Batterer intervention providers, anger management counselors, mental health professionals, and research scholars dedicated to evidence-based practice worldwide.
May I start with expressing thanks to everyone for your work. Over the last five years, I have learned an immeasurable amount from this site and also personally felt supported in ways that were difficult to find elsewhere. Having said that…
This is my first post. I am hopeful that even though my inquiry feels like a stretch, especially given how much I respect the time and busy-ness of everyone here, maybe, a connection of some mutual benefit will come out of posting. I welcome suggestions, recommendations and ways to do this differently or better – thank you so much in advance.
Onto the actual substance of the matter:
In January, I’ll be starting work on my master’s thesis in the MA in Interdisciplinary Studies at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. I will be working under the supervision of Dr. Evan Hoffman and I’m now looking for a volunteer second committee member with the experience/expertise in my topic area. My thesis will likely apply qualitative methods to examine a subset of emotionally abusive people, those who want to change their behavior and are challenged by lack of understanding and resources. A brief article I published in the WashingtonPost, and short selfie video on Upworthy (which reached 2 million+ views) should shed some additional light.
Royal Roads University awards a small honorarium of $100 CAD for this service. Because this is the second committee member, I understand the commitment is much smaller than the supervisor role. If you have any possible interest or have an idea for someone who might, please reach out, or comment below. Many thanks.
I am pleased to announce that preliminary results of our recent nationwide survey of domestic violence perpetrator treatment programs (what many of us call batterer intervention programs, or BIPs), are now available on the ADVIP website. These preliminary findings were presented by myself, John Hamel, and my colleague, Clare Cannon from U.C. Davis, at the recent IVAT conference in San Diego.
Our findings are, on the whole, quite positive, and show that there is a much greater approval among providers for evidence-based practice than ever before, even among practitioners of Duluth and other gender-based approaches. There also appears to be a great deal of approval for what we, at ADVIP, are trying to do in terms of disseminating up-to-date research.
Just go to www.domesticviolenceintervention.net and click on the survey results link on the home page.
The peer-reviewed journal Partner Abuse (https://www.springerpub.com/partner-abuse.html) offers cutting-edge research on abuse between dating, married and cohabitating partners, and features articles on innovative, promising treatment programs. We are especially interested in securing clinical case studies with perpetrators, victims or both, that illustrate in greater detail how your treatment approach works with a particular individual or family. Case studies bring what might otherwise be dry information to life, helping the clinician to integrate research and intervention and better understand the treatment process
We accept case studies involving male and/or female clients in individual, group, couples or family therapy, or any combination. If you are interested in submitting a case study, please let me know. Submission guidelines are attached.
The Simmons University’s School of Nursing and Health Sciences recently sent ADVIP a link to some newish statistics on IPV, from the NISVS data. Pretty reliable. You can find this information at:
RE: Request for data to inform a meta-analytic review assessing the magnitude of the relationship between motivation and physical intimate partner violence
Dr. Matt Hammond, Fiona Dempsey, and I are conducting a meta-analysis to examine the magnitude of the relationship between self-reported physical aggression in intimate partner relationships and the motivation for this aggression. We would like to elaborate on previous reviews in this area to go beyond understanding the range of motivations associated with intimate partner violence and gain insight into the effect sizes of different motives. For example, control is theorised as being central to understanding intimate partner violence. This review will enable us to determine the magnitude of the relationship between self reported control and physical intimate partner violence compared to non-controlling motives. It is anticipated that the findings will inform the debate regarding gender differences in motivations.
We have identified a number of published studies in this area and are now seeking unpublished work from researchers in the field. We would greatly appreciate it if you could share with us any unpublished data you may have or in press/in progress research findings so that we can include your data/findings in our analysis and cite your work.
Studies which meet the following criteria will be of relevance:
Where participants are male and/ or female.
Where participants are 18+ years.
Data includes a measure of self-reported perpetration of physical assault and motivation(s) associated with use of physical aggression..
