(11) Men Being Treated Badly: The Integrated Domestic Abuse programme: Part 3

Caring about men and boys. This episode continues the discussion about the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme and makes the argument that because radical feminist ideology underpins the programme, it can be viewed as cult like. I look at the experiences of men I have interviewed, who had negative experiences on the programme, through the lens of, one of Robert J Lifton’s components of brainwashing, or ‘thought reform’ as he calls it, that of Milieu Control. 

And of course....there’s another ‘good guy of the week’! 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Men Being Treated Badly: The Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme: Part 3

As I said in my last episode, I have been interviewing men who have participated in IDAP, the UK’s Integrated Domestic Abuse Programmes. I interviewed these men for three reasons.

1.    Firstly, their voices have not been recorded in UK or USA research beyond a few sentences in a Home Office paper (Bullock et al, 2010) in which two men appraise the programme positively.

2.    Secondly, as I said in my previous episode, men coming to me for Empathic Anger Management would often need to debrief and process their negative experiences of the IDAP programme before we could begin the necessary therapeutic work. I had been disturbed to hear them using phrases that included

·    feeling dominated and controlled

·    it was the facilitator’s way or the highway

·    feeling bound and gagged

·    saying they’d been brainwashed

·    that ‘they’, the facilitators, messed with my head

Ironically, these are the very kind of behaviours which the IDAP programme assumes that their group participants will have been engaging in, in their intimate partner relationships, and which the IDAP programme aims to eradicate.

3.    Lastly, in 2010, I attended an International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) conference and listened to speakers discussing Robert J Lifton’s ‘psychology of totalism’; ‘psychology of totalism’, derived from his research during the mid-1950’s, on brainwashing in Chinese universities. Lifton identified the tactics used by Chinese communists to cause drastic shifts in a person’s opinions and personality, a process he called ‘thought reform’. As I listened, the stories of the men whom I had worked with came to mind and I wondered if they had been the subjects of a form of indoctrination. Lifton identified eight criteria of thought reform, these include, control of the milieu or environment, manipulation through mystical means, a demand for purity which consistently evokes guilt and shame, a requirement for the confession of ‘sins’ (that word is in air quotes, the belief system is held as sacred and as a science, the use of insider loaded language which limits wider thought and can shut down emotional processes; the doctrine is more important than the individual, personal experiences are subordinate to the ideology and lastly, there is the dispensing of existence, whereby people with alternative belief systems do not deserve acknowledgement or value, and anyone who leaves the indoctrinated community is shunned.    

This led me to a small research programme where I interviewed 8 individuals; in the interest of transparency, these were all men who had not fared well on the IDAP programme who wished to tell me about their experiences as a way of getting their stories heard. My interviewees came from men from London, Yorkshire, Liverpool and the East and West Midlands; five white males, one man who identified as Asian and two who identified as an African Caribbean; three are white collar workers and five are blue collar; all in the 35 – 50 age bracket. 

In this episode I am going to map their experiences against the milieu control component of thought reform with the intention of demonstrating that a form of mind control, or thought reform, is at the core of this programme. The eight components co-exist, they are not discrete phenomena, they inevitably overlap. Milieu control, which is being considered here, has to be present for all the other components to exist.

Milieu control relates to the control of all communication within a given environment which includes both the individual’s inner communication with themselves, as well as their external, inter-personal communication with others. Within the IDAP programme I would argue, communication is constructed and maintained through focussing all group dialogue around the power and control wheel and the equality wheel. When these two models stand-alone, they finely calibrate a wide range of constructive and destructive inter-personal behaviours which make a considerable contribution to our understanding of what constitutes safe and unsafe relationships. However, those I interviewed described them being used in conjunction with a radical feminist ideology which holds a cynical, stereotypical view of men, who are all viewed as rapists or perpetrators of domestic abuse or potential rapists and perpetrators of domestic abuse.

