Episode eleven of the second season of the Podcast on Crimes Against Women continues our domestic violence series with Dr. Scott Hampton, Director of Ending the Violence. In this episode, Dr. Hampton delves into his work on BIPP (Battering Intervention and Protection Programs). Dr. Hampton explains what attracted him to work with offenders of domestic violence, how he focuses on offenders taking accountability for their actions, and why it can also be important to learn about the offender despite the survivor being the individual forced to live through the trauma. Dr. Hampton then explores the mindsets of offenders, why they are violent toward women, and the differences in the mindsets of offenders of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and human trafficking. Finally, Dr. Hampton describes his work with Ending the Violence, the expectations of BIPP, and what are the limitations of what BIPP is able to accomplish.
Episode eleven of the second season of the Podcast on Crimes Against Women continues our domestic violence series with Dr. Scott Hampton, Director of Ending the Violence. In this episode, Dr. Hampton delves into his work on BIPP (Battering Intervention and Protection Programs). Dr. Hampton explains what attracted him to work with offenders of domestic violence, how he focuses on offenders taking accountability for their actions, and why it can also be important to learn about the offender despite the survivor being the individual forced to live through the trauma. Dr. Hampton then explores the mindsets of offenders, why they are violent toward women, and the differences in the mindsets of offenders of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and human trafficking. Finally, Dr. Hampton describes his work with Ending the Violence, the expectations of BIPP, and what are the limitations of what BIPP is able to accomplish.
Maria McMullen: The subject matter of this podcast will address difficult topics, multiple forms of violence, and identity-based discrimination and harassment. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult and have listed specific content warnings in each episode description to help create a positive safe experience for all listeners.
Woman: In this country, 31 million crimes, 31 million crimes are reported every year. That is one every second. Out of that, every 24 minutes, there is a murder; every five minutes, there is a rape; every 2 to 5 minutes, there is a sexual assault; every nine seconds in this country, a woman is assaulted by someone who told her that he loved her, by someone who told her it was her fault, by someone who tries to tell the rest of us, it's none of our business. And I am proud to stand here today with each of you to call that perpetrator a liar.
Maria McMullen: Welcome to the podcast on crimes against women. I'm Maria McMullen. Battering Intervention and Prevention Programs, or BIPP, as they are most often known, have existed for decades in the United States as a tool to rehabilitate domestic violence offenders, but are they effective? And to that point, what are the causes for offender behaviors that these programs address?
Many experts argue that offenders can never truly be cured of their abusive behaviors or desire for power and control and encourage a focus on survivors, their rights, and their healing. Today, we explore the spectrum of offender rehabilitation with a 30-year veteran in the field to gain an understanding of the process of change for men who abuse women.
Joining the conversation is Dr. Scott Hampton, Director of Ending the Violence, a Dover, New Hampshire-based organization that provides educational classes to the perpetrators of domestic violence and sexual violence, and Project Coordinator for Stratford County New Hampshire Supervised Visitation Center. Dr. Hampton is a past president of the National Supervised Visitation Network, a peer reviewer for the United States Department of Justice, and has been serving on New Hampshire's Domestic Violence Fatality Review Committee since its inception in the late 1990s. A writer, consultant, and public speaker, Dr. Hampton has dedicated his career to the issues related to interpersonal violence. Dr. Hampton, welcome to the show.
Dr. Scott Hampton: Thank you. I appreciate being here.
Maria: In our work to heal the trauma of domestic violence and other crimes against women, experts most often guide us to focus on the survivors, yet your work is focused on offenders and accountability for their actions. Why is it important for us to learn about the offender when it's the survivor who is the one who suffers and deals with the trauma?
Dr. Hampton: That's a great place to start. The work with survivors is absolutely critical, but this work is not mutually exclusive. So we think about - if I were to only focus on the work with survivors, it would be like trying to cure the common cold with a better box of Kleenex. I mean, Kleenex is good but it just mops up the mess. So, the way I look at it is that there's only one person who's responsible for the abuse and that would be the abuser. The victim never causes it and the victim can't cure it and our work with victims can never cure the abuse either. It's just all of our responsibility to make sure that the abuser gets that message. And that's part of the work that I do.
Maria: Tell us about your work at the organization, Ending the Violence.
Dr. Hampton: Yeah, I started that organization back in 2000. There are several things that we do. The main focus of the work is providing batterers intervention services for offenders both in the community and at the county jail. We also do training and consultation for a wide variety of professionals so we trained medical doctors, teachers, attorneys, judges, child protective workers, and psychologists, and we also provide court testimony to help fact-finder such as judges and juries understand better the dynamics of domestic and sexual violence. And the last thing we do is we do a little bit of research and writing.
