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Andrew, a year-old mortarman on his first deployment, found himself trapped at the center of a hellish, week-long urban firefight, lobbing explosives at dangerously close targets in every direction. Several years later, after his third tour in Iraq, Andrew returned home to Superior.
A few years later, he married Gretchen and they had their daughter. Gretchen told me that, during their marriage, she could almost set her watch by when her husband would start hurting her. Andrew denied that he regularly hurt Gretchen beyond the two occasions, in and , when he was arrested for domestic abuse. He said, however, that there were instances in which Gretchen attacked him, as well as fights that led to violence on both sides.
Gretchen said she used violence only defensively. By the time Andrew was sent to Duluth—a short drive across the Wisconsin-Minnesota border from his home in Superior—he was frightened by his own capacity for violence. After his second arrest, Gretchen had finally left him.
He loved, more than anything, being a father to his 9-year-old daughter, and, while he and Gretchen were sharing custody, he worried that he would lose her. For the first month of class, Andrew slumped in his seat, arms crossed, glaring at the whiteboard. In an odd coincidence, Gretchen had started working part-time in a blown-glass gallery that shared a building with DAIP.
She would see Andrew stomp downstairs after class, looking pissed off. She worried that he was getting worse. Soon, however, Andrew began recognizing himself in some of his classmates. After a few weeks, Andrew worked up the courage to talk. He shared an anecdote about his day, then glanced up and caught a few guys making eye contact with him. That was the biggest reassurance: someone being willing to look at you.
Gradually, Andrew felt the stirrings of camaraderie. The relationships with coworkers and his buddies in the Marines had each created a particular type of intimacy, but a limited one—nothing too personal. After a couple months of classes, Gretchen noticed that Andrew was acting different. The two of them would meet up every few days to hand off their daughter.
The encounters had been tense at first, but Andrew had begun to soften. He stopped making backhanded compliments and showed an unprecedented willingness to compromise, offering to cover for her when she needed a babysitter. In her writings, Ellen Pence, who died in , was insistent about seeing domestic violence within its proper context.
But, while Pence allowed that these factors might exacerbate abusive behavior, she denied that anything other than male entitlement, born of patriarchy, could cause a man to hit his partner. Letting the men think of themselves as victims ran the risk of letting them escape blame for their actions. Pence also dismissed the idea that eons of male domination could be solved with psychotherapy.
They might allow their clients to see their abuse simply as a by-product of their past trauma or other difficulties. But as she saw it, each abuser, regardless of background, was motivated by a common sense of male entitlement. In the view of most psychologists, domestic violence can be caused by many things. While culture—particularly the degree to which domestic violence is tolerated or encouraged by a society—plays a role in producing batterers, scholars argue that it is impossible to isolate a single element, like male entitlement, from what is often a grisly gnarl of psychological and biological influences.
At the same time, other types of group-based interventions, including various forms of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT—an apolitical method of helping abusers change the thought patterns that lead to violence— have proven little more effective. Paymar and others have questioned the methodology of the NIJ research. DAIP also emphasizes that the groups were never intended as a cure-all solution to domestic violence, but only one element of its original Duluth model, requiring a coordinated community response.
Many cities, however, use just the groups. For many men, Zarling said, being violent is a way of fending off unpleasant emotions, such as vulnerability, shame, jealousy, or anxiety. And their brain remembers that.
One solution, Zarling posited, was to give abusers a way of making their distress manageable. Ideally, an abuser will learn to become aware of unpleasant feelings but to not let them control him. In addition to teaching abusers about patriarchy, ACTV is also teaching them mindfulness.
The trick, Sampson explained, was for men to be able to notice and identify difficult emotions before they led them to act out in ways they would later regret. But if I ignore it, eventually …? ACTV seemed less of a strain on the facilitators. At the same time, facilitators lacked the comfort of thinking that they were much different than the abusers.
Results for ACTV are preliminary but promising, especially given the dearth of effective domestic-violence interventions. As far as what, at bottom, causes domestic violence—why some men deploy violence to avoid unpleasant emotions instead of other forms of evasion—ACTV is agnostic. While participants are encouraged to seek out their own motives, ACTV classes are also designed to help them control their behavior in the moment.
Theoretically, a man could go through ACTV never admitting a single fault—could, in fact, believe that he is the victim in the relationship—and yet come through it a less dangerous man. There were tears, expressions of regret, pledges to improve. We change — our opinions, personalities, careers, friends and much more. Some changes feel like they happen overnight. One part of changing may involve an abusive partner willingly attending a certified batterer intervention program that focuses on behavior, reflection and accountability.
Focus on changes you can control to improve your own life, because you deserved to feel loved, happy and safe. We're here to help! To browse this site safely, be sure to regularly clear your browser history. Security Alert Internet usage can be monitored and is impossible to erase completely.
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