Rose Garrity, a New York State-based women's advocate has just produced a very convincing summation of many women's experience with domestic violence offender programs. I find her evidence-based historical and contemporary analysis of "Movement Activism versus Professionalism" absolutely convincing as it resonates with my own experience of such systems and how violent men and an indifferent system uses them.
Garrity writes in Introduction: "Often we do not perceive things the way they really are because we see and hear what we have been carefully groomed and trained to see and hear. In a recent workshop at a domestic violence conference, for example, where a researcher was extolling the virtues of some state standards for what she called batterer treatment, she said to the group of battered women's advocates, "We are desperately in need of research to show what you all know". It doesn't take much scrutiny to figure out how ridiculous this statement seemed to some of us. This workshop presented research and academic theories regarding the degree to which they think batterer programs are successful at getting men to stop being abusive, and how we can promulgate state standards for batterer "treatment" programs. Activists in the room made numerous statements of concern regarding the dangers inherent in what was being advocated as standardized programs, saying that the battered women's movement had volumes of information that pointed to the danger, the ineffectiveness and the offense of these approaches. -- Batterer "Treatment" A huge industry has been spawned in building and expanding programs and services as well as selling books and programs about how to "treat" men who batter. Many battered women were and are murdered even as the "experts" provide "treatment" to their abusers, yet these programs continue to proliferate, and some promoters of different "models" and analyses have become very well paid authors and speakers. (S. Stosny, D. Dutton, N. Jacobson, J. Campbell, R. Gelles, for example). --Pathologizing Men Who Batter The behavior of dominating by using patriarchal tactics to maintain control and power is engaged in by far too large a portion of the population to be called a pathology of individuals. It is behavior that is carefully taught by institutions and is supported culturally, institutionally and individually. If the status quo were served by bank robberies, forgeries, child murder, embezzlement and other crimes that are seen only as criminal behavior and not explained away and "treated", it is certain that there would be more pathologizing of that behavior as well." (...) ****************** I will be glad to share this piece with interested feminists. Martin Dufresne Montreal men Against Sexism Canada ***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/