Maria: So what attracted you to this work and to work with offenders?
Dr. Hampton: Huh. I have to go back a little ways for that one to the time that I first intervened with an abuser, and that was actually 60 years ago. Yeah, 6-0. That was before there were domestic violence shelters or domestic violence legislation. I didn't even have an office so I had to do home-based work. So, at the time, the abuser was in the process of assaulting a spouse, so I stepped in the middle to suggest that he stopped, his response resulted in my ending up at the bottom of the staircase. So to say the least, my intervention was less than effective. But that makes sense since most four-year-old boys are unable to wield significant influence over their fathers decisions.
So, at that point, I decided to hold off in my career plans of working with offenders until I was a little bit older, a little taller, and had a chance to get some training. So the short answer is that that work means something to me, and specifically, I can't think of anything that's more important in our lives than our relationships, but they need to be healthy and safe. So, that's pretty much what I've been focusing on personally and professionally for about 30 years now.
Maria: Thank you for sharing your personal story a little bit with us. I think that does bring a lot of meaning and context to the work. I'd like to explore the mindset of the offender - who is he and why is he violent towards women?
Dr. Hampton: Okay. First, I think it's helpful to make a distinction about how we think about the work. I draw a distinction between violence and abuse and violence is what you do. That's the hitting, kicking, pushing, stabbing, and shooting; abuse is the intent and the impact. So when I look at the work, our work is about abuse, not about violence because you can be violent without being abusive. So, for instance, in self-defense, and similarly, you can be abusive without being violent, which means, I could be psychologically or emotionally coercive without ever using any physical tactics. So, this is an important distinction because, in some cases, victims actually will use more violence than the perpetrator but they're doing it self-defensively, they're doing it to resist the abuse that's being perpetrated against them, and for us to view them as violent offenders would totally miss the point.
But what's going on for the mindset of the offender? Probably helpful to start off with what the problem is not. It's not because they have an anger management problem. It's not because they have a substance abuse problem and can't control themselves when they're drunk. It's not because they have communication skills deficits or difficulties managing stress. These are all excuses and we could probably devote several podcast to debunking those mess. But just for illustration, I'll pick one of them.
I had a man in my group once who explained it perfectly. What he said was, "I used to believe that I only hit my wife because I was drunk. Now, I realize that I drank so I could hit her." It was a powerful statement.
Maria: It really is.
Dr. Hampton: So the guys in the group had this sort of glaze look over and then they involuntarily started to nod because it made sense to them. And what he came to realize was that alcohol does not have an agenda. Dr. Smirnoff is not a misogynistic beverage, Jim Beam does not tell you to hit your wife. We don't do things when we're drunk that we don't at least want to do when we're sober. So, for example, no one worries about drinking in the kitchen for fear that they might accidentally pick up a fork and skewer their eyeball. You know why? Well, because they would never want to do that when they're sober.
Maria: Right.
Dr. Hampton: So, men don't abuse their wives when they're drunk or when they do that when they're drunk, they already have the idea when they're sober. So, alcohol is not the problem, the problem is their desire to do something abusive and that's what we would address in the program.
So what is the problem? What is the abuser's mindset if it isn't about all of these other excuses? In a word, it's about control. Now, you'll hear there's a phrase that gets tossed around quite a bit. They say it's all about power and control, power and control, but no one ever unpacks that to suggest what it really means. When we look at it, it's really about the abuse of power and the attempt to control another person. Abusers typically feel out of control in their own lives and then they compensate by exerting control over other people, commonly, their intimate partners and their other family members. It's also probably important to point out that the agenda is not to hurt or to cause physical pain or suffering. Some people think, well, domestic violence is all about the violent act - it's actually about control.
So I asked a group of men once which tactic, out of the 16 or so that we talked about in group, which tactic they'd be willing to give up. And most of the time, over 70% of the time, they said physical violence. And I thought that was interesting. I said, "Why would you give up something that has been so effective for you?" And they said, "Well, it's not effective, because when I'm physically violent, that's what leaves evidence. That's what gets me caught. That interferes with my ability to control my partner, and most of the time, I can control her with maybe the threat of violence, but using the other tactics."
