the entire culture. Male perpetration has been around for millennia -- for anything to last that long, it must have institutional support. In short, our social institutions create and maintain a culture of violence against women -- not a new thought, I know, but one that speaks to an entirely different solution than that of counseling a few men. The question that I have been asking for some time and not come up with an actionable intervention is, "How to change culture?" Institutions create culture and maintain culture and these institutions are controlled by the group that is benefiting from this arrangement. For every batterer that is counseled, there are X number of new ones being raised in a culture that sanctions violence against women -- even if counseling was effective, there would still be new batterers cranked out day after day -- historically, the "source" of battering (i.e., institutional arrangement and control) has never been effectively intervened upon. In my opinion, till that changes, there will continue to be minimal progress. Thanks for the listen. John Glass John Glass Director, Program Evaluation The Family Place P.O. Box 7999 Dallas, Texas 75209, USA 214-443-7702 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.familyplace.org ***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/
