Dear All,

May we all keep the faith (whatever yours is) to face the challenges and
grasp the opportunities in the new year ahead.

I am director of Ahimsa (Plymouth, SW England) which is one of the
oldest perpetrator programme providers in Europe.  We work with both
court-mandated and 'voluntary' referrals and we provide support services
for partners.  I have been absent through much of this debate but wanted
to respond to some of the comments about intervention programmes with
abusive men.  I apologise if I am duplicating what has already been
said.

Firstly, I think the bigger issue is - does counselling (abusive men)
work for women? We learned some years ago that priorities to facilitate
change in men and to safeguard women often compete.  We concluded that
we must make the safety of women and children the overriding priority of
our interventions.  We have often facilitated significant improvements
in the safety and welfare of women's lives despite at times mediocre
results with our efforts to effect significant change in some of their
abusive partners' behaviour.  For example, a proportion of our work
entails facilitating safe separation (a notoriously dangerous time for
many women). We would not have been able to achieve this without our
perpetrator programme.

Secondly, whilst perpetrator programme providers should be very cautious
about making over-zealous claims about programme success and the risk to
women of the very provision of such programmes should not be overlooked,
the fact remains that outcome research does show encouraging signs, at
least with those men who complete a programme (most of course don't).
The Observer article claiming 'no cure for men who beat their wives'
cited by one contributor was completely erroneous and subsequently
denied by the Home Office and appears to have been without any
foundation whatsoever.  Certainly the two most rigorous research
undertakings of UK perpetrator programmes in the UK (Change Project in
Edinburgh 1996 & DVIP in London 1998) revealed a significant increase in
women's and children's safety.  Both evaluation initiatives were
undertaken by experienced research teams with well-established feminist
pedigree.  It is clear that women victim/survivors in general value
having perpetrator programmes available (where they also provide partner
support) and abusive men fare much better than control groups in terms
of eliminating./reducing violent and abusive behaviour.

It should go without saying that perpetrator programmes cannot bring
about the far-reaching cultural changes necessary to promote a climate
in which violence and abuse are scorned by all but they do have a modest
contribution to make albeit with only very small numbers.

Calvin Bell
website: www.ahimsa.org.uk



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