Maria: That's incredible. I'm just sitting here trying to take everything that you shared and I appreciate the breakdown of the difference between violence versus abuse and the distinction of what power and control really is. Interested to know if there are differences in this mindset for, let's say, domestic violence offenders versus those who commit sexual assault or human trafficking.
Dr. Hampton: Okay. That's an easy question. The answer is no, but I will offer a little explanation. First of all, they're not mutually exclusive. We talked about batterers, we talk about sex offenders, we talk about stalkers, and traffickers as if these are distinct groups of people. Often, they're the same people. For instance, we have batterers who sexually assault their partners as one of their tactics. We used to have a law in every state of the country, it was called the Marital Rape Exemption which men could not be prosecuted for raping their wives, well, why? Well, because as soon as she said "I do," it meant, "I will." And so consent was implied. So sexual offending is a part of many batterers' repertoire. So batterers will sexually assault their partners, sometimes their children; sex offenders will batter their non-offending parent as a way of avoiding detection and keeping them silent about the sexual abuse; both batterers and sex offenders will stalk their victims and we have batterers who have been known to pimp out their partners for financial gain.
So, there's all these crossovers from all these different issues. The similarities between them are much more significant than the differences. The similarities are the objectification of the victims, their depersonalization of them, and viewing them through some kind of functional lens. So batterers, for instance, think that they own their partners, sex offenders view their targets as disposable sexual objects, and traffickers view their victims as commodities. They all focus disproportionately on their own desires and then tend to disregard the wants and needs and welfare of others. So they all need to learn more about interpersonal respect, particularly respecting boundaries.
Maria: Okay. So, we've got a glimpse now into the mindset of these offenders. Let's talk about the programs that focus on their rehabilitation. What is a Battering Intervention and Protection Program and who is this type of program effective for?
Dr. Hampton: Okay, big question. A batterer's program is a program that provides education about how to lead a non-abusive lifestyle. It's one component of a larger... what Ed Gondolf referred to in a book that he wrote by this name, it's called Battering Intervention Systems and the focus on the book was that batterer's programs are one component of that system, but there are many other components. There are the courts and probation and parole and child protective services and victim advocacy. And so, batterers' programs in and of themselves will never stop battering. In fact, one criticism I heard once, someone said, batterers' programs make better batterers, or they can.
So, someone can come into my group and listen to the stories of the other men and pick up tips on how to be coercive and controlling outside of group. The problem is you teach someone how to use a hammer, they might go out and build a house or they might go out and smash a car window. So, the same tool, same instruction and how to use it, different agenda. So what a batterers' program can do is they can provide education, they can also educate the courts and survivors about what a program can't do. There are certain things that we don't have the ability, like, I can't predict or control someone's behavior once he leaves my classroom. But we can also assist probation and the courts and monitor offenders. So, it's another set of eyes in the community so we can help for the period of time that they're in a program to keep them on track and let them know whether they're in compliance with their court orders.
When we run a program in a group setting, which is pretty much the standard, it also provides an opportunity to develop a counterculture. And what I mean by that is I often refer to our group as the hour and a half a week when someone comes in to learn about non-abusive attitudes and behaviors, and then for the next hundred and sixty six and a half hours, they go back to the locker room and get all the other kinds of messages. So we have the small opportunity to have a group of men who discuss what it would be like to define masculinity differently. How can I be a different kind of father, a different kind of husband, a different kind of neighbor, a different kind of man that gets his needs met in ways that don't cause problems for himself or other people? So it's largely an educational piece.
The one thing that I think is important to point out about batterers' programs is that sometimes we expect too much of them. We say, "If I send them to your program, will that stop his battering?" For me, the analogy that works best is that of going to your primary care physician for your annual physical. When you go to that appointment, a number of things happen - there's an exchange of information, the doctor wants to get a history, does a physical exam, ask a bunch of questions about lifestyle choices, draws blood to check those levels, collects that information, finds out what your complaints are, and then disseminates information. Well, here's some suggestions about cutting down on your smoking and drinking and eating fewer cheeseburgers every week. And here's a referral to a physical therapist, and here's a script for some medication.
What the physician is unable to do is predict or control whether or not the patient is going to follow through with any of the recommendations. The other thing that that appointment doesn't do is it doesn't cure disease. So we say, well, how much healthier is someone after going to that annual visit? And the answer is probably not at all. That doesn't mean it's not important. It's the same thing with batterers' programs - they come in, we exchange information, we do a little risk management, we make referrals to other services, we communicate with the courts, and we have absolutely no ability to predict or control what they'll do once they leave the room. That doesn't mean that participation in the program isn't worthwhile because we can't prove that it's effective, it just means that it was never designed to do that. It was never designed to do everything. It's the community that insist the abuse stops, not the batterers' program.
