Help for perpetrators of family violence

Joplin Higgins OAM, local lawyer, has brought two world leaders in domestic violence offender rehabilitation to Australia. They have been training facilitators in Australia and speaking to people in our judicial system to promote more programs for Australian offenders.

Ms Higgins organised for scone.com.au to interview them, to help people in our community better understand domestic violence and for offenders to know there is help available.  

Dorthy and Steven Halley are based in Kansas and have developed programs, whereby more than 80% of perpetrators do not re-offend in the first five years after completing their program. While most programs in Australia are short and not yielding those results, there are organisations they recommend here, listed at the end of this story. They are also in the process of training Australian facilitators to provide their program here.

They encourage offenders to proactively reach out to these programs to find the peace they and their families want, without waiting until they become part of the judicial system.

Because this information is so vital to so many people in our community, instead of adopting the typical story format, we have instead published in the style of a transcript.

Tell me about your background with domestic violence and how you came to develop your program.

Dorthy: I ran a domestic violence shelter for a little over a decade in the 80s and 90s and following that I taught at the Pittsburgh State University for a little over a decade. I was contacted by the Office of the Attorney General who asked me to consider being the director of the victims’ services division for him, and one of the charges was for me to establish battering intervention programs.

He knew what we were doing in south-east Kansas and he wanted something similar across the state. I spent 13 years serving in that capacity and in that time we got statutory changes made, so that Kansas uses certified programs that must follow certain essential elements of standards.

In 2011 when the statute changed, there were at least six programs that were certified for 2012. Three years later we did a pilot project to look at all of the completers from the six programs to assess have these guys had any other person crimes? Have they even been charged with any, not convicted? The other thing they looked at is how many of these guys had another protection order? And what they found was that in that three-year time period, 88 percent did not have another person crime charge and 90 percent did not have another protection order placed against them.

Since then we developed an assessment tool, which is used state-wide. Anyone who is referred to a certified program must go through that assessment, and orientation prior to getting into the program. Part of that assessment includes the motive of those who batter.

The programs run for a minimum of 24 group sessions and most are 26 or 27 weeks long, some are as long as 52. They are group men’s therapy, and there are some programs for women who also show a pattern of domination and control.

Why is a group approach used instead of one-on-one therapy?

Steve: One of the things we hear most commonly when people complete our program is, when we ask, what was the most impactful thing for them? It’s, “oh the stories of the other men!” They connect that I’m not alone, that I’m not crazy, that there’s other people like me and that this is a struggle that is shared in somewhat of a community. And men generally are living relatively isolated, with a lack of social support, and when they come together and experience that they’re not alone, it’s a very powerful intervention component.

Research shows that men don’t have the same types of lifelong emotionally supportive relationships that women form, is that an issue for many of these men?

Steve: Yes. Dr Natalie Hoskins has done a lot of research on the socialisation of men, how they are raised and the research has identified that lack of perceived peer support and emotional support. Then there’s this restrictive emotional expression which is going on, and what we’re educating our men to do is acknowledge, not to avoid and to escape their emotional experience. People have to do some very dysfunctional things in order to escape their emotional reality, such as control, aggression, alcohol and drugs, being a workaholic, all kinds of behaviours designed to help escape emotional reality. We see men in our groups doing that to the extreme.

The primary goal is to build the common experiences to help be supportive of each other, but also hold each other accountable for the violence and cruelty that they are using in their life. The facilitator has to make sure that collusion among the group members is at a minimum, they’re not blaming the victim, not justifying their cruel behaviour, but learning how to hold each other accountable is a very loving, connecting, emotionally supportive experience.

Dorthy: One of the things that helps with that is we have open groups, where different men enter that group process at different points. They enter the group when they are referred, so there will be some men on week 27, when another man is entering the group. Those who are first entering might be somewhat resistant to accept any accountability, but they are hearing from the seasoned men in the group, “oh man I was there once too, that’s what I used to say.” And they start seeing that the culture of the group is to become internally focused, rather than externally focused.

When they come in, many of them believe that it’s the system’s fault, that it’s their partner’s fault, it’s everybody’s else’s fault and they are not going to become safe, until they become internally focused. And it really is through the art of the group facilitators that allows that to happen.

Do you accept everyone referred?

