Issues in Family Violence
Fall 2002
"Did He Successfully Complete the Program?"
"Who's asking and why do you want to know?"
David Mandel
State’s Attorney: “Your honor, the batterer intervention program reports that Mr. Smith has completed their program.”
Judge: “What does that mean? Has he changed?”
State’s Attorney: “I don’t know, Your Honor. The report only says he has had no new arrests and that he attended all twenty six sessions.”
Judge: “But has he changed?”
State’s Attorney: “They didn’t say.”
One of the most important and challenging jobs a batterer intervention program has is communicating back to a referral source about the progress a client is or isn’t making. The most common questions are “Did he successfully complete the program?” or “Can you update me on his progress?” The answers to these questions can have very serious implications for the safety of battered women and their children, batterer accountability and decisions by the court and child protection agencies.
Successful communication in these matters requires a clear understanding of the definitions of success and progress and the expectations of multiple parties involved with the situation. Many instances involve at least six different perspectives: the adult victim, the children (if any), the referring agency (e.g. the criminal justice system, child protective services, other therapists), the clinical staff working with the perpetrator, the perpetrator’s attorney and finally the perpetrator himself. Many programs and coordinated community response systems fail to clearly articulate, let alone standardize, the definitions of progress and success. This can leave room for misunderstanding, which in turn can lead to poor decisions related to the safety of battered women and children exposed to domestic violence.
There is no way to avoid the issue of communicating to others about progress and successful completion. It is built into the systems in which we operate. Some programs choose to report in the most limited way possible. “He is currently in good standing in the program” or “he met the criteria required for completion,” are common comments. Sometimes these answers are enough to satisfy the referring agency. When state standards for batterer’s programs address progress and completion standards, it is usually in the most basic way. Repeated physical violence, poor attendance and participation, and failure to pay fees are some of the more common criteria mentioned (Austin and Dankwort, 1998) . But in many instances, the court, the victim or a child protection agency want and deserve more information about the client’s participation in the program.
As child protection agencies become more involved in domestic violence and batterer intervention, there will be greater need for a more sophisticated and comprehensive response to the question “How is he doing in the program?” Child protective service agencies primarily measure progress for batterers against the safety, well being and “the best interests” of the children. Child protective agencies and juvenile courts are mandated to make decisions about a wide spectrum of factors related to families including the permanent placement of children and the termination of parental rights. The assessment of a batterer’s progress in a domestic violence program may impact whether a child can remain in the home or with her parents.
Because a report on a client’s progress can play a critical role in the lives of numerous people, batterer intervention programs have a responsibility to educate their audience about the nature and limitations of the report. This means articulating how the program design may limit what is known about the batterer, the sources of information for the report, the relationship of the reports to the batterer’s potential for new violence, and the weight and meaning the reader should give to the batterer’s participation in the group.
Articulate Program Limitations
The first hurdle to effectively communicating about a batterers’ participation in a program may rest with the limitations of the program. Programs that are more oriented towards education versus counseling, that receive less information from referral sources and have less contact with battered women and their advocates will have much less to say about a batterers’ progress and success. It is dangerous for a batterer intervention program to overstate the meaning the court or another agency should attribute to a client’s completion of their program. Their communications should include regular reminders of the limitations of the information they are providing. The limited nature of the feedback may lead to other agencies becoming frustrated. This frustration is preferable to overly optimistic appraisals leading to decisions that provide a false sense of security and hope. The amount of information a batterer intervention program can reasonably provide back to a referral source is one of the variables for evaluating what type of batterer intervention program is best for an agency or community.
Identify the Sources of Information
The most thorough assessment of progress integrates information from a diversity of sources. The greater the number of information sources the more likely the assessment of progress will be accurate. These information sources might include the victim, the victim’s children, the court and law enforcement agencies, child protective services, other therapists, other programs (e.g. substance abuse), the batterer intervention staff and the batterer himself. The inclusion of information from the victim or the victim’s children requires careful screening of how the disclosure of the victims’ perspectives will effect their safety. Ideally, inclusion of this information is always done with explicit permission of the victim after she has had an opportunity to explore the consequences of her involvement in the assessment process. Victim’s requests for confidentiality need to be respected except when she has been explicitly informed, in advance, that any information she shares with the batterer intervention program might be shared with the referring agency and through them, possibly, the abuser.
Articulate Pitfalls in Assessing Risk for New Violence
The most challenging progress and completion communication issue is around the potential for new violence. Assessing risk for domestic and other forms of violence is closer to an art than a science. Despite the proliferation of various tools, instruments and acronyms (the DVI, the SARA, the K-SID), conventional wisdom still indicates that when you know a person’s history of violent and abusive behavior you have a sense of what they are capable of doing. A thorough history combined with an assessment of the current situational variables (e.g. pending divorce, escalating jealousy, a new order of protection, access to victim and children, access to weapons) may offer the best assessment of danger.