Maria: Okay. Those are really great distinctions for us to understand, so it does not cure the problem but it's kind of a step in the direction toward the possibility for prevention. Is that accurate?
Dr. Hampton: Yeah. I think it is part of prevention and it is part of the intervention. It is probably one of the few places, unfortunately, where someone will come in after maybe decades of harboring misogynistic racist homophobic attitudes and lifestyle choices to hear about alternatives. What's a different way that I can view relationships? What's a different way that I can participate? What are boundaries all about? So we provide absolutely essential information but what they do with that information is beyond the scope of what a program can guarantee or predict.
Maria: So, how do most offenders come into a BIPP program? Is it something that's recommended to them or ordered for them to do? Is it self-motivated?
Dr. Hampton: Great questions. It used to be, like I said, I've been doing this for about 30 years and it used to be that all of our referrals came from the court system, either through probation and parole or directly through the courts. Maybe a few would come through Child Protective Services. What I've noticed over time though is currently, I would say probably 80% of my people come through that route, and 20% I classify as otherwise referred. You notice, I didn't say voluntary. What will happen sometimes, sometimes a guy will come in and say, "I'm not court-ordered, but my wife said that if I don't go in your program, she's going to leave me." Well, I refer to that as socially mandated. So, he's there not because he wants to change, he's there because it'll serve some purpose for him even if he has no interest in changing whatsoever.
But I've also noticed over the last, maybe ten years, that I'm getting more people coming in who know someone who is in the program. Maybe two people work together over at a company, one guy is referred to our program by the courts and a friend of his hears him talking about the discussion we had in group about discipline strategies with your children. And he says, wow, I could really use that, I haven't been arrested, never met a police officer not mandated to do anything but I could benefit from that conversation. I'll get the call. He'll say, can I be part of it? I'll say absolutely.
One of the powerful piece about that is that our experience used to be, guys would come into the group and they'd say, "Well, none of us would be here if it wasn't for the courts and it wasn't for our wives bitching about something." And now we have guys who say, "Well, no, that's not true for me. I'm here because I want to be a better man. I'm here because I want to learn about what it should mean to be a father," and that kind of challenge in the group is that part of that counterculture I was talking about. They're going to take the messages from other men in the group much more seriously than for me, who's theoretically paid to do this work.
Maria: Let me just make sure I understand this. So, some of the people who enter a BIPP program, have never been an offender. They're just coming in to learn about strategies.
Dr. Hampton: Maybe. Some of them have never been identified as an offender, some of them may have done abusive or controlling things and he never identified it, she never identified it, no one ever called the police. Sometimes we say, "Well, this is my first offense." Well, maybe, or maybe it was the first time you got caught, so we don't know about the distinction. But I think you're right. I think we do have some people who are concerned about crossing the line, they're concerned about the effect they're having on other people. I've had some people come in and say, "I don't have children yet and I'm worried that I'll become like my dad and what my dad did was pretty scary. I don't want to do that." So they don't have the opportunity to be an abusive father yet and they're looking for some prevention. We are starting to see some of that, which to me suggests that the change is starting to occur in a more community-wide basis, rather than an individual, "He's a batterer, go fix him," approach.
Maria: Wow, that's interesting. Beyond the BIPP program, what are some other alternatives for offender rehabilitation or even the community education of men who want to be better parents and better partners?
Dr. Hampton: Yeah. A lot has popped up over the last 10, 15 years, or so, there certainly have the batterer's intervention programs and in addition to that, there are programs if we were just talking about parenting, there are programs that are called Fathering After Violence programs or Responsible Fatherhood, or in Canada, there's one called Caring Dads, and what these programs do is they say, we're going to narrow our focus to how to be a non-abusive dad. Maybe not the full range of what a Batterers Intervention Program does but narrowly focuses on that particular role in their life.
There was a suggestion, I don't think this exist yet, but one of the judges that I've worked with in New Hampshire, Judge Susan Carbon, who years ago was the Director of Office on Violence Against Women in Washington for a couple years. She had a wonderful suggestion, she said, there are these programs for parents who are getting divorced that for our programs that parents need to go through to become sensitive to the impact on their kids have going through divorce and those are very helpful. She said, we should do something analogous with teenagers and what that would be is to have a healthy relationship primer just 4, 6, 8 hours. This is what boundaries are like, this is what consent is all about, this is about how to treat people in a healthy relationship, and have that connected to getting a driver's license. I thought that was wonderful.
