Issues about working with men and women, together
Can I just say what a sheer relief it is to find some constructive dialogues giving potential alternatives to the nonsense that is “Duluth”. The late Ellen Pence did have the decency to admit in her 1999 book that she got the “power and control” thing wrong”. The trouble seems to me to be that because of the vested interests nobody in the UK wants to read and understand the implications of that!
Our experience of running mixed groups has overall been very good, although we have of course completed work with 900 plus men and only 100 plus women. With a maximum group size of 8 there are very often groups with no woman, my co-facilitator apart, but we have also had groups where there have been 3 women and 3 men. We do not, however work with couples in the same group; if both partners need to attend then they attend in separate groups.
As couple counsellors we saw no real problem with this. Our experience suggested that many of the problems faced by a female would be very similar to those faced by males, and in terms of couple relationships there is no reason not to include both gay men and lesbians in that mix although over 21 years we’ve only had two of each.
We were very relieved in 2011 to discover that Dr Louise Dixon’s paper suggested that in her opinion, based on criminological need, there was no academic reason for separate courses. However the stumbling block we saw in her prolonged format, which we manage to largely avoid in ours, was one of “two emotionally vulnerable people” being given plenty of opportunity to “get their heads together”, using the course as the alibi for where they were going. Our format is so compact that although people get to know one another very well the opportunity does not really exist to develop a relationship whilst still on the course. Outside the course those people become adults in their own right.
We could also add that by and large men also need to learn about women, and the differences, woman to woman, and also, of course, women need to learn about men, man to man. There is no better way I suggest of doing that than having them working together in considerable intimacy. So the last woman we worked with, for example, was able to give first hand experiences of having a baby by caesarian section, very important for two of thee men there.
On the subject of research we’ve found that men are by and large very willing to take part, women have been very much more reticent to talk “publicly” but are willing to talk off the record. I think that the men tend to think they’ve done something very wrong and having addressed their problems they usually feel very much better about themselves and women are not sure that they have done anything wrong and at the end they have become much more aware of the potential damage they have caused, which perhaps links up with a potential “bad mother” private image. So for a researcher in urgent need of data we could quickly find 30 men. I would have thought we should have been able to find 10 women – but as it was only two came through!
I see another group of members suggesting facilitators should be mental health trained practitioners. My reading of Dr Dan Siegel’s work suggested that mental health professionals were highly skilled in diagnosis but seemed to have had very little training in what constituted good mental health and how that might be achieved. His long overdue definitions of emotion and the mind and the role and importance of relationships look to me as if they will be a very positive contribution for the next couple of decades.
I was also delighted this morning to find Dr Tonia Nicholls’ Youtube clip.
Jan 09, 2017 @ 06:24:01
David:
Thank you for your comments. I couldn’t agree more. And I loved the You Tube video featuring Tonia Nicholls. Tonia and I edited a book on domestic violence in 2007, “Family Interventions in Domestic Violence,” and have worked on several research projects and articles.
The You Tube video is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtOsEkY_UHc
Feb 07, 2017 @ 15:41:08
Just to add a perspective on working with men and women in DV intervention groups. We have led co-ed groups for about 18 years now, usually about seven at a time and the continued outcomes and the anonymous feedback from BOTH men and the women participating in the groups has been fantastic. At the end of tx, we ask each member to comment on what it was like to have both genders in the group and results are overwhelmingly positive with participants commenting on how much they learned from this process. There are a number of benefits that seem to come with co-ed practice: 1) decreases the tendency for participants to “blame” the CJS for being “one sided” in stopping DV, 2) increases the sense of universality of DV, again resulting in increased personal responsibility and decreased shame (factors we know from other research positively correlated with good group outcomes), 3) When gender and gender roles are discussed as they are in most DV programs, it provides a much richer set of shared ideas to explore (men and women both have expectations of men’s and women’s roles and all are impacted by culture, media and family or origin), 4) Diminishes and in most cases eliminates gender bashing or same-sex collusion (negative generalizations), 5) provides greater opportunities for complex member-t0-member feedback informed by gender, etc. I am sure there are other benefits but overall it just works, particularly since we primarily use an emotional regulation model focused on skills acquisition and application. Over the last two decades, the percentage of female participants has increased to about 25-30% and we have had groups with close to a 50-50 mix and even groups with more women than men. Staffing wise, most of our groups have one masters trained counselor/social worker and typically 2-3 trained community volunteers who assist in facilitating and logistics, homework review and help, checking folks in, etc. Most of our staff and volunteers are female and like most counseling and social work agencies, that is pretty typical of the field. I too appreciated Dr. Nicholls’ presentation, particularly her point that we can work from a gendered awareness perspective without being rigid about it. Gender and power/control are important issues, but so is mental health, substance use, skills/skill deficits in emotional regulation (particularly with attachment relationships), learned behavior/habits, beliefs, etc.
Feb 09, 2017 @ 07:56:48
Hi Sam,
Thank you very much for the contact. It was great to hear of your experiences, too, and I’m delighted that your percentage of female participants is up amongst the 30%s – I would say exactly where it needs to be.
In the UK our numbers of women taking part have plummeted. We have had only about 4 in the last 2 years, 2%! Down from 10.5% in one area and 13% in another area. All female abusers are being funneled into the “Freedom Programme” for victims, a piece of ideological nonsense which obviously believes that a badly traumatised women can be best supported by telling her about 9 types of male abuser. “Ch 2, the Dominator. In Britain 112 women a year are killed by a male partner or former partner. 22 men are killed by a female partner partner or former partner. (Home Office 2007).Ch 5, “The effects of Domestic violence and abuse on children: At least 750,000 children witness domestic violence. Nearly three quarters of children live in households where domestic violence occurs. (Dept of health 2003).” Of course nowhere is it mentioned that 60 plus children per year are killed by their “parents”, making a child more than 3 times at risk than a woman! And of course the figures quoted in this piece of research that women are responsible for more child deaths than fathers and subsequent male partners combined is a long way from the light of day. http://mra-uk.co.uk/?p=1281.
I’ll write up some of our parallel experiences for UK digestion to illustrate that we are not the only people working in mixed groups. I’ll run the version past you if that’s Ok and can either link it to your org or not as you would prefer.
Feb 09, 2017 @ 03:06:31
Sam:
A few years ago, my journal, Partner Abuse, published an article from another batterer intervention program that has conducted mixed-gender groups for many years, with great success. Anyone who is interested in obtaining a pdf of the article can contact me at johnmhamel@comcast.net. The reference is: Hexam, C. (2010). Learning in the Real World: Coeducational Groups in Response to Intimate Partner Violence. Partner Abuse, Volume 1, Number 4. There are pros and cons to holding mixed-gender groups, as opposed to same-gender groups, having to do primarily with individual preferences, but there is NO research that would support current state prohibitions. The real reason why mixed-gender groups have not been allowed is the persistent belief by many victim advocates that women who are arrested for domestic violence are victims and therefore would be at risk in such groups. This belief has, of course, been proven to be false.