A new website explains the practical difficulties faced by RESPECT associated projects and the so-called "accredited projects". You are advised to be cautious when approaching a radical (pro-) feminist aligneded project!  We have been very strong critics of RESPECT based on our detailed knowledge of the practicalities of abuser courses - perpetrator programmes. A soon-to-be-published research review paper calls into very serious question the whole of the underlying theories of RESPECT, and calls for the RESPECT "accreditation standard" to be abolished. CAFCASS, and other authorities, set store by that policy and fund accordingly, advocating only RESPECT accredited projects.To our very serious concerns have now been added the academic's criticism. Effectively this makes most current policy demonstrably unsafe for children. We will provide solicitors and barristers with links to this information so that CAFCASS may be suitably challenged within the courts, case by case, until they bring about sensible changes in their policies.   

For potential clients, men and women.
Are you violent, aggressive, abusive to a wife or husband, a partner or a former partner
or mixtures of these towards your partner or former partner?
Do you want to change?


If so we may well be able to help you do just that. Applicant booklet with application form

Next course dates are:Birmingham December 3rd and 4th and Jan 7th and 8th.  
Northampton: No new dates currently offered.
Harrow - North London: New service to start as soon as there are enough clients: Jan 21st and 22nd - and (or) February 18th and  19th. 

The course we devised 15 years ago and have improved upon ever since runs like this. You can currently attend in either Birmingham or Northampton. As and when finance becomes available our plans are to work in other places, too. Manchester is now number one on our list, followed by Borehamwood.

Stage 1 (day 1, weekend 1)
You start to learn new skills, which will allow you to start changing in the very first hour.

Stage 2 (day 2, weekend 1)
You discover and examine your own violent reactions.  In addition, we will help you develop higher-level skills and begin to teach you how to empathise with your partner.

Stage 3    (Weekend 2 Day 3)
You establish exactly what your violent, aggressive, abusive behaviour is and learn new ways of managing it, exactly for your particular case.

Stage 4 (Weekend 2 Day  4)
As a group we develop a 3 stage plan for you to manage yourself from now on.
The ending of the group and "dealing with the baggage" is explored. Preparations for ongoing support are made.

Course content
The course has three main components.
a) Learning new skills with which to manage yourself in a couple relationship and understand yourself and your partner (and children) .
b) Learning about many different important aspects of yourself and your relationship.
c) Developing your awareness so that you can "regulate your emotions", rather than 'simply' managing your anger.

Methods
Although in schools people learn a great deal by reading and writing, the skills needed for couple relationships are mainly aural and oral, and observational and reflective. It follows that most of the practice is with aural, oral and interpretative skills.
Couple relationships are dependent upon the careful recognition of another person's "emotional communication", this is, of course also developed and practised.  There is virtually no reading and no writing involved in the course. You learn mainly by doing and practising. Some people feel they retain information better by taking notes, and so some do .

"Therapy" helps people to learn more quickly and more easily and a "therapeutic thread" helps to motivate people.  By following "the thread" people are "engaged with" and thus drawn through the work. This "therapeutic component" is capable of changing "the whole base" on which they exist.

"Attachment" forms the basis of all intimate relationships and so attachment theory provides the lense, if you like, through which the majority of this work is carried out. When this theraputic  thread is grasped, or if the facilitators are able to make it available, an individual can make enormous progress.   The report on "Dave" at the bottom of this page and on page 8 clearly illustrates this. It clearly indicates a man who made such enormous progress it would probably not be an exageration to say that he was a changed personality, according to the examining psychology team.  For people who are not abusers but who wish to understand about emotions and a possible way in which they "work", Emotional Insights provides seminars into a way of understanding basic emotions. www.emotionalinsights.co.uk

How else do we help? 

Early intervention. When someone asks us for help we attempt to deliver it, early.  So our target is to get to a first meeting with them within a week to 14 days of them contacting us.

We usually meet in the person's own home, or somewhere close to where they live. Our experience is that these meetings happen. Maybe one or two people a year "miss" the appointment. We have transport and can get to you. We save on not having to run an office in a run-down part of a city to which you would have to come. Partner Booklet

We deliver intensive courses at weekends which are designed specifically to help you to stop being violent and or aggressive and or abusive with your partner or former partner, your spouse or former spouse. We work with "closed groups" so you would need to be able to attend  all 4 days over two weekends with the same group of people. In this format and with the therapeutic focus we are able to bring to the work, change can be brought about very effectively and quite rapidly in most cases.
Our figures and averages over 15 years are: First visits 1,177, courses delivered 118, completions 602 (this means 100% attendance)  Drop-outs 118 who completed on average about 60% of the work.  Currently more than 9 out of 10 people who attend complete all  the work. Our  average yearly expenditure, severely underfunded and consequently now running each of 2 projects at about 1/3rd capacity is £20,671.  This compares with RESPECT's flagship, DVIP project, running 4 projects in London where in 2007 33 men of 230 who contacted the organisation completed the work at a budgeted £219,000. Other Duluth projects have typically between 6 and 8 completions per year. You have been warned! It could be you!