Maria: That is brilliant.
Dr. Hampton: It is. It was like, how many teenagers don't want a driver's license? So if all they have to do is go to a 4, 6, or 8-hour class in order to have access to a driver's license, they'll all sign up. And what better time to intervene right at the beginning of when people are developing these romantic relationship.
Maria: Absolutely. Is that a program that was implemented?
Dr. Hampton: No. We were just having a conversation about how do we expand this work, and she just came up with this idea and, sort of, bouncing around. But thank you for the reminder, I should probably be giving her a call to see...
Maria: Yeah. Go for it.
Dr. Hampton: Absolutely. There's a program called Coaching Boys Into Men, so it's looking more so in the athletic arena, there are a number of organizations that is really just focused on redefining manhood. So, back in the 1980s, early 90s, Paul Cavell, it was part of the Oakland Men's Project and he came up with this concept called Act Like a Man Box and there's also Act Like a Lady Box and the idea is, how does society tell us, what do we demand them? That men have to act like to prove their masculinity and which of those are healthy, which of those are unhealthy? And other organizations have picked this up and run with it.
So, Ted Bunch and Tony Porter, in an organization called Call To Men, have picked this up and they use the concept of The Man Box. So there's a lot of work going out there about how do we invite men to do this work before they get involved in the criminal justice system? Because in some ways, if they're involved in the criminal justice system, what that means is our community has failed. We have failed these boys, we have failed these men. It's too late in some ways and we're just doing repair work. Much better if we can start to instill some of these beliefs early on in their lives.
Maria: I completely agree on that. But I have to back up for a minute - what is a man box? I don't understand that.
Dr. Hampton: Okay. So the idea was that there's this box that has inside of it and men can feel trapped inside of this box. Just like if there's a lady box, women would be trapped inside of that. And these are the expectations. Well, what does it mean to be a man? Does it mean that you're violent? Does that mean that you can drink the next guy under the table? Does it mean that you prove how good you are by proving how much better you are than someone else? And real men don't show feelings. So all these messages that trap men inside this box, that limit who we are as human beings, and send us down a path of destruction sometimes.
There's a man, Chris Kilmartin, who did a video called Crimes Against Nature, and what he was talking about is that a lot of the things that our conception of masculinity demand from men are really crimes against nature. So they tell men they should be able to drink a lot and smoke a lot and surf on trains and go bare-chested a 10-degree weather in a football game to prove that their men. And what happens is we, men, die seven years earlier than women do to a large extent because of all the destructive things we do trying to prove that we are "real men".
So the man box is where men get trapped inside of this destructive masculinity or some people refer to as toxic masculinity and the work that a lot of us try to engage in, whether it's in a Batterers Intervention Program or talking with grade school kids about boundaries and respect, the work we're trying to do is to open up that box and say - just because you're a man doesn't mean there are things that you're not allowed to do, and just because you're a woman, doesn't mean there are things that you're forced to do. And we want to expand that so that all of us can develop a much healthier sense of self and participation in relationships.
Maria: Oh, thank you for explaining that, that actually is a really interesting idea and another good insight that you provided. You have so many of them. So, let's switch a little bit to talk about survivors and when we work with survivors, many programs are developed to be culturally sensitive to meet their unique needs and backgrounds. Is this also true of BIPP programs or do these programs fit more of a one-size-fits-all approach?
Dr. Hampton: Yeah. Ideally, we would be matching the programs with the communities that we serve. So when you're in a large urban area, you have greater opportunities to do a good job of matching the people providing the service with the people they're serving. So, if I were as a Caucasian male were to work with a group of entirely African-American men, would they just immediately discount my credibility and they probably should. Or what if I, as a heterosexual male, were to work with people who are in same-sex relationships, do I really understand their experience? Or, what if as someone who is a US citizen, I work with a group of immigrants who may or may not have varying levels of immigration status. So ideally we would match those up.
Now, the reality is that in some communities, there just isn't a critical mass of people, there aren't enough people to form a group. And so, we end up mixing and matching, we have to be fairly creative in how we find ways to connect with their experience. So, it's definitely a challenge. And in terms of the one-size-fits-all, we definitely have people who have varying degrees of work to do? So we may have someone who, generally speaking, is fairly respectful in relationships and has made a couple of bad decisions, but doesn't have the sort of lifelong entrenched set of attitudes they need to be dealt with. We have other people who have been arrested 20, 30 40 times, spent most of their life in prison. Very different experiences for them. Which is one of the reasons we also do programming inside the jails.
