Batterers, Treatment Approaches and Effectiveness

Batterer intervention programs (BIPs) are one of several types of interventions designed to prevent the onset or continuation of intimate partner violence (IPV). Other interventions include (a) arrest, prosecution, sentencing, and probation of the offender; (b) services for victims of IPV, including counseling, crisis intervention, advocacy, children's programs, and shelter; (c) couples groups; and (d) individual counseling. Couples groups and individual counseling are less often utilized due to concerns about the safety and blaming of victims in couples treatment and concerns about reinforcing the batterer's code of secrecy in individual counseling. Nevertheless, both couples groups and individual treatment are viable interventions for other populations, and their application to batterers, with proper criteria, increases the intervention options for a very diverse group of people.

Although criminal justice actions and services for victims are not usually thought of as interventions for batterers, BIPs are now part of a larger community system of violence prevention in which criminal sanction and victim services are pivotal. Unlike mental health services, BIPs are not designed to be free-standing interventions, but a local node in a community antivi-olence network.

BIPs are intended for people (usually men) arrested for domestic violence, for people who would be arrested if their actions were public, or for people who believe their aggressive behavior toward partners or ex-partners is troubling in some way. Men from this latter category of self-referred batterers are often dubbed wife referrals by practitioners who doubt the true motivation behind a man's self-referral to a BIP One of the unintended consequences of BIPs is that a man's participation may support his belief that he is changing his behavior but his partner is not changing hers, therefore increasing his risk for IPV. Research suggests that self-referred batterers are more likely than court-referred batterers to drop out of the BIP and to reoffend.

BIPs usually consist of a short evaluation followed by anywhere from 3 to 12 months of weekly groups. These groups may be educational, treatment oriented, or focused on personal growth, but there are usually elements of all three in a BIP, in varying combinations. BIPs may also include other intervention elements, such as personal counseling, case management, addiction treatment, parent education, mentoring, or programming drawn from cultural and ethnic traditions. BIPs may be focused on partner violence by men or by women, by heterosexuals or by people in same-sex relationships, but groups are usually not mixed by gender or sexual orientation. BIPs are often housed in nonprofit or private agencies, and less frequently in the criminal justice system or in public institutions. The details of conducting batterer intervention programs are readily available in a number of books and papers. Most states and provinces require that BIPs meet standards, and most standards require that the staff of BIPs meet specific educational and training requirements.

The current focus is on group-based, same-sex groups for men. There are two theoretical perspectives that, although seemingly in conflict, are usually combined in practice to form what is called the standard model BIP. The original BIPs emerged from the women's movement of the 1970s and suggested that men's violence against women was socially supported as a means of maintaining male dominance of women. The function of a batterer program drawn from this [Page 71]tradition is to help men change their minds about male dominance through a process of psycho-education and community activism. The Domestic Abuse Intervention Program in Minnesota is the most widely known of the psycho-educational approaches, and a sizable proportion of BIPs identify their program as a Duluth model. The Duluth “power and control wheel” is ubiquitous in BIPs, regardless of theoretical orientation.

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