The Goal of Intervention with
Men Who Batter their Partners

The existence of batterer intervention programs (BIP’s) is controversial for at least three reasons; their use of scarce resources, they can be an easy out for men who batter, and they pose a potential for increased risk to victims. To be responsive to the risks inherent in such programs we must be very careful about the implicit and explicit goals of such programs. This article reviews the history of the development of the articulation of the goals and suggests that a prudent and responsible goal for BIP’s is to “train men in the advantages of and the techniques for being accountable.” Further, this article suggests a framework for what is meant and not meant by accountability

When RAVEN was organized in the late ‘70's, it was clear to the men who started it that they didn’t know how best to intervene in men’s violence against women, but that as men, they had an inherent responsibility to confront the violence that both created and supported the power and privilege that all men enjoy. At the very least, it was their wish to do no harm, and their clear intention was to learn about men’s violence so that they could act in ways that would deter it.

Shortly after this author joined the RAVEN staff, I was privileged to attend a conference of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) held in Milwaukee. Arriving at that meeting, those of us from RAVEN immediately faced controversy about the very existence of our program. Informally but widely circulated at the conference was the “green paper:” an attack on the presence of programs working with men who batter. Conversations with the authors of the green paper disclosed that the concern was not with our work, but with the growing trend of battered women’s shelters providing services to batterers. They were quite content with us men dealing with those men. They were, however, quite concerned about what we were doing with those men.

Reasons for concern about the existence of Batterer Intervention Programs:

The confrontation of RAVEN and other batterers intervention programs (BIP’s) by battered women’s advocates has continued... and with good reason. This first confrontation had largely to do with the use of scarce resources that could be used for supporting battered women and their children going to questionable efforts to stop the men from their violence. It has always been clear that the best use of resources is in providing support for battered women over intervention work with the batterer. Indeed, without support for battered women there is no “need” for batterer intervention. Where there is no support for victims, there is no demand for intervention with the perpetrator. It is only when the voices of the victims can be heard that the perpetrator begins to see that he has a problem.

A second confrontation of the existence of BIP’s emerged in the mid-80's as the notion of criminalizing wife battering gained currency. It remains true in most areas that a man may do to his wife what he would be arrested for doing to a stranger. This inconsistency has prompted changes in the criminal justice code and practice that in effect “criminalizes” wife battery. But we already have overcrowded jails and courts and probation offices. It would be so much simpler to send these men to a BIP in lieu of prosecution. To give him the option of going to treatment instead of going to court would hopefully change him and not overburden the courts. The brutal fact is that most men will choose treatment and then not go, or not go consistently, or not pay attention when they do go. Thus the existence of the BIP lets the criminal justice system off the hook without doing anything to increase safety for battered women and children.

But even more distressing is the possibility that the intervention actually increases the danger to victims. Despite our best efforts, we might be making him or the relationship he has to his partner more oppressive or even lethal. There are two ways that this may happen. One has to do with the way the program changes her; the other has to do with the way it changes him.

Before the battering comes to the attention of the outside world, it has been a daily part of the lives of the victims for months and years and even decades. She has hoped and prayed and fretted about what might happen that will preserve her family and her marriage without destroying herself. Now he has finally done something that will get him to stop his abuse of her; he has entered a program for men who batter and at long last, she hopes, he will stop these intermittent spells of tyranny and violence. When he talks to her about what he is learning, she is so hungry for hope that she believes and returns to him. But a few weeks of warming a seat in the BIP will not stop a life-long pattern of acting out his internal conflicts by controlling those he is closest to. Sooner or later, push will come to shove, and the violence will reappear. The more she is lulled into complacency by his attendance in the BIP, the greater the risk to her.

The second risk is that the intervention of the BIP may actually teach the man the skills and the awareness to end the physical violence while at the same time leave him with the will to dominate and the means to do so in a more subtle and less easily confronted manner. He may actually use what he has learned in the BIP as a tool for his control of her. The very thing that she had hoped would be the instrument of her salvation becomes the substance of her shackles.

Problems with knowing whether we are helping or harming:

It is easy for those of us who are doing the work of intervening with batterers to lose sight of the dangers. What we see are the successes. And there is no doubt that we have some wonderful life transforming success with many of the men who stay with our programs. We also know that for many women, the very existence of a program that confronts batterers is a source of emotional strength. Even if her own batterer never darkens our door, it is encouraging for her to know that there are men out there who validate her anguish.