But, yes, it's difficult to have people with varying backgrounds all in the same group. The advantage to that, though, is that then provides a representative sample of what our community at large is like. The danger of everyone being exactly the same in the group is that we develop sort of a group think, and we lose an appreciation for diversity. So I think it can go both ways. One of the things that a lot of groups will do is to make sure that they have both a male and female co-leadership in the team, which I think is a very helpful approach so that the male and female co-leaders can model for the group members what healthy relationships are like.
When I first started doing the work and open up my own practice, I worked with some interns. I had a female intern from the local university and a real challenge for us was to make sure that, I mean, an intern typically takes their lead from the group leader and so there was this power differential and I didn't want to send the message, here is some man telling a woman what to do. All that would do is reinforce the power imbalance at home. So we had to be very deliberate in terms of how we would distribute responsibilities in group so that they couldn't quite get a fix on that.
So those questions about is it one-size-fits-all? How do we organize these groups? That's something that we constantly struggle with and try and find the most effective ways of doing the work.
Maria: Yeah, it sounds really evolved and trying to be responsive to the needs of many different people in a variety of situations. What are the responses or reactions from survivors to BIPP or offender accountability programs?
Dr. Hampton: We get a variety of responses, some of it is anecdotal. There have been some surveys. I think recently the state of Maine sent out a survey to partners of people in the program. There were several observations that were made. One was that for those survivors whose partners had not yet attended a program, they were going through the legal process and that was a possibility, they were hopeful. Their thought was, okay, he's going to go into a program in Maine. It's a 48-session format so it takes almost a year to go through. They were hopeful for some change. For those survivors whose partners had completed the program, they reported feeling safer, overall, physically safer, and they reported on average having more agency in their life. In other words, they felt like their ability to make independent decisions and have less course of control, they felt like they had more of a voice in the relationship.
For those survivors whose partners dropped out of the program, in other words, they would start the program and would go part way through and then we drop out on their own, they either felt the same as they did before the program started or felt somewhat less safe. For those survivors whose partners were expelled from the program, these were people who weren't following the rules, weren't doing the homework, weren't paying the fee, or some problem they were having, or just weren't participating, those survivors said they felt less safe. And that seemed to be a risk factor. These people weren't willing to do what the providers ask them to do. It felt as though the guardrails were falling away and that they were becoming riskier at home.
So there's been a range of reactions. I've had survivors call me and say things like, "I'm really glad he was in your program. I don't feel like I have to sleep with one eye open as much anymore," or, "I feel like he does a better job of listening to my concerns and doesn't just immediately dismiss me. I feel like I can participate more actively in the decision-making in the family. I don't feel like I'm less of a person in his eyes." But I also get comments on the other side where they'll say, this goes into sometimes batterers programs make better batterers, and they'll say, "I need you to know something. I'm sure he tells you exactly what you want to hear in group, however, when he comes home, he's an entirely different person. And so he hasn't made changes. And I feel like he's just pulling one over on the system."
We have what our people refer to as group members who know how to do group because people ask me, well, how successful is your group and can you tell when some guy is doing a great job? And the problem is we have people who learn what it is that they think I expect. So they will ask questions. They'll be involved. They'll do all the homework assignments and they will struggle just enough because they figure if I don't struggle at all, they think I'm hiding something, so I'll struggle a little bit. I'll ask some questions and I'll say, "Oh, I really need some help with this," and they will later on, admit to someone that they were doing that as a manipulation.
So it's really hard for us to tell what the success is like but I really like your question about what do survivors think? Because, ultimately, those are our clients, the people that I'm serving more than anyone else are the people at home, secondarily, I'm serving the people who come into my group. And if I'm not held accountable to the welfare of survivors, I should close up shop and go raise gerbils for a living.
Maria: Well, I kind of agree with that because it sounds like just, in a summary, there are varying degrees of safety reported by survivors both during the program and post-program but is the long-term effectiveness of the program being measured? And is that data reported somewhere?
Dr. Hampton: Yeah. In some ways, this goes back to that analogy of the annual visit to the doctor. When we try to measure effectiveness, first of all, it's hard to separate out if someone changes, are they changing because they came to the batterer's program? Are they changing because they got arrested? Are they changing because of how seriously our community takes this whole issue? It's hard to know. The one statistic that researchers typically collect to determine success is recidivism which is a horribly misleading statistic. It's almost meaningless because what recidivism tells you is, did this person get re-arrested? Well, let's assume he doesn't get re-arrested, what does that mean? Does that mean that he stopped being abusive? Or does that mean that he's more abusive to the point where he has sufficiently intimidated this partner so that she wouldn't dare call the police again?