Here are some of the things the men I interviewed told me

·       “make no mistake about it, we were left in no doubt that men are bad”

·       “I was assumed to be a serial offender; you were not allowed to say “it only happened the once” “

·       “you knew that if you didn’t agree with them, you’d be off the course; ‘off the course was code for ‘back to court’ or ‘prison’

These highly structured groups restrict participant discussion to the eight abusive behaviours on the power and control wheel and their eight non-abusive counterparts on the equality wheel. The men I interviewed told me that they were assumed to have committed harmful behaviours from each of the eight categories and thery were discouraged from saying

·       “actually, I never sexually abused my wife” or

·       “I never financially exploited my partner” or

·       “I didn’t use the children to manipulate her”

Facilitators argue that ‘the driving force of domestic abuse, the hub of the wheel of domestic abuse is power and control – not the whole range of factors mentioned in the last two episodes of this podcast dedicated to Men Being Treated Badly; or the whole range of factors which psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors all agree contribute to abusive behaviours.

Each of the interviewees had reflected on their behaviour and all of them had a complex narrative of why what happened, had happened; invariably they resolved that there were multiple personal and interpersonal factors that had contributed to their abusive behaviour rather than the single ‘power and control’ explanation, which facilitators, magistrates and judges focus on. 

At this juncture I want to say, power and control may well be part of what contributed to the abusive event or events but not in the way that radical feminists understand it to have done. In my opinion, the need for power and control is a trauma symptom; it arises when an individual is so overwhelmed that they cannot cope with one more experience, cannot process one more thing, however trivial and have the urgent need to maintain the environment precisely as it is, for fear of their psychic destruction. Such behaviour is not, in my opinion, learned or a political act of the patriarchy, it’s a psychic survival mechanism. As I always feel the need to say, I’m not excusing abuse, I’m explaining it in a different way; to my mind a more humane and compassionate way, and a way that indicates very different interventions.

Anyhow, going back to what these men told me about their experiences on the programme; they very quickly learned that any other kind of explanations for domestic abuse, would not be tolerated. When the milieu is being controlled, an individual’s autonomy becomes a threat to the group and those men I interviewed who challenged the notion, that all men are bad, denied that they had committed a particular category of abuse or offered an alternative explanation from ‘the party line’ (that’s a participant’s quote), were all told they were being

·       disruptive

·       unco-operative

·       not engaging

·       in denial

·       or making excuses

and were threatened with being removed from the group.

Robert J Lifton says 

‘intense milieu control can contribute to a dramatic change of identity’ which he calls ‘doubling’: the formation of a second self which lives side by side with the former one’ he tells us that ‘the boundary of the self is chipped away at’ and that pressure is exerted on the internal milieu, that is the participant’s inner life, to introject, in other words swallow or take on board, the external milieu, in this case, an identity and motivation that derives from, radical feminist ideology.

The research participants reported

·       “presenting what they [the facilitators] wanted to hear”

·       “showing a false self”

·       “telling others to keep their heads down, do what’s expected and don’t rock the boat”

Lifton tells us, ‘when the milieu control is lifted, elements of the earlier self may reappear; participants described being more real with each other in tea and cigarette breaks and in any contact outside of the group environment. It’s my opinion that men who wished to talk to me so passionately about their IDAP experiences, were seeking out just this opportunity, to be real and to continue the process of restoring themselves to their former identity and personality. 

Lifton describes how humans naturally ‘strive towards new information, independent judgement and self-expression’; seven out of the eight men I interviewed told me that, whatever misgivings they had about joining the IDAP programme, they had decided to make the best of the situation and had been hopeful and optimistic about learning something new about themselves and their relationships.

It’s my opinion, the control of the milieu thwarts this organismic process.

There’s still plenty more to come on this topic and I will return to it in future episodes. 

Good Guy of the week

There was a very heart-warming moment shared in the Daily Mail this week. A young male Ryanair passenger was checking his phone in the queue to board a flight from Ibiza to Stanstead. As he was checking his phone his attention was caught by a woman who was clearly distressed and overwhelmed, as Ryanair flight personnel told this mother with two children, that her bag was too big to go on as cabin luggage and that she would need to pay £50.00 for it to go into the hold. 

In a video posted by the Daily Mail you see that, as the woman begins to cry, and by this point her children are also upset and are chasing each other about the place, the young man steps forward and tells her, ‘don’t worry, I’ll pay this for you’. This young man not only paid the £50.00 oversized baggage fee, but then proceeded to talk very soothingly to the mother, telling her ‘it’s all right now, don’t worry yourself, you and the children are fine now’. The generous stranger has chosen to remain anonymous. 

Those who commented on the Daily Mail post have heaped praise on the young man and said, ‘what a legend he is’, ‘there’s hope for humanity’ and well done that man! A sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with.