No, the problem is not mostly with the men we see, but with the men we don’t see, or don’t see for long. While I am unaware of a comprehensive study of compliance and attendance rates for BIP’s, it was discovered some years ago in a study at RAVEN that we received less than one call for each 10 calls received by the Women’s Self Help Center. Of the men who called, only half agreed to attend and of those only half actually showed up and of those only half were still around after three weeks. Those who stayed for three weeks had a 50-50 chance of being around for six months and half of those were still around after a year. Among those who were around after a year, we could have some great confidence that we had made a positive difference in his life and the lives of those close to him. But we are talking here about a success rate that is well under 1% of the identifiable batterers in our area.

Even with those who stay in the program, the man who may appear to us to be having success in treatment may continue to be oppressive to his partner. When we work to help a man be able to identify abuse, he may take his knowledge home to point out to her all of the things she is doing that he feels abused by. Or if we teach him to take a “time out” by leaving for a while to cool off when he is starting to get overheated in a conflict, he may then use this guidance to run out on her whenever she tries to address a problem in the relationship that he would rather avoid. He may use what we teach him to control or abandon his partner... and then come to the program and get support for using the skills he is learning. For this reason it is essential that BIP’s not work in isolation but be in an ongoing conversation with battered women’s advocates. We have to have a relationship with those who see the effects of our work in order to be accountable for our actions.

Accountability of Batterers Intervention Programs with Advocates for Battered Women

Through the years that this author has worked with men who abuse members of their own family, I have participated in or observed many efforts to develop better mechanisms for accountability of BIP’s to BWA’s (battered women’s advocates). We have attended conferences for Battered Women’s Advocates at the local, regional and national level and have listened to their analysis of the problem of woman-battering. We have presented our work at these conferences in order to give an account of our work and to get feedback on it from BWA’s. We have read books and journals and have consulted with battered women’s advocates in our immediate area. Perhaps the largest effort at being accountable was the Safety Network.

The Safety Network brought together on a weekly or biweekly basis the front line staff of services for battered women and for men who batter. We would talk about specific cases and specific intervention strategies with an aim to better understand the consequences of the approaches we chose. This gathering rarely had more than four or five participants and struggled along for nearly three years before petering out.

We never did a formal evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the Safety Network so I can only speak out of my own experience of what worked and what didn’t. The best things about the experience for me were the opportunities to gather with others who were also committed to ending men’s violence against women and talk in ways that broadened and clarified my understanding of the problem, and the chance to act in a way that was consistent with my politics. But I rarely had a clear sense that what we were doing had any direct impact on the families and the couples that we worked with. Despite the large volume of women and men who were seeking services from our programs and our careful efforts to obtain releases of information which would identify if a partner was getting help from another service, we rarely found a man in our program whose partner was active with one of the women’s services. Usually the people we served, both women and men, reported that their partners were not seeking help. This meant that we were constructing what was happening in the relationship rather than observing it. My suspicion is that only one member of the couple was sufficiently motivated to get help. If one was getting help, the other figured he or she didn’t need to.

So we found that the effort to coordinate services was too much work with too little evidence that we were producing positive results. In a business where we are continually addressing the crises in others’ lives, there are just too many crises to take the time to sit down and calmly talk about what we are doing. In addition, the advocates for battered women had to wonder if working with the batterer intervention folks wasn’t a waste of time. Rarely did a women in their program identify that her partner was seeking help and even then it really didn’t seem like it was doing any good. Perhaps batterer intervention is irrelevant.

From the point of view of the batterer intervention staff, talking with the BWA’s sometimes felt belittling in its own right. Not only were we told that what we were doing was irrelevant and dangerous, we were told that we were not sufficiently appreciative of the damage these men were doing and were too likely to identify with and thus “collude” with them. We were not to trust our own experience of them, but were to relate to them only in the context of confronting their choices to control and abuse. We liked this feedback as it conformed to our own political analysis of the problem, but this feedback was troubling as it contradicted our own experience. We found ourselves in the anxious position of wanting to do what the women told us to do on the one hand and wanting to do what we genuinely experienced as most helpful on the other hand.

It began to occur to us that the relationship between BIP’s and BWA’s was a parallel to that of the battered to the batterer. We are not to trust our own experience but to do what we are told. Some of us see this as necessary corrective to the imbalance of power that has existed in the battering relationship and in the society as a whole. By “accepting leadership from battered women” we are working to counterbalance the oppression of patriarchal cultural forces. But others of us see this reversal as simply another power hierarchy and thus not really a correction but a duplication of the very system we are trying to dismantle.


