Perpetrators of Domestic Violence

 

A new article in the blog ACE’s (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Too High  describes some new and current programs that aim to help the perpetrators of domestic violence. Not its victims, its perpetrators.

 

Help the perpetrators of domestic violence and not just its victims? Whoever heard of such a thing? How can anyone care about them? Not a popular idea to be sure.  Perpetrators are traditionally shunted to the side as worthy only of blame, shame and punishment.

However, if we want to actually decrease the incidence of domestic violence, we have to address the behavior of everyone involved. In fact, initial data shows that these programs reduce the level of recidivism among arrested wife beaters.  These healing  programs, most developed in the last decade or so, show a zero to 8 percent re-arrest rate over months or years, instead of the traditional rates of 12% to 60%. 

And the whole domestic violence situation is often a lot more complicated than it seems.

Sorry, it's not “blaming the victim” to point out that, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, it takes a victim of domestic violence on average seven times before they leave an abusive relationship for good. So not like they have nothing to do with it at all. What message does their going back give to the perpetrator? He’s usually aware that this is a puzzle: Why does she want to be with someone who treats her like that? Furthermore, why does he want to be with someone who pisses him off so much? Often abusers have themselves been victims of child abuse as children, and/or observed such things as domestic violence or drug abuse by their parents. 

Of course this does NOT excuse the violence. Abusers already know that what they have done is wrong, so any attempt by someone to excuse their behavior seems to them to be disingenuous, and therefore they would not take it seriously.  However, understanding them is a mechanism that can be employed in helping them gain control and alter dysfunctional interactions with their spouses. 

The ACE's blog article also points to the following facts to justify treating the perpetrators:

·         Many women don’t want to leave but would prefer that someone just fix        their partners; 

·         Teens who engage in dating violence often flip from abuser to being              abused; 

·         It’s becoming harder to tell who’s the primary aggressor, because both           parties stewed in the same dysfunctional soup when they were growing          up, and  the couples do as well in their current relationship.                  

·         Family violence and intimate partner violence are more accurate terms          for domestic violence because violence occurs between or among parents        and adult children, siblings, members of generations in the same family,         extended family or in gay relationships; 

·         Abuse is also emotional and financial, something for which it’s                   difficult to make an arrest.            

 

Family violence is at the root of many problems in any community: over-crowded courtrooms and jails, burgeoning child welfare caseloads, increased youth violence and gun violence, increased healthcare costs and homelessness—a significant portion of what a community spends its tax dollars.

 

Healing-centered programs require that an abuser take responsibility for the actions that lead to his or her arrest.  One of the themes of this blog is the ongoing relationship between child adversity and dysfunctional relationships. To get to the bottom of the problems of any given couple, in my opinion this absolutely must be addressed for both parties as well as for their own relationship. 

 

Although the various patterns of the intergeneration transfer of dysfunctional patterns that I describe in my blog are not well understood in the field, some people teaching healing-centered batterer interventions course are steeped in the science of childhood adversity.

 

The rest of the ACE's blog post describes more details of several of these programs throughout the country. There would probably be more of such programs, but the risk of being cancelled if you show any empathy at all towards abusers is high. That hurts the victims of domestic violence just as much as it does the perpetrators.