(10) Men Being Treated Badly: the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme: Part 2

Caring about men and boys. In this episode I discuss the origin of this programme in a single brutal murder that took place in Duluth, Minnesota in 1980 and how the dynamics of this grim crime were extrapolated and applied to every incident of domestic abuse throughout the Western world ever since, at a cost of billions. I talk about how participants in the programme were ’treated’ badly and discuss some of the research which has consistently found the programme to be ineffective. And of course...there’s another ‘good guy of the week’.

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Men Being Treated Badly: The Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme: Part 2

I’d like to start this episode by sharing with you, a little-known fact about the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme, IDAP for short; 

The United States Duluth programme model, on which the UK IDAP is based, is grounded in the event of a single, particularly brutal murder of a female by her male spouse in Duluth, Minnesota in 1980; the very particular dynamic of this solitary murder has been extrapolated and universalized, Western worldwide, ever since, across all incidents of domestic abuse, whatever the degree of harm. 

The authors of the programme were political activists from within the battered women’s movement; they were radical feminists who believed that domestic abuse was caused by men under the influence of patriarchal ideology, a belief system where society is thought to be arranged for the benefit of, and controlled by, men; men who have a grandiose sense of entitlement or privilege and who dominate and oppress women. These female authors based their one-size-fits-all treatment programme for males on this single grim and unrepresentative sample, completely unaware of how unscientific, let alone inhumane that was and the possible harm it could cause.

As I described in the last episode, within this ideology, men’s violence has a single cause, their need for power and control over women, other many and varied possible explanations are ignored. 

Patriarchal ideology is not only blind to other explanations, but it is also blind to women’s rage; for decades women were thought only to be victims of domestic abuse, never the perpetrator; indeed, within the ideology women’s rage behaviours were framed as pre-emptive, that is they were only violent because they anticipated being attacked, or they were violent in self-defence. Another explanation for women’s violence was listed for many years, on a Home Office funded domestic abuse website, that when women were being violent, it was because they were behaving like men.  

Ellen Pence was co-creator of the Duluth programme; before she died, she said 

‘in determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind domestic abuse, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with’. 

She went on to say, which is in line with what I heard from the men I worked with and interviewed,

‘I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were motivated by their need for power and control, and those who disagreed or simply kept quiet were told they were in denial’.

Finally, Ellen Pence said, 

‘many of the men did not seem to have, and never articulated a desire to have power over their partner but this fact went unnoticed by me and many of my co-workers. We had been finding something in these men that, because of our belief system, we had been predetermined to find’.

Despite Pence’s shift in position, which happened in 1999, the Duluth model and programmes derived from it are still prevalent throughout the Western world; and, despite research consistently finding that the approach is not effective, it is funded in the billions. Many researchers have found as I did, and as I discussed in the last episode, that the programme is not successful because it ignores a wide range of treatment needs including, emotional processing issues and relationship dynamics. 

Any domestic abuse treatment programme is unlikely to be successful if it is not evidence based, and if it doesn’t take into account all the possible social, developmental, and biological factors that we know contribute to the perpetration of domestic abuse.  

Studies that have examined the success rates of the Duluth model intervention program have unsurprisingly found it to be unsuccessful. One group of researchers carried out a meta-analysis of 22 studies that evaluated such treatment programmes and found that it had minimal effects and concluded that the interventions were inadequate in reducing recidivism. 

Another researcher found so much evidence that contradicted the radical feminist explanation and treatment that he concluded that its continued use is preventing effective treatment and undermining the intentions of the justice system. 

I’d like to turn my attention now to the men who took part in my research and those whom I have worked with as a psychotherapist; in view of what I’ve said earlier you won’t be surprised to hear, that none of them had done well on IDAP, in fact, they needed to debrief and process the negative impact that the programme had had on them, to address the multiple traumas experienced there, either as part of the research process, or before we could go ahead and address the real underlying causes of their unwanted behaviour.

The three main harms that these men repeatedly identified were all related to the facilitation of the programme. Please bear in mind, that all the while these men were on the programme, usually for half a year, they were often facing the potential negative consequences of being separated from, or never reunited with, their children and/or a prison sentence if they didn’t complete the programme or if the facilitators deemed that they weren’t sufficiently engaged in it. 

So, first harm coming up….as I said in the last episode, the IDAP programme focuses to a great extent on the power and control wheel; during sessions, many of these men had been required to own up to at least one abusive behaviour in each of the eight categories of the abuse wheel, otherwise they were considered to be in denial or not engaging. The old witches ducking stool or the Salem witch trials come to mind; for example, one man told me, “even though I used to turn over my pay packet to my partner every week and she would give me pocket money, the facilitators would not accept this so I had to lie and say that I had been financially abusive to my partner”. Similarly, another man said “I never stopped my partner from seeing her family or friends, in fact I was really upset because she was hardly ever at home” but felt obliged to lie and say that he had isolated her. 

The second harm…every man I worked with and spoke to in my research gave examples of their own version of events not being welcomed on the programme; the environment of the training was controlled so that they were deterred from bringing any of their own story into the sessions and, if they did, facilitators would swiftly close them down. they would tell the participant that they were denying or minimising what they had done, or that they were blaming their victim, any one of these possibilities could be construed as their not engaging in the programme properly with the risk of them experiencing harsh consequences.    

Finally, the third harm; I’m grumpy to have to say this, but know that  I have to….it is never OK for anyone to shove or slap a partner, there is never an excuse for that and I do not intend to minimise or deny the damage that such an act causes. However, and this is a controversial opinion to hold, I do think that abuse is on a continuum; radical feminists will say ‘violence is violence’ meaning all violent acts should be treated in the same way. However, (and I brace myself as I say this) it’s my opinion that, it is of course wrong to push or shove anyone but a push or a shove is not as bad as punching, kicking, threatening to kill someone or harming them with a weapon’. I support this statement by drawing on two sources; firstly, the medical model of tri-aging, where some injuries are acknowledged to be worse than others and in need of treatment more urgently and more intensively; secondly, the law acknowledges a hierarchy of harm, for example charges of common assault, actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, attempted murder and murder. 

Many of my male research participants and clients were towards the push and shove end of the violence continuum but they were on programmes with men who had attacked their partner brutally, sometimes with a weapon; they told me how intimidated and scared they felt being in the room with men who had done much worse things than them; this is something they could never have voiced at the time because they would have been told they were denying or minimising their own behaviour. 

In conclusion of this episode at least, officially IDAP doesn’t exist anymore; it has been replaced with Building Better Relationships however, in the new programme modules, there is so called ‘control log’ which the men are required to complete; sub-headings of this log include, ‘an incident when you physically abused your partner’ and ‘an incident when you used issues about children to manipulate your partner or ex-partner’. A rose by another name but with a fishy smell.

There is still so much more to say on this topic and I will return to it in a future episode. 

Good Guy of the week

I just hope I can get through this one without crying. I certainly couldn’t write it without crying. Because of Covid-19, the majority of hospitals everywhere have enforced no visiting or reduced visiting rules for health and safety reasons. This meant that Albert Conner, a father of three, from Texas, couldn't sit with his wife while she had her chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. 

Determined to support her to the best of his ability, he positioned himself so that she could see him through her hospital window. He sat on a picnic chair, between two parked cars, across the road from her with a makeshift sign which said ‘I can’t be with you but I’m here’, ‘I love you’ and ‘thank you to all the staff’..