Dorthy: We rule out only very, very few, in very rare cases it could have been in self-defence, but what we find is that many say it was a one-time situation, when it’s not. In Kansas the statute allows for us to make an assessment and recommend if someone needs to complete the program. They don’t just say, you go and you finish 27 weeks of the program, but rather we have that out, of saying we assess this person as not needing the program. We ensure people who may have been the victim of family violence, but have been referred for a related offence, are not part of the program.

The vast majority of those who are referred are accepted into the program.

What are the motives of offenders?

Dorthy: What the Kansas assessment tool helps us look at, is the differing motives. We know that some are clearly entitlement based. And they believe they have every right to be violent to their partner if they’ve had a bad day, or if their partner has disobeyed them in some way, or if they’re in a bad mood. However, all in all we find that there are many like that who will be violent repeatedly, but the chances of that violence being lethal is minimal. There’s some others who are violent where it is much more likely to ultimately end up being lethal.

One of those groups is what we call survival-based and there are really two different survival-based groups. One is totally after connection with their partner because they believe there is really nobody else out there who understands them, who is there for them. And this person is vital to their existence. We call that survival-based type 1.

Then there’s survival-based type 2, they also are desperate to hang on to their partner. Not just for the connection to their partner, but what their partner affords to their image. They are all about status they tend to be quite narcissistic, they might not fit that diagnosis, but they have those characteristics. And they are furious. This isn’t about anger and fear, but terror and rage.

When either the survival-based 1 or 2 believe that the relationship is over, it’s a very dangerous time for those victims. Interestingly many of those cases have not entered the criminal justice system prior to becoming lethal potential. Some of those are very high risk and even if they have been noted in the system, a lot of the regular approaches to addressing through the criminal justice aspects, such as though protection orders, are not very effective. Once this person gets into a rage, they’re not very rational and they really don’t end up caring what happens to them, and see themselves as being destroyed, because the relationship is destroyed, the only question is who are they going to take out with them?

I heard someone once say, “AVOs only work on rational people”. Meaning, you can’t expect a rational response from someone who is irrational and is triggered by an AVO. Only people who react rationally to an AVO, will behave rationally, and adhere to the AVO.

Steve: I like that phrase of only working on rational people, because we think about the investment in conformity and the higher the conformity, more likely these things will work.

Dorthy: Right, on the desperate ones it certainly is not going to work and those would be the survival-based offenders.

Could it also be the case then that when an AVO is taken out against someone who is irrational they become incensed, and it could be like a red-flag to a bull?

Dorthy: We see that in case after case! If you look at Karina Lock, if you look at the Baxter Family familicide that happened in Australia, if you look at Teresa Bradford, all of those cases there are situations where it ended up in homicide/suicide. And what often happens is there is something that gives the offender the belief that it’s over for good.

The victim can be doing everything right, the system can be doing everything right as far as trying to protect the victim, but if the system has not addressed effectively getting the offender connected and into a program to address that behaviour, any kind of protection order is actually a trigger, you are exactly right. In those circumstances that are survival based.

So ideally, we need those offender-based services prior to people coming to the attention of police and before the courts. I’m sure there’d be a lot of families out there, and a lot of offenders who do want help, do people proactively seek out your programs?

Dorthy: That would be the ideal thing. And generally, programs will take voluntary referrals in Kansas. We have some and I would say they are partner-mandated, rather than system-mandated. But that can certainly make a difference. We would like to see that happen.

But even after examining some of the homicide/suicides in Australia it becomes clear that there was quite a bit of contact with the offender, without anyone making a referral and following through to go to a domestic violence offender program.  

From what I’ve observed in the local court, the services we do have are few and far between, difficult to access and arguably with the rates of recidivism, fairly ineffective. How can the judicial system better address domestic violence?

Steve: There’s kind of a belief that some kind of an intervention or a judicial system intervention is the treatment, and we don’t think about that as the treatment. Chances of behaviour change happening because of a piece of paper being filed in the court is really unlikely, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. We talk about it like an accountability fence, the system should be working together to try to contain people who are causing harm in their family, but then there has to be something inside that fence that occurs to create a change in behaviour. When we start thinking about the fence as the change in behaviour, we’re probably missing the point. But the fence is a very important part of creating change in behaviour, we’ve just got to get the activity going on inside that accountability fence, to help more peaceful behaviours come to the surface.

