This page is being re-written to include observations about the feminist dominated agenda of this work which may not be apparent to the general public and professionals and also to alert individuals to the experiences which they may encounter in undertaking a pro-feminsit course, which we view as potentially compromising the safety of children and partners because of the very high drop-out rates associated with the programmes, which in turn are the results of many severely compromising features of the programmes. We could summarise some of these points as follows:
1) The Duluth Programme, into which virtually all of the work in America has been forced, and on which most of the work in Britain is based, and into which all programmes UK programmes are being gradually funnelled  is wrongly focussed - on patriarchy and power and control. 30 years of usage in America has demonstrated no real measurable change in the "male perpetrators" taking part. As recently as 2005 efforts were being made by well-meaning individuals to add something "meaningful" to the content of the Duluth programme - in the form of "emotional" content. 
2) The programme has no idea how changes may be brought about other than by "supevision". On a recorded radio programme the person mainly responsible for the accreditaton process in Britain  likened giving up violence and abusiveness to giving up alcohol or drugs - when the habit-sustaining chemical dependency would be..........   Neil?  R2D2 is a long way from proven, if you have even heard of it!
3) It is deliberately overlong, resulting in very high drop-out rates. Dropping out is likely to increase the tensions within a couple relationship, which are likely to lead to the massive increase in "definable" Intimate terrorism - which Professor Michael P Johnson predicts goes up from 7 per thousand in men before separation  to 22% of men in separating couples! And there is a similar, although very much smaller increases in female "intimate terrorism", up from 5 per thousand to 5.4%.
4) It fits a feminist only prescription of domestic violence.
5) It has no theoretical background which matches anything other than feminist dogmas - power and control and patriarchy. There are, of course patriarchal societies around the world, just as there are (very many fewer) matriarchal cultures.
6) As a vehicle for bringing about change in domestic abusers it is as useful today as a penny farthing bike is as a means of transport. "Power and control" would be the big wheel at the front, equality, the little wheel at the back!

Words in  bold and italics are attributable to David Eggins.
Pro-feminst politics in this field have attempted to dominate the agenda with what is, in my view, arrogantly described as "best practice".

Vastly more men drop-out than complete even the best run of these Duluth programmes in UK, the figures are given on page 3. Men that drop-out are deemed by researchers to be much more dangerous than men that complete a programme. The almost complete denial of the existence of female abuse of men and the utter lack of any idea about how to approach that work by RESPECT, give clues to the agenda under which RESPECT works. The current "internal arguments" are all about "violent retaliation", and whether it is "legal" violent retaliation  or "illegal"  retaliation. 

The whole purpose of most Duluth -type projects as seen by RESPECT is to "hold men accountable" for their violence, they run an "intervention" project. To intervene means to come between, to separate. This does not mean the projects they "accredit" will undertake any meaningful work with the men!  "Holding them accountable" is undertaken to give the woman a chance to flee and separate - when the woman has fled the figures of pro-feminist Professor Michael P Johnson demonstrate that intimate terrorism - mainly by men, but also by women, "goes through the roof". Deliberate policies of separating all men and women, whenever possible, actually increases Intimate terrorism, rather than decreasing violence. Feminist policies claim to be reducing and stopping domestic violence - but they are having a paradoxical effect! That means they are increasing what they say they are trying to decrease!  Recorded female violence against men has also increased from "less than 5%" 15 years ago to "14.9%" as reported.

The roots of RESPECT are DVIP. The roots of DVIP are the Hammersmith and Fulham Domestic Violence forum.

Politics For a long time I have struggled with the feminist politics of Duluth and Domestic abuse as presented in UK. A book I bought for £26 odd recently seems to have explained many of my outstanding questions: the title, Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence Lessons from Duluth and Beyond  - Melanie Shepherd , Ellen Pence.  

Many things about the way RESPECT goes about it's Home Office supported work amazed / dumbfounded me really, not least the enormous drop-out rates of men attending their "accredited" or soon to be accredited Abuser work, those mentioned on page 1, for example.   Naively I thought that the objective of work with abusers would be to "succeed" in changing the behaviour of the men, or helping the men to change their behaviour. It clearly isn't as far as Respect is concerned. It's purpose is simply to hold the men accountable.      However, research by Gondolf clearly states that men that drop out or courses are potentially more dangerous than those that never start them!
 
P 259  2 paras from bottom
"Support for DVIP, in Hammersmith and Fulham, the Domestic Violence Intervention Project was given in 1991 on the understanding that they also offered parallel work with women, whether or not their partners were participants in the men's programme  and that they did not attempt to compete for income from sources traditionally accessed by the refuges." 

That formed the basis of the way abuser work should be carried out and that, unchanged, is the agenda being forced through via the Minister for Women and Equality based in The Home Office and fronted by RESPECT and very heavily supported by Women's Aid with all aspects researched  by .....  you guessed it!  

So let us just take a few things from the above book and the fascinating insight it offers into the machinations of the world of feminist politics.   In the face of all statistics, more of which later, you have to consider that the feminist view of domestic violence is always and only about men's violence to women. 