Where motivation is defined as any preceding act (e.g., physical, psychological, sexual harm) or psychological or physiological state (e.g., anger, jealousy, fear) that influences a person’s use of aggression toward their intimate partner. Motives are not personality characteristics, or risk factors for IPV (e.g., attachment styles, attitudes towards violence).
Where possible we would like to request the following data from you:
A continuous or ordinal measure of self reported physical aggression
A measure of at least one motivation for physical aggression
Demographic data for the sample (e.g., ethnicity, mean age, sex/gender identity of the participants)
Some information on the methodology used to collate the data set
Where raw data is not feasible we would like to request:
Correlations between motivations for IPV and self-reported physical assault (split by gender, if relevant)
Sample N
The research team are all based at the School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and I include our web addresses below so you can take a look at our recent profiles.
This work will form the basis of a study in Fiona’s PhD and be submitted for peer review to a relevant academic journal. If you are able to share any relevant work or have any further questions about this, we would be very grateful.
I am very pleased to announce that my contacts at Springer, publisher of the scholarly journal, Partner Abuse, have agreed to let ADVIP members download copies of one complimentary article each quarter. If you go to our website, and click on the MEMBER BENEFITS section, look for the link to the journal discounts and free articles. You will need to put in your ADVIP password, which is: evidence12. I have gone ahead and back-dated several articles, so there are actually 4 articles available to you (see below). One new article will be available each quarter the next one in January, 2019. And don’t forget about the great new podcast series, also available for free through the MEMBER BENEFITS area. The latest podcast with Sandra Stith on couples counseling, is fantastic!
COMPLIMENTARY ARTICLES
Quarterly Selections from the Peer-Reviewed Journal, Partner Abuse
FALL 2018
Vol. 9, Number 4: A phenomenological inquiry into men’s desistance from intimate partner
violence
SUMMER 2018
Vol. 9, No. 3: Patterns in controlling coercive behaviors among men mandated for batterer treatment.
SPRING 2018
Vol. 9, No. 2: Attachment security priming and domestic violence: Augmenting biopsychological treatment of perpetrators.
WINTER 2017-2018
Vol. 9, No. 1: Intimate partner perpetration: Moving toward a comprehensive conceptual framework.
I received an email requesting assistance from a researcher in Australia. I offered to post her request in hopes there are others who can provide input into program development.
“I’m currently seeking treatment providers views about the treatment needs of women who use force in intimate relationships and what constitutes best practice in this area to help inform the development of an evidence based treatment program for such women fit for the Australian context, where no programs currently exist. I would be extremely grateful if you would complete my survey. It takes approximately 15 minutes to complete and can be found at: http://surveys.utas.edu.au/index.php/513266?lang=en
Members views on the treatment needs of female perpetrators and what constitutes best practice treatment methods in this area are currently being sought.
Your valuable input will help inform the development of an intervention program for female perpetrators in Australia, where no such programs currently exist for women.
The survey takes approximately 15 minutes to complete and can be found at:
In response to research finding batterer intervention programs to be limited overall in their ability to reduce rates of recidivism, stakeholders in the field of domestic violence have been calling for more evidence-based treatment models. Meanwhile, because of the limitations of state standards, lack of information and other factors, providers are often polarized and confused. The recent literature review by Julia Babcock and colleagues on what works in batterer intervention indicates that while there are some serious conceptual flaws to gendered models of treatment, such as Duluth (including the unsupported focus on the power and control motive and patriarchy as a major risk factor for violence), outcome studies have not found CBT to always be more effective, and that certain approaches (e.g., developing a strong facilitator-client relationship) may in fact account for successful interventions regardless of the program’s stated philosophy.
Based on this common factor research, discussions with facilitators and clients from various programs, and a comparison of my own program with observations of a gender-based model in action, I have put together a training for treatment providers, with suggestions on how to reduce polarization among providers and increase treatment effectiveness. Let me know if you want to know more. Meanwhile, I highly recommend the second edition of the book, The Great Psychotherapy Debate, by B. Wampold and Z. Imel (Routledge, 2015). The book showcases a new psychotherapy meta-model, the Contextual Model, that nicely accounts for findings from recent RAC batterer intervention outcome studies on the importance of the facilitator-client relationship and the value of Motivational Interviewing.
