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 ***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/