It is close to impossible to make any kind of reliable assessment of risk for new violence based solely on a batterer’s participation in group. Referral sources and victims need to be educated to the fact that a batterer’s participation in group may have absolutely no relationship to his behavior at home or his risk for new violence. Batterers often act very differently with strangers, friends and professionals than they do with their family members. Even when a client is genuine in his desire to change, his actual behavior may lag far behind his participation in group. For example, clients will frequently acknowledge the negative impact of their abusive behavior to their group without offering the same admission to their family members.
Communicate the Context and Limitations of Changes
When a batterer does appear to make changes, the batterer intervention programs need to be able to communicate the meaning and context for these changes. From the perspective of the perpetrator, change usually occurs in small steps that feel like major shifts for him. His self-centeredness also amplifies the importance of his changes. Changing lifetime patterns of behaviors, emotions and beliefs require concentration and persistence. Often times the perpetrator will experience a sense of progress when he handles one situation without violence or abuse where in the past he would have gotten abusive or violent under the same circumstance. It will take him months, but more likely years, to translate this into sustained, consistent, and trustworthy change.
Frequently, the victim will justifiably not be able to tolerate this time line. She has the right to demand the violence and abuse stop immediately. She also has the right to demand that he come to a swift understanding of the impact his past violence and abuse has had on her and her children. Reconciling these potentially conflicting perspectives often represents a significant challenge for a batterer who has begun to make an effort to change his behavior. He will frequently have a much higher opinion of his efforts than his victim will. New danger can come when he expects or needs her to give up her needs and perspective to appreciate and respond to the changes he feels he is making.
A batterer intervention program needs to be grounded in the context and history of the abuse when reporting on the progress or completion of a client. The victim’s experience needs validation, acknowledgement and consideration. No progress by the perpetrator, no matter how important it feels to him, obligates the victim to any particular emotional response or course of action. A batterer’s progress can only appropriately be acknowledged within the context of the adult and child victims’ realities and the expectations of the criminal justice and child protective service systems.
Standardize Progress Criteria
Standardizing batterer intervention program progress and completion criteria may help better communicate to referring agencies and victims the nature of a client’s progress in a group. Progress and completion criteria should be clearly articulated and reflect the goals and objectives of the program. They should be connected to a vision of what change looks like for batterers and what needs to occur in order to make it happen. Gondolf, in his 1995 article on discharge criteria, developed a ten-point set of criteria for evaluating a batterer’s progress (See sidebar for details). The criteria covered a range of characteristics including attendance, nonviolence, sobriety, help seeking, process consciousness and self-disclosure. Each client’s participation in a batterer intervention program was evaluated on a scale of 0 to 5 with 0 meaning “no opinion, uncertain, not applicable” and 5 meaning “ extremely present.”
Modeled on Gondolf’s efforts, the Non-Violence Alliance developed a set of criteria for evaluating progress tied to our operational profile of an abuser (see earlier Issues in Family Violence) and the principles, goals and objectives of our program. Using the same measurement scale (0-5) with the same definitions, the criteria helps group leaders evaluate the client in the following areas: understanding control, definition of abuse, entitlement thinking, emotion identification, impact, risk management, behavior change, children, aggravating factors, general qualities and progress (See sidebar for details).
These criteria and their definitions are helpful when communicating with the referring agencies about the nature of a client’s progress in group. These criteria also help identify the areas where a client may need to do more work. Although recent research has indicated that Gondolf’s list of discharge criteria is a weak predictor of reassault, he argues that measures of this type have an important role to play. He writes
“The discharge instrument still predicts better than chance and better than actuarial data. The whole prediction business is rather complex, so current prediction results should not be used to dismiss the use of structured clinical observations and assessments (albeit these should be used with caution). (These types of criteria are a)...useful set of what we sometimes call proximal goals and a way to keep tabs on them. Theoretically and philosophical(ly) these are things that we say are important and that we are trying to teach in counseling groups. We ought then, as a means of our own accountability, have some way of measuring them to see if those things are in fact being learned. This is what we do in school classes--test for proximal outcomes or goals. But most counseling programs don't pay much attention to them.” (Personal Communication, December 10 & 20, 2002)
Batterer intervention programs need to review on a regular basis what they are communicating to their referring agencies. Batterer intervention programs change and evolve and the needs of the referring agencies change and evolve. A program needs to make sure that their partners in a coordinated community response have an accurate understanding of what is being communicated. As new partners, like child protection, join a coordinated community response, there is a need for thorough and thoughtful discussions about the role that information from a batterer intervention program can and cannot play in the determination of issues like the “best interests of a child” and the physical safety of victims.
References
Austin, J. & Dankwort, J. (Revised August 1998). A Review of Standards for Batterer Intervention Programs. Available on line at http://www.vaw.umn.edu/vawnet/standard.htm.
(c) 2002, The Non-Violence Alliance. Permission to reprint with the following information "Originally published in Issues in Family Violence, Volume 4, Issue 4 Fall 2002, The Non-Violence Alliance, www.endingviolence.com." |