Well, that shows up in the same column on the sheet, one is a tremendous success for her, and one is a tremendous success for him. One means he's less abusive, one means it's more. Recidivism by itself is a meaningless statistic. We collect it because it's easy. Did you get arrested? Yes or no. So, all a program can determine is compliance - does the guy show up to the group? Does he pay his fee? Have there been any problems in the group? But what we need to do is we need to ask the people who have the information. "I have 100% success in my program. No one has ever been abusive while he's sitting in my room." Who cares, right? That's not why he was sent to my program. We aren't sent there to learn how to sit in a group of men and not do something nasty. The moment he walks out the door is the moment I lose my ability to assess progress but that's what's important. So we need to talk to people who have boots on the ground. We need to primarily talk to the survivor - is your life improved?
We need to talk to child protective social workers to take visits in the home, probation officers, and school teachers. So we need to be interviewing the people who actually get to see what's happening out there but again, this isn't really a measure of how effective the batterer's program is, it's a measure of how effective the community is at insisting that the abuse stops. All it takes is one person to sing out-of-key to ruin the entire choir. There was a police officer, for instance, in Detroit, Michigan, who arrested a man for violating a protective order and while he was arresting him, while he was putting the cuffs on, he said, "You know, I bet if I hit my wife, she would act right, too." That's the police officer telling the guy he's arresting. Think about the mixed message.
Maria: Yeah. That's very clear. The very clear message of what the attitudes are. So to the point of effectiveness of BIPP programs, the increase in violence, just using the United States as an example, one in three women experience domestic violence in her lifetime and that number continues to grow and the COVID pandemic has really put an unfortunate spotlight on the rising incidents of domestic violence. In fact, in just the past, I believe it was two weeks here in Dallas, there were five domestic violence homicides that occurred. So I have to wonder then if BIPP programs if you have 100% compliance in the classroom, there's definitely something that's not being translated when they go back home or back out into the community. So, to those points then, and talking about alternatives as well as the impact of COVID, how was your work responding to potentially a lack of effectiveness of the BIPP program and an increase in violence due to the pandemic?
Dr. Hampton: Yeah. When the pandemic showed up, it changed a lot of things, and one of the things we did notice was there was a spike in the incidents of domestic violence. The instance of crime, in general, went down so people weren't knocking off 7-Elevens as much because people were staying at home and there wasn't as much movement around the community. But the flip side was that there wasn't much movement around the community so abusers had more access to their victims. For example, I had one guy tell me, this was back probably in April and he said, "What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell my partner that I've been exposed to someone with COVID and then she'll have to stay at home with me for 14 days to quarantine." He says, "So, now, I can keep her home and I can blame it on the CDC recommendation, rather than any control issue she accuses me of having. Pretty cool, huh?"
So, they're picking up on these opportunities but this is always true. Abusers are always looking for cracks in the system. They're always looking for someone who doesn't take it seriously. They're always looking for that police officer who makes an inappropriate comment. And so, what this comes back to again is, is the batterer's program effective? But some people say batterers programs are most effective in communities that don't need them. I love that statement because what it says is the real work is done once he leaves the room. The real work is when the community says, okay, you learn something, now we're going to insist that you apply this in the right direction.
Maria: I guess I'm just kind of a little taken back by the idea that Batterers Intervention and Prevention Programs continue on and yet the effectiveness is not fully being measured or realized and we continue to see increases in domestic violence and manipulation and ways to use things like a pandemic to further manipulate women and their children. What else can be done or is being done to help eradicate this behavior?
Dr. Hampton: I think that part is coming back to the discussion we had about those alternatives to Batterer's Intervention Programs.
Maria: I just feel so frustrated that there aren't enough results that can happen from this program. So what else is there?
Dr. Hampton: I think it's about changing our expectations about what a particular program or particular intervention can accomplish. I know that in some ways this leads to, how do we rethink what domestic abuse is all about. When the pandemic arrived and we started noticing the increase in incidents of domestic violence, one of the things that it encouraged all of us to do is to think about the nature of domestic abuse, which itself is a pandemic, and we thought, okay, what can we learn from the pandemic and how we're approaching the pandemic? So, with COVID, we had a variety of strategies. Well, one of the things that we know is that anyone can be infected by this. First, we thought it was just the elderly and we thought it was people with pre-existing conditions. Then we started noticing younger people getting it. Then we started noticing specific things with children. And, over time, we realized anyone can be infected, anyone can pass this along.