The Parallel Process of Being Accountable and Teaching Accountability

The parallel process between the relationship of batterer to battered and of BIP to BWA is not surprising to anyone who understands how human systems function. Our exposure to systems in distress causes a resonance with that system. Therapists who work with severely traumatized victims experience a kind of secondary traumatization. Women working with battered women feel their pain and their anger and look for their own ways to express those feelings. Their anger at the men who batter can easily be transferred onto the men who work with the men who batter. Similarly, the men who work with the men who batter feel their guilt and look for ways to atone for the patriarchal alliance. We want to prove that we are not like these other men even as we know that we are. So we hope to correct the imbalance by being subject to the authority of battered women and battered women’s advocates.

But simply reversing the imbalance is rarely helpful. A colleague who works with battered women recently told the story of a woman who complained to her husband that she felt like a maid. She was angry that the cooking and cleaning fell to her and that he got to avoid all of the housekeeping. In an effort to soothe her feelings and to show his willingness to change, he began to take responsibility for the laundry. She was then furious that he was even trying to take away one of the few areas in which she still felt like she had some authority. It felt like he was telling her that she wasn’t doing it right. Simply shuffling the jobs isn’t going to get to the heart of the matter. It was not a question of which jobs he did. The problem was his presumption that it was his right to choose and his belief that he had no obligation to actually make the decision with her.

The point here is that the process is at least as important as the content. Certainly we want to intervene in ways that will stop the violence. But at least as important is the problem of how power is distributed in the relationship. Violence and abuse are characteristics of the content of the relationship. They are characteristics of the events that happen that form the relationship. These events are ones which cause harm. Battering is a characteristic of the process of the relationship. It is characterized by a process of making decisions in which one party assumes dominance over the other. The primary source of permission for this dominance is patriarchy.

While the violence is a primary tool of the battering, it is possible to end the violence without ending the battering. Emotional battering can easily be as damaging in its own way as is physical battering. At least with physical battering she knows she is being abused. The physical violence and abuse is a characteristic of the way decisions are carried out. The battering is a characteristic of the way that decisions get made. The constructive alternative to violence is non-violence. The constructive alternative to battering is accountability.

When BIP’s seek to be accountable to BWA’s by “accepting leadership from battered women and battered women’s advocates,” we are modeling an attitude of respect for the wisdom of women that challenges the patriarchal norm. But when we assume that “accepting leadership” is tantamount to doing what we are told, we generate a whole new set of problems. The first relates to the connection between rights and responsibilities. If I have the right to make the choice then I am responsible for the outcome. If BIP’s give BWA’s the right to decide how programs are run, they also (though certainly not consciously) make them responsible for the outcome. This can be a way for BIP’s to deny accountability if we are “just doing what we were told to do by BWA’s.” The second relates to a denial of our own expertise. Battered women and battered women’s advocates know about battering. But they do not claim to know how to intervene with men who batter. Indeed, anyone who claims to know is highly suspect. But those of us who are working with men who batter do have a level of expertise that must not be denied. This work is far too important to be selling short what we do know how to do (and not do).

Certainly one of the things we do not know how to do is to make a man stop being violent. There are some who work in the field who argue that he already knows how to not be violent. After all, he isn’t violent with the police or the judge. This thinking is dangerously simplistic. It denies the complicated and intense emotional dynamics in one’s primary relationship and suggests that ending the violence is a matter of will power. We don’t even know how to keep ourselves from being violent. Many men (this author included) have found themselves acting in ways that they have come to consider “violent” even after they have spent many years doing violence intervention work. If we can’t stop ourselves from violence, how can we possibly succeed at changing the men in our programs?

Rather than promise what we have little hope of delivering and thus setting ourselves up for failure, I would argue that we better serve battered women and their children when we only claim to do what we can reasonably hope to do; that is, to teach men how to be accountable. [For a suggestion about what we mean by accountability, refer to the Credo of Accountability]

A Framework for Understanding Accountability

Accountability has become somewhat of a buzz word recently. It is even fashionable to be accountable in some circles. But profoundly unaccountable behavior is being modeled in these same circles. Just recently in the news about the criminal justice system we have had an Illinois Supreme Court Justice claim that he didn’t accept a ticket from a police officer because he was afraid of police brutality. A Texas “prison for profit” tried to ward off criticism by stating that the video tape didn’t show “beatings” of prisoners as no one was struck repeatedly. If we are going to try to teach accountability we must be very clear about what we mean by the term.

