What is it about?
Since the 1970s, much has been accomplished by abused women advocates. These achievements include establishing shelters for abused women, shifting public perception of domestic violence from a private problem to a public crime, and designing and delivering men’s behaviour change programmes. However, this kind of violence has not decreased. Furthermore, the behaviour change programmes targeting male domestic offenders have been criticized for their lack of effectiveness and a narrow perspective that the violence is primarily a tool used by men to maintain gender privileges. While this perspective mostly originated from the experience of abused women, that of their abusers remained by and large unknown. Our scoping review aimed at assessing the extent to which the lived experience of partner-violent men contributed to the development of domestic violence prevention and intervention programmes. We found that, of the estimated 45,000 studies published in the domestic literature between 1980 and 2023, only 52 were dedicated to the perspective of partner-violent men and their experience with change. We recommended that the end-to-end lived experience of offenders should be explored independently from existing theories and assumptions, enabling their contribution to bring a fresh perspective that will either complement or question present-day conventional wisdom about the causes of the issue.
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Why is it important?
The perspective of the primary actors of domestic violence, the offenders themselves, cannot be ignored if we are to truly understand their motives and what they need to change. This understanding can be valuable when evaluating current domestic violence interventions or developing new programmes.
Perspectives
De-marginalizing the perspective of male offenders may be interpreted as undermining the criminalization of domestic violence offences. In this context, exploring these men’s lived experience risk attracting more socio-political criticism than positive attention. I found the answer to this conundrum in the philosophy that underpin the different scientific methods available to researchers. To seek the perspective of offenders is a qualitative undertaking very different from quantitatively producing yes/no answers to e.g., questions about the effectiveness of interventions. Perspectives are not right or wrong: they depend on experiential backgrounds and are expected to be different for victims and for abusers. In that sense, they do not oppose each other like factual accounts may do. Therefore, our proposed approach should provide valuable answers in this controversial field of research.
Dr Jean-Luc Arrigo
University of Newcastle
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Domestic violence, behavior change programs, positive and negative outcomes: A scoping review., Psychology of Violence, September 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/vio0000540.
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