Well, what if we applied that concept to domestic abuse? We now start to realize, this isn't about - there's a group of men who are batterers and a group of men who are not batterers. No. Anyone can be infected by this. Anyone can become abusive. But both abusive attitudes and respectful attitudes are highly contagious. So, we look at some of the other concepts of the pandemic and see how those can guide us.
What about the concept of what it means to immunize someone? Well, with medical viruses, we start immunizing kids at a very young age. We do it with measles and we do it with the flu and we immunize them when they're young, and then we give them booster shots very frequently. We'll do the same thing with domestic abuse. We have to start delivering messages when they're very, very young, do it through grade school, middle school, and high school, and we keep sending these appropriate messages to offset what's going on in that locker room. Herd immunity, I think, is a wonderful concept.
For medical viruses, herd immunity says if we have about 70, 80 85 percent of people who are immunized, then it's difficult for the virus to pass from one person to someone else. Well, imagine we apply the same concept with regard to misogynistic or racist attitudes and jokes. I tell a joke to five people, four of whom find it very funny and that fifth person watches everyone laugh, they all feel good, and chances are people are going to go spread those attitudes throughout their lives. On the other hand, if four out of five people find it offensive, then that one person who finds it funny, realizing that I was confronted, I was challenged, and I was told it wasn't funny is less likely to pass that attitude on to other people because it's not going to get him what he wants.
If we can view domestic abuse through a social contagion model and address it on that level and realize it's not about individual pathology, but it's about community standards, it's about how our community wants people to be treated, I think we'll have far more success.
Maria: That's an interesting approach and something that I think just shows us that the work really needs to continue and we have so far to go to eradicating violence against women and finding programs for men for intervention and prevention that really are truly effective. Is the offender able to be fully rehabilitated and have healthy relationships with women and his children?
Dr. Hampton: Yes. So, a couple of things I would say: abuse is a choice which leads to probably both good news and bad news. I'll give you the bad news first. The bad news is that you can't cure choice so the risk is always there just like an alcoholic can stop drinking for ten years and then pick up any time they make a decision to pick up. There's no guarantee. The good news is that abuse is a choice, which means they can choose to lead a non-abusive lifestyle whenever they want to, and our job is to help them do that. So a batterer's program can provide the tools and the perspective, and the strategies for being non-abusive.
Do we hear cases where someone gives up abusive strategies? Absolutely. We do hear those.
Maria: Before I let you go, I need to ask you, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Dr. Hampton: The best piece of advice I've ever received was to not feel like I know what the answer is to the problem, but always be curious to listen to people's experiences whether it's with victims, what do you really need our system to do? But also even listening to offenders, what is it you're trying to accomplish? What do you need? When I listen more than I think that I know... I like to learn, I don't like to assume that I know something and that's been very helpful to keep me open to improving the work that I do.
Maria: I'm with you on that. Describe your job in three words.
Dr. Hampton: Huh.
Maria: Is that one of them?
Dr. Hampton: Promoting healthy relationships.
Maria: That's beautiful. Dr. Scott Hampton, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Dr. Hampton: Thank you.
Maria: The re-education of offenders is an ongoing conversation from which new models of prevention and intervention are emerging. It is encouraging to know that this priority is evolving. But as one researcher put it, we can have an impact but it's still a generational process. This problem is so long-standing, so entrenched, so historical. To think that one agency has the power to end that violence is ludicrous and domestic violence will likely stick around until society can figure out how to rid itself of male entitlement. Still, other researchers argued that abuse is a social issue, that for millennia, men had been taught that it was their right to control women by force if necessary.
Domestic violence was the means by which a man exercise this power on an interpersonal level. Far from a dysfunction, it was a rational tactic, a tool for patriarchy. Yet men had grown so used to the system into which they'd been socialized since birth, that they never thought to question its correctness.
There may not be one right answer to either the root causes of offender behavior or the best approach for intervention and prevention but as we keep the conversation going, we learn the roots of the behavior are as deep and prevalent as the behavior itself, and our work continues. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe.
Interested in learning more about the topics you've heard on this podcast, visit www.conferencecaw.org for details about the 2021 virtual conference and other upcoming training opportunities and be sure to follow us on social media @nationalccaw.
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