Complicating the matter is that the term can mean very different things in different settings. It is instructive to note that the term is used both in authority relationships (relationships characterized by a power hierarchy) and in mutual relationships. The meaning is very different depending on the type of relationship.

Authority relationships are ones in which the parties involved have different rights and responsibilities. These are relationships like teacher to student, parent to child, foreman to laborer, coach to player, etc. Each has certain rights and each has certain responsibilities to the other, but they are not the same. The coach has the right to determine who plays in the game but the player has the right to be on the field during play. Authority relationships have the advantage of being efficient and stable as long as the parties involved know and adhere to their respective roles.

Mutual relationships are ones in which the parties involved have the same rights and responsibilities. These are relationships like teacher to teacher, student to student, player to player, etc. Each has the same rights and responsibilities. To be sure there are few purely mutual relationships. The pitcher has different rights and responsibilities than does the catcher, but they are free to switch roles at any time. Mutual relationships are not as efficient or stable as authority relationships but they offer the possibility of intimacy. Not only is true intimacy impossible in an authority relationship; efforts to create it are a form of abuse.

Few relationships are purely authority relationships or mutual relationships. It may be that the only pure authority relationship is that of drill instructor to new recruit. Some mutuality is present between a compassionate employer and a diligent employee. Some aspects of authority are present among students working on a project together. But any relationship is either primarily an authority relationship or primarily a mutual one. The college professor who dates his student and argues that the intimate relationship they enjoy outside the classroom has nothing to do with their status as faculty and student is involved in a dangerous self-deception. Similarly, the man who claims that he has to be “in charge” in his marriage is destroying the very intimacy he claims to want.

In the context of an authority relationship, accountability is the “ability to give an account of oneself.” This is what an employee does for a boss who wants to know how the current project is coming along. In the context of a mutual relationship, accountability is the “ability to take into account how one’s behavior affects others, and how the other’s behavior affects oneself.” It is this later kind of accountability that we are seeking to teach.

A complete description of the content of our treatment program is beyond the scope of this article. But in brief, the purpose of the intervention program is not only to make clear what we mean by accountability but also to show the advantages to living a life characterized by accountability. To this end the men in it must have some experience of what it feels like to be accountable. This requires that we teach the skills involved and lead him through experiences of accountable behavior so that he can know first hand what we are promoting.

Successful completion of the program depends upon his ability to use certain skills that are necessary for being accountable. He must be able to have enough awareness of his own relationships that he is aware of the conflicts that occur, giving particular attention to the ones that happen again and again. He must be able to describe what happens in those conflicts such that the person he is in conflict with can agree on the event that is happening. He must be able to know how the event affects him and be able to describe that effect clearly. He must be able to hear how the event affects the other. He must be able to name what it is that he needs in terms that are independent of the other’s behavior and to design something that he can do on his own that will address his need without requiring change on the part of the other.

Further, he must be able to hear from those around him when he is making choices that are harmful to them, be able to know what the harm is that he is doing and be fully responsible for it. He must be able to see how this present event is part of a larger pattern of events and how that pattern is his responsibility as well. He must know himself well enough to know what supports that pattern and be able to design actions that he can take to dismantle that pattern and to guard against its reoccurrence.

There is no guarantee that a man who has successfully completed the program will not become violent or otherwise abusive in the future. The only guarantee is that he knows how to be accountable for his abuse and that he has some experience of being accountable so that he knows the sense of personal satisfaction that it can give him. It is always up to him whether he will choose to use the skills that we teach him.

While the curriculum is designed to help him, bit by bit, learn the skills that it takes to be accountable and to begin to experience it for himself; the most powerful tool that we have for teaching is not the classroom material, but the way we live our lives. We learn from what is modeled for us by people who respect us far more than we learn from what people who don’t respect us tell us we should do. Thus the relationships that we build with the men in the program and relationships they witness us having with others are the ways that best teach the why and how of being accountable.

It is this very modeling of accountability, in the sense of being accountable in the context of a mutual relationship, that we must learn to do in the relationship of BIP’s to BWA’s.



Mark Lee Robinson
Abuse Prevention Program
6454 Alamo
St. Louis, MO 63105
314-863-2363

© Center for Creative Conflict Resolution 2000 Notes