Dorthy: We often use the analogy of training a horse. If it’s running around out in the pasture, there isn’t a whole lot that’s going to be done. You’ve got to get it corralled and once it is corralled there can be many people walk into that corral and not get that horse straight. So, it takes that next step. It takes all those systems working together to get the person into a domestic violence offender program and make sure that he stays there and completes it. Because we know completing makes a difference. It’s not just going one time, but actually going and completing it. That fence has to keep them going and then you have to have someone who has a whole lot of expertise inside that fence working with that person, facilitating that group in an effective way.

What kind of facilitation works? What skill sets and approach is needed?

Steve: We operate an extensive facilitator training series that really focuses on the difficult skills that we want those facilitators to acquire and develop, to really implement what invites transformational change. In a simplified explanation, we’re really asking facilitators to learn how to create an internal focused dialogue with the participants. Where the participants are becoming very reflective on their own story, which oftentimes includes significant abuse during developmental stages in people’s lives and how their past-experience of cruelty impacts their present-day behaviour of inflicting cruelty. To be able to get at connecting both what happened to us, when we were in our development and what we’re doing now, it really requires this internal-focused dialogue. So, helping facilitators to learn how to move a participant from blaming their partner and feeling justified in their behaviour, and connecting that to their own history. Being able to help participants reflect, connect, and experience their own history, to see how it’s related to their present-day behaviour is a very challenging set of skills. Most programs out there in the world are really focused on a cognitive behavioural treatment model, which really focuses primarily on the here and now, but we’ve been adding the affective component which includes the trauma history. And the evidence is out there that it has created a higher level of engagement, a higher level of internal focused dialogue and better change process for offenders.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is the accepted gold standard for many therapies, but the affective or emotional aspect is a fairly critical driver of behaviour, is that the key to your program?

Steve: Yes, and I’m not criticising CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) because our program has a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy components, but adding that affective component and adding the ability to move back and forth from the developmental history to the present-day is a very powerful doorway into transformational change.

I read a paper whereby 80% of offenders would meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, particularly childhood trauma. How many of the men in your programs do you anecdotally find have some type of developmental trauma?

Steve: I’m glad you used the phrase developmental trauma because we’re not talking about someone who was 25 and had a car wreck at an intersection and has a shock trauma. We’re talking about developmental trauma, and I would argue that if you have someone in your program that does not have significant developmental trauma, they should be studied, they are an absolute outlier! By far most of the participants in our programs have significant developmental trauma and it’s an indirect link into the world of domestic violence. So, for facilitators to be able to incorporate a trauma responsive approach into their CBT work and the other work that they are doing in the men’s behavioural change programs, it’s just adding a powerful component.

Dorthy: We just finished two of our three levels of training facilitators, and we just finished doing a level one and a level two here in Brisbane. It was so exciting to see people who are doing men behavioural change programs, do that additional component and I’m really excited to see what those who attended will do. They feel it will be a very powerful addition to their work and it will be neat to see how that goes.

When we’re talking about developmental trauma, how would you describe that?

Steve: There’s a long list of developmental trauma events and circumstances. Many of the group participants, especially the survival-based, will talk about being abandoned at a very early age by a significant caretaker. A common story is, “I went to bed one night when I was four years old and I woke up and my mum was gone, and she didn’t come back until I was 22”. There is obviously the witnessing of domestic violence, there’s having a caretaker who is addicted to drugs or alcohol, there’s the physical abuse. We’re not just talking about spanking, when our groups talk about physical abuse they talk about beatings, they talk about being hit with garden hoses, belts, and cords and on and on. It’s very spine-tingling experiences.

Dorthy: Some have been shot at by their grandfather, or by a parent.

Steve: Being locked in garden sheds for days at a time. This sound extreme, but inside of our participant group these are the norm. It’s really an interesting conversation and we have to educate our participants as to what trauma is and about mental trauma. They don’t think about it as, ‘oh that was a trauma that I experienced’, they commonly blame themselves. They say, ‘oh I was locked in the shed for two days, because I was mean to my sister, or I didn’t eat my peas.’ It’s craziness, but they really are educated that it was their fault that they were treated that way. Not that it was something horrible inflected upon them by somebody.

There is a wide range and spectrum, but those are the kind of stories that we hear are commonplace in our groups.

Many people who have grown up with domestic violence environment, say they worry about doing the same thing. What would you say to that?