The UK mirrors the US and Canada in a lot of the research and practice that occurs in intimate partner violence (IPV). In the current review, (that will be published in Partner Abuse next year) myself and my colleagues sought to explore what IPV perpetrator programmes were provided within the UK. This was part of the wider review being conducted and organised by John Hamel.
We sought approval through the UK National Offender Management Service and moved forward with an edited version of the questionnaire that was being used in the US. We contacted prisons, probation services, charities and other organisations we found through online searches. One of the most interesting findings from this was the reluctance of some organisations to take part. In the paper (Bates, Graham-Kevan, Bolam & Thornton, in press) there is a quote from one such organisation; on finding out about my collaborators and my previous publications they decided: “Now I know the source of the research I do not wish to respond”. This was representative of a suspicion of our motives, agenda and how we would use the data. As a consequence we had quite a low response rate, at approximately 10%, although it was comparable with colleagues in other nations.
We found that the majority of provision was still aimed at men who had abused their female partners. There were still some strong influences of the Duluth/feminist model, often mixed with some CBT approaches too. We chose to supplement our findings with a review of the current accreditation procedures to give a better picture of the current state of provision within the UK. There are two methods for gaining accreditation; the first is through the UK Criminal Justice System which had currently four accredited programmes. Each has some feminist influences and each is only appropriate for heterosexual men.
Within the UK there is a further level of accreditation that some seek to achieve, that of the feminist organisation Respect. Respect (2012) and their accreditation standard applied to “all organisations providing domestic violence prevention programs (DVPPs) working with men who use intimate partner violence (IPV), and also providing integrated safety services (ISS) for partners and ex-partners of these perpetrators” (p.1). They are a very powerful organisation within the UK and hold a lot of political sway in lobbying the Government and influencing policy (Dixon et al., 2012). Their accreditation standards are firmly grounded in the feminist model and they accredit programmes that hold men truly accountable for their violence towards women. This of course ignores the wealth of literature that details that IPV is not just a unilateral problem of men hitting women (e.g. Bates, Graham-Kevan & Archer, 2014). The research team attempted to engage with Respect through email and social media to get up to date versions of their mission statement but we received no response.
There are few evaluations of Respect accredited programmes but one particularly well-known one in the UK is Project Mirabel (Kelly & Westmarland, 2015). The authors sought to challenge previous evaluations by creating a new, methodologically rigorous version but there were significant issues including no pre-post inferential statistical analysis and a comparison of effect using all starters and the completers – so 99 vs. 52 men.
Within this review, we as a team concluded that the Duluth model is still very influential within practice in the UK. It is something that is significantly impeding practice moving forward in terms of reducing IPV offending. We call for more evidence based practice within the area and an end to the “immunity” the model seems to have from needing to answer to any external empirical evaluation (Corvo, Dutton & Chen, 2008; p.112).
Bates, E. A., Graham-Kevan, N., & Archer, J. (2014) Testing predictions from the male control theory of men’s partner violence. Aggressive Behavior, 40(1) 42-55. doi: 10.1002/ab.21499
Bates, E.A., Graham-Kevan, N., Bolam, L. T. & Thornton, A. J. V. (in press) Review of Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programs in the UK. Partner Abuse.
Corvo, K., Dutton, D. G. & Chen, W. Y. (2008) Towards evidence-based practice with domestic violence perpetrators. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, 16 (2), 111-130. doi: 10.1080/10926770801921246
Dixon, L., Archer, J. & Graham-Kevan, N. (2012) Perpetrator programs for partner violence: Are they based on ideology or evidence? Legal and Criminological Psychology, 17, 196-215. doi: 0.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02029.x
Kelly, L. & Westmarland, N. (2015) Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes: Steps Towards Change. Project Mirabal Final Report. London and Durham: London Metropolitan University and Durham University
Pence, E. & Paymar, M. (1993) Education groups for men who batter: The Duluth Model. New York, US: Springer Publishing