 Ellen Pence wrote, p 28: "He does it for the power, he does it for control, he does it because he can - these were the jingles that, in our opinion, said all there was to say".  P 28 - 8 lines from bottom.   "By determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with. Like those we were criticising, we reduced our analysis to a psychological universal truism. The DAIP staff - like the therapist insisting it was an anger control problem, or the judge wanting to see it as an alcohol problem, or the defense attorney arguing that it was a defective wife problem - remained undaunted by the differences in our theory and the actual experiences of those we were working with. We all engaged in ideological practices and claimed them to be neutral observations"  
"I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over a partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to the men in groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my co-workers. Eventually we realised that we were finding what we had predetermined to find."  

The above is the truism upon which Respect inspired Duluth-type  work in Britain is based.   I suggest that whole basis of its concept has been very significantly undermined by the above recognition, Ellen Pence was afterall the woman that constructed the abuser programme.   We might look at the attempt to bring much greater safety to our families, and to women as being something worthwhile; after all, Britain, as a sea-going nation has always culturally had the notion "women and children first" . But when work with abusers is so very poorly undertaken, (23 men of 230!)  a woman's safety is not enhanced, on the contrary her safety is placed in much greater danger because such a high proportion of the men involved dropout of the work, and are going to be additionally frustrated by the drop-out. The reasons they dropout will be many but fundamentally the roots of their problem will have been utterly and totally ignored, because the power and control agenda, is still essentially the only focus.   The safety of children is correspondingly also thus ignored and perhaps even further endangered, because although the very strong inference is that men are the only abusers, and hence of children, in fact 62% of abuse of children is at the hand s of women, for whatever reasons.   The Duluth abuser model was misconceived from the start. The misconception has at least been recognised, although America is entirely "trapped" by it. Nevertheless, in Briatin every attempt is being made by feminists to bring the foetus to a full term, stillbirth.  

P 143 "The emergence of lesbian and gay battering as an issue (Renzetti 1992, 1997) poses another challenge for the pro-feminist batterer intervention field. There is much new research in this area, including surveys indicating that the rate of domestic violence is similar to or higher in the gay and lesbian communities than in the heterosexual community."

The counter argument is that the samples were unreliable - just like the examples of male dominated abuse  - taken from women in Refuges.  

P 143 At one level, activists who believe that patriarchal values are the fundamental impulse behind male battering  .., are challenged to accept that women or gay men can have significant violence directed at intimates.  ( Not to mention women!) . A more realistic view is that male dominance is but one potent reinforcer .. male dominance is a central focus because it has a cultural base ..  

In a patricarchal society it is often pragmatic for disadvantaged groups to speak as victims, first it may be the only voice allowed, second it allows groups to press for social change without appearing to challenge the underlying structure power arrangements. But although the moral position of victim may be a politically strategic one for battered women it is also a politically precarious one.   P 180

P 188
Incomplete treatment is a critical issue for the men on the programme component of the coordinated community response. Most batterer programmes experience drop-out rates ranging from 40% to 60%  (Gondolf 1997)    Athough attitudes and emotional states may be an important part of the change process programmes ultimately must determine whether abuse has ended.   P 197

P199
"Violence by women. The arrest of women who have used violence against their partners has become a significant problem in recent years. "However, the crucial issue here is not the dearth of female batterer programmes, but whether these women should be labelled batterers in the first place.  The hasty attempt to equate men and women who have used physical force against intimate partners to batterers stems from the misinterpretation of the concept of battering itself"   p 199

Although each violent episode of  battering may look like idiosyncratic outbursts of uncontrolled anger, stringed together, such incidences form a pattern of coercion. Furthermore . Battering looms as a systematic course of action rather than the peculiar behaviours of a few demented individuals"    

P 216 Little systematic research has been focused on women who use violence.   Unfortunately many practitioners in the field have confused all violence by women, regardless of their antecedents, motivations and consequences, as battering.

P217 Gender sensitivity cannot be sacrificed to achieve uniformity of response in domestic violence intervention work. The predominant services around the country focus on assisting the victims, thereby leaving no room for the inclusion of abusive women.  

Why not?  If you strive for equality you are entitled to equal condemnation for the same behaviour! If you espouse equality then equal services have to be provided for both men and women, and gay men and lesbian women, too!

p. 218 b A critical view of violence by women: "Thus, in formulating an intervention programme for women in heterosexual relationships who have assaulted their partners, the following must be considered:
1     Since the majority of women have been and are being battered, it is important to address the issue of battering and control.
2     Since the justice system tends to focus on incidents of violence, it is likely that a woman's violence will be viewed in segments rather than in their contextual entirety. Therefore it is important to train appropriate personnel to understand women's use of violence holistically and contextually. 3      3       Frequently, alcohol or drug abuse plays a significant role in violence of any kind. The issue of substance abuse needs to be addressed in women's intervention programmes.
4        Exploring behavioural alternatives to violence in any given situation must be given in any intervention programme.
5        Issues related to race, class, ethnicity, nationality and residency status in the United States must be incorporated in the curriculum.  

Awareness of the gender dynamic in domestic conflicts is leading the community intervention projects such as DAIP to incorporate greater sensitivity towards perpetrators by contextualising their actions. A step towards this is to replace the mandatory "flat" arrest policy by "primary aggressor" language. "

In plain language we will include in a female abuser programme 3 aspects (1,2,3,) which are not included in male abuser programmes. We must train the police to recognise that the "primary aggressor" may only be a man because a woman is not capable of "battering" a man.