Steve: Well, we hear a common statement in our groups, ‘I swore I would never be like my father, and here I am being just like him.’ Alice Miller has kind of been the spiritual mentor of the Family Peace Initiative and her ideas we formulated into this ‘river of cruelty’. And the river of cruelty model says, when someone when they were young experiences cruelty, if they don’t heal from it, if they don’t have relationships that will help them to accept and understand and recover from those emotions, then they have two options.

They can either give that cruelty away to somebody else as an attempt to get away from it, or they will heap it upon themselves, or a combination of both. So, people will say in our programs, ‘I am doing to my kids exactly what I was done to me. I am handing it down to the next generation.’ In the cruelty model, it’s an explanation of how cruelty was passed from person to person and generation to generation. The way to escape that is for us all to become much more responsible for our own emotional selves and not have to pass our adverse emotions on to others or to heap them on ourselves.

What would your main message be to our readers, in terms of if they are in a family violence situation right now, where they are the perpetrator what kinds of support can they access from here in Scone?

Dorthy: The first thing in regard to someone who has been victimised, make contact with a victim service program and process what they have experienced with someone. They can help them look at safety planning and options, and hopefully that person would be aware of what offender services are available.

There are some programs online, some I definitely wouldn’t recommend. We do have a Zoom group which is online, and those need to be interactive.

Steve: We believed we couldn’t do groups online, but COVID forced our hand and we found out that Zoom groups can work and I believe there are some agencies in Australia who are using Zoom groups. From all over north America we have people coming into our programs on Zoom because there is so much convenience. There are people in the United States that live in very rural areas that would have to travel a long distance to get to groups, so these online programs have been very helpful. But everybody that I have spoken to has said some online groups can have a certain value, but in-person is by far the better approach to working together. So, we are in the middle of migrating much of our program back to in-person for that very reason.

We’ve met some amazing organisations here in Queensland and there are remarkable providers trying to figure out the best way to give access to these programs.

I want to tell people: if you recognise that your family may be afraid of you. If there’s a lot of yelling and screaming and intimidation or throwing of things or controlling and isolating and living in fear that maybe your partner might be leaving you…those are all flags about domestic violence.

There is help in Australia, for people who have that going on in their relationship. People do not have to have criminal justice involved in their relationship in order to get help. And there are helplines that are available for men to call and get connected to resources.

If you’re afraid your relationship is going to end and your partner is going to leave because they are afraid of you, there is an alternative. It requires the person to go and get help, it doesn’t have to be that way.

When the hallmarks of coercive control first appear in a relationship, would that be the ideal time to reach out before there is physical violence?

Steve: Absolutely. The coercive control shows up in a lot of different ways. Commonly it’s emotional abuse, isolation, trying to manage someone, make someone feel humiliated, make them feel submissive, taking away their own agency. Creating a feeling where the partner needs to depend on the abusive partner, for decision making for permission to behave a certain way, all of those things. Domestic violence does not have to be physical violence.

The emotional abuse is many times worse because it really attacks people at the core of their being. The primary ingredient of someone who is going to perpetrate violence on their family, their wife, their kids, is they can tell you about being emotionally humiliated and degraded and abused when they were young. It’s a very significant ingredient both in creating those who abuse and the experience of the victims.

How much do you attribute misogyny to domestic violence?

Steve: There is a plethora of influences. There’s misogyny, there’s patriarchy, there’s developmental trauma, there’s so many things going on. Men being socially restricted in their emotional awareness, and we can go on and on about the complex mixture of all these influences, what creates somebody to be doing cruel behaviour towards others and our specialty has been how do you intervene? And if we’re going to get to the fixing of the problem, if you boil it down, we have to begin by raising our children differently. We have to take child abuse very seriously, developmental abuse very differently, and we have to figure out how to help our kids get better at emotional expression. So that people develop peer-supports, emotional-supports. If we can start at a very early age, then a lot of these things tend to evaporate. I think we’re not talking about that enough. How do we eradicate cruelty by teaching our young? That has to be a part of the conversation, including misogyny, patriarchy, entitlement and all these things that have had a huge impact on cruelty. To repair it is going to start with our children.

Help available:

No To Violence: is an advice and counselling service for men concerned about their use of family violence. It is a 24/7 service, available Australia wide, by phone or online chat.

• Phone: 1300 766 491
• Chat online: No To Violence.