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Communication | Creativity | Commonsense
September’s blog spoke about the inaugural European Conference on Domestic Violence, in Belfast.
I was presenting on Strength to Change and what we can say about ‘what works’ with domestically abusive men, i.e. we can draw on strong evidence for the effective facilitation of change if we can get beyond a narrow position based on gender and power and control.
There were about 200 individual presentations at the conference, of which I could only attend a handful, but I thought it might be of interest to share some of them. so I’m going to focus on an opening input from Sylvia Walby Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She spoke on ‘The changing rate of domestic violence.”
Sylvia was arguing that the measurable rate of decline in domestic violence has stopped, versus a continuing decline in ‘general violence’. She suggested a paradox where domestic violence a is specialised and marginalised area, and prevention focuses narrowly on attitudes and the changing of abusive attitudes. Here there is a link to my own interests around effective practice, since the ‘original’ intervention programme, the Duluth model, was psycho-educational in approach, foregrounding the re-education of abusive men.
This means that it took an approach based in disease models, seeking to educate people about their symptomology, on the grounds that if you know about your diabetes (for example) you will eat better, look after yourselves etc. The corollary of this is that if I ‘educate’ you about patriarchy and your attitudes, this will prevent your domestic abuse.
I won't go into the shortfalls of that view here, so to return to Sylvia: she suggested that leading intellectuals take a stance on intimate partner violence and abuse that is very unhelpful, citing the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavovj Zizek who suggests that to focus on violence is a ‘distraction’ from the real task of fighting capitalism. She also mentioned the French philosopher Pierre Bordieau who suggests that victims are complicit in the violence against them. This reminded me of my PhD on work with violent offenders where I argued in passing against a similar point by UK playwright David Edgar that under capitalism, ‘violence is an act of solidarity with the victim’.
One can see the abstract intellectual point, but in ‘life world’ terms, no victim of a violent attack feels ‘solidarity’ with their attacker. I think the stance is rather like French intellectuals defending the Marquis de Sade as a free thinking libertarian, when actually his book 120 Days of Sodom chronicles the most appalling fantasised abuse of young men and women, purely for his (literally) sadistic pleasure.
Moving on, Sylvia discussed mainstream criminology which often sees criminal activity as arising from the frustrations of the disadvantaged against the advantaged; her point was that in domestic violence the powerful – i.e. the abuser – targets the abuse against people lower down the pecking order. There is a lot to unpack here, but her point was that gender inequality cannot be discounted, as her research showed that levels of women being killed are at their lowest in countries where there is the highest level of representation of women in legislative assemblies. This finding is obviously the tip of a very much bigger iceberg of social progress.
Fascinatingly, the presentation also explored what happens when you put back into calculations the ‘capped’ data regarding prevalence of domestic violence – capped recording does not count incidents where there are more than 5 reports or occurrences, a group that Sylvia calculates as constituting 11%.
Re-including this ‘removed’ data increases prevalence by a factor of 1.9, from over 300,000 up to over 500,000 incident.
Finally, and contradicting a previous post discussing two letters in The Guardian, concerning gender and violence against women, Sylvia argued that these figures show 45% of all violence is against women, and that the idea of men as being the prime victims of violence is false: she argued that only 25% of violent crime is male stranger to male stranger.
To conclude, Sylvia suggested that we need to move domestic violence from the margins and into the mainstream and use the kind of recording that the crime figures use, if we are to get an accurate picture.
For me, this raises some very interesting question, but still leaves us asking where the data comes from. These are crime figures, which, while they may be accurate, show a different picture to the studies looking at family conflict, where often people do not experience what happens to them as a crime, but simply part of ‘how relationships are’. So for me it isn’t a case of ‘this OR that’' but ‘both – and’: both descriptions can be true if we look at gender inclusive research and the continuum of abusive behaviour.
A parallel might be that the kind of work I advocate, person centred, therapeutically informed work founded in Motivational Interviewing, is actually mainstream in addressing in problematic behaviour everywhere else but the field of intimate partner violence and abuse – can we mainstream that respectful, strength-based stance too?