 Emotions drive behaviour.
"Anger management" is often what is deemed to be needed. But since emotions drive behaviour it is more likely that you need to learn how to "regulate your emotions ".  Anger may well be one of them, but some cases are really more about fear, or jealousy or "attachment".
 "Affect regulation" is the expression for the new therapies which are now quickly emerging, resulting from the new sciences which are converging on  emotions and which are slowly supplanting "Cognitive behavioural therapy" CBT.
In the linked website ( which is currently being extended, developed and added to) you can read more about "attachment", about "emotional regulation" and a framework we developed in 1998 to help people understand their own emotions and the emotions of others much better. There is also increasingly detailed criticism of the misplaced "power and equality" wheels, and the "power and control  hungry methods promoted by RESPECT on behalf of a radical feminist agenda.

Most domestic abusers are  simply not about  achieving "power and control" over a partner. Ellen Pence recognised this and honestly acknowledged it in 1999.

Prior to separation, the term "Intimate terrorist" applies to 7 men per 1,000 and 5 women per 1,000, Johnson (2000).
Post separation these figures increase enormously, much more in men than in women. But upon separation men tend to lose everything, and women tend to keep children and accommodation. Attachment theory predicts the likely course of events, men then tend to become chaotic and "the children" help provide an alternative "attachment" for women. Attachment and loss of attachment  mediate a great deal of the behaviour that follows.
People that are separating need close support to help them to manage themselves during the separation. It can be a time of depression, and worse.

The vast majority of our work is undertaken with people displaying "common couple violence" or "mutual couple violence" some cases of "violent retaliation" and a handful of "intimate terrorists".. 
https://sites.google.com/site/temperdomesticviolence/

Ongoing support
Assuming you finish the course,  we will continue to support you for up to a year by telephone and email and, for people who need it, further face-to-face work is available. Usually we want to come back and see you a further 3 times after 2 months, 6 months and 1 year to hear and check out how you are managing with your new skills.
Our Club runs in one area where there are a number of people who have attended. People that take part can gain additional support from one another.

 We work in roughly a 30 mile radius of Birmingham and Northampton, people travel in daily for two whole days' work at the weekend. Determined people with transport and who can afford a room for a Saturday night (£29.95 if booked a week in advance by internet) travel from much further afield.

The work is exhausting so we recommend not travelling in further than 1 hour per day to the venue. For people needing to use public transport, services are, unfortunately, sometimes not available to get you to the venue for a 9.00 start on a Sunday.

Most often our clients are in heterosexual relationships but gay men and lesbian women have also taken part successfully and without apparent difficulty.

We are mainly focused on sources of help for abusers rather than victims. There is relatively speaking masses of help available for female victims, and virtually none for men, victims or abusers. Contact information is available on the following page

Children are the main victims of domestic violence. A child is 4 times to 6 times more at risk of abuse than a women. A child may be at risk from a male or a female parenting figure or both.
In America approximately 62 % of child abuse is by women. In terms of deaths Ms Sandra Horley, CEO of REFUGE,  regularly reminds us that 2 women per week are killed by a partner or former partner - 8 women per month. She forgets to mention 6 children per month and 2.5 men. 

We started this work in 1995, unaware of the deep political motivations of radical feminism. RESPECT / DVIP via  radical feminist's obvious effort is to ensure that abuser programmes fail. When men fail radical feminists succeed. Our view is that when men fail, families (and 2.4 children) in very many cases fall into chaos. The Centre for Social Justice highlights many of the problems of  "Broken Britain" and the extensive damage caused by broken families. Broken families are a radical feminist goal, it follows from their mantra "all men are abusers and all women are victims." You can see and hear much more about the details of "Duluth", the abuser programme and the politics of radical feminism and the things of which you need to be wary of at this link.
"Rolling Programmes", "30 sessions", "pro-feminist", "power and control", "violence (only) against women", "holding men accountable", "denial", "minimisation", "gender". On the ground many of the people involved in the projects may well be very interested and willing to help people change their behaviour; the trouble is they have, perhaps unknowingly, (just as we were ignorant about the politics, too,) adopted a programme that does not address the real problems.
This is the link to the various programmes.

There are one or two independent programmes amongst the RESPECT membership, so not all merit this criticism, but you do need to be cautious because vast numbers of men drop out from Duluth or Duluth descendant programmes, typically over 75%. Imagine the disappointment of the abuser and the heart-ache for the family from that failure.This link opens to one man's personal account of his experiences at DVIP

Policy decisions regarding cases referred to TEMPER by Social Services in Birmingham can be found on page 7.

Cafcass buys into RESPECT's radical feminism in a "health and safety" kind of way. The abuser programmes they might fund and permit are for men only, (for which they will pay between £2000- and £2,500 - for a completed programme but they must follow the radical feminist "patriarchy", gender analysis, power and control stand-point. CAFCASS chooses to ignore that the evidence of 35 years in America demonstrates minimal gains, they are also content that there is no work available for female abusers. They somehow miss or ignore the fact that a child is virtually equally at risk from a mother or from a father.  A complete list of the courses CAFCASS recognises is available here and as much contact information as we can find for other projects, too, at the address two paragraphs above.

Research by Bristol University into a perpetrator programme in South Tyneside illustrates the Duluth problems graphically! 
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ARcVYKrhnJNhZGc2ZzI5enBfMTQxZzhrZmNqZG0&hl=en_GB

RELATE - Caution is still advised on a centre-by-centre basis, but I am delighted to say that  RELATE's services are now much more likely, as from August 2011,  to become couple orientated once again rather than radically feminist orientated - i.e. they seem to be returning to working appropriately with couples, using their enormous experience rather than cow-towing to radical feminism, and splitting couples as required by radical feminsim. Obviously RELATE, as an independent organisation, may work in any way they choose with clients.  Thankfully they are now using their 75 years of experience of couple counselling, and having the confidence of their own convictions rather than following the  " one size fits all" strategy designed by radical feminism, exercised via RESPECT to prevent couple counselling work. Clearly the pro-family and non- radical pro-feminist voices within RELATE are now gaining the courage of their convictions to counter that policy.
The statistics are given at the following link:

When RESPECT's membership programmes fail to engage with men, which the large majority very largely do, the men leave, frustrated, having learnt nothing or very little new.  CAFCASS makes membership of RESPECT and adhering to RESPECT'S former "Principles and minimum standards of practice" a condition for "approval" of this type of work.  County Councils are "advised" to do the same thing  by radical feminist dominated domestic violence forums in a similar way. The attempt is to force Britain into the same situation which has dominated America for 35 years - DULUTH and minimal  effective outcomes!

Much more sensible suggestions are available at this address.
http://www.springerpub.com/samples/9780826110817_chapter.pdf

They are very largely principals we have been following for the last 15 years.

The book: "Coordinating community responses to domestic violence",  Chapter: "components of Community Intervention Projects" , batterer intervention programmes" contains quotes you can read at  this address.
Jacqueline Campbell characterised these programmes as an attempt to create a firewall against therapeutic practices..... . This firewall was successfully built." Page 134. (Many other quotes are contained on page 6 of this website.) Radical feminists were and are worried that "therapeutic work" will undermine their potential income, for helping women. The Duluth abuser programme advocated by RESPECT delivered by DVIP and several others  is the "FIREWALL"  to prevent  effective, therapeutic work with abusers from taking place.

Radical feminists and politicians lured by the word "integrated" currently seek background  work to be undertaken in the radical feminist devised "power and control" model.  For the vast majority of cases "power and control" is not an issue! Emotion drives behaviour, not an overriding desire for "power and control".  How do we know? It is our experience and even the originator says so in the above book, the quote is on page.

Psychologists' report extract on a successful TEMPER client from 2002. The remainder of the report is on page 4

A Victim Empathy questionnaire. The most striking characteristic was his 'Don't Knows'. His responses were at variance with non-offending men. He showed very little appreciation of how the victim might have felt.
At current testing, there have been significant changes in his answers.    
Comment Mr W now presents as a man with averagely good self-esteem. He does not complain of emotional loneliness. He  has become considerably less guarded, tense, aggressive and impulsive. He is also much less hostile and mistrustful of others.   When I last saw Mr W I found that he had a range of personality problems characterised by impulsivity, aggression, poor perspective taking and lower than average empathic concern for others. His perspective taking ability and empathic concern for others has improved partly through maturation but also through the help he received on the Anger Management Programme he attended.   Mr W's personality profile has changed as he has matured and received treatment and he no longer exhibits the aggressive and impulsive tendencies which characterized his previous presentation.