Understanding a person who has used violence is the first step to helping them
In honour of White Ribbon NZ this November, RISE is doing a month-long series of articles, videos, and Facebook posts to address one question we often get asked: Do stopping violence courses work? Follow the series through November here on our website, on our Facebook page, and on YouTube.
This is the first article in the series. Read the second article in the series about the Non-Violence Programme.
It is likely that most people who haven’t personally experienced family violence are introduced to it by reading a horrific headline:
New Zealand has one of the worst rates of family violence and intimate-partner violence in the world and most of what we see are headlines like these. It’s understandable to empathise with a victim and wish the worst for a perpetrator.
“As human beings, we look for someone to blame,” says RISE General Manager Dee Cresswell. “It helps us process the horror. But none of us knows the entirety of the situation that took place. While it’s easy to take a black and white view that there is a victim and there is an abuser – there’s good and there’s bad – so often the story underneath is far more complicated.”
RISE is a specialist family violence organisation, the only one in Nelson Tasman that works with victims and perpetrators of family violence. Contracted by the Ministry for Social Development, the Ministry of Justice, Oranga Tamariki, and the Department of Corrections, RISE clinicians are well-trained experts in the field of family violence. They are some of the few people who get to the bottom of these very complicated stories with the aim to help violent people, mostly men, learn a different way.
“The answer most societies have is to punish these men, lock them in prison or take them away from their families,” says Dee. “In New Zealand, we’ve done this for decades and yet we still have this incredibly high rate of family violence. Clearly what we have been doing has not worked. We have to do something different, we have to do better by these men.”
Rethinking ‘stopping violence’
While the most awful news stories grab attention, raise ire, and get social media clicks, Dee and the team of 20 who work across Nelson, Motueka, and Kaikoura provide a variety of courses and programmes to help people affected by family violence. Some programmes are for victims including children as young as five and some are for perpetrators. The first stop for the latter is a 16-week group programme that most people think of as a ‘stopping violence’ programme.
“I think the term ‘stopping violence programme’ has set us up to fail in some ways,” Dee says. “Those of us working in this field don’t call it that anymore because we know that no one attends a programme for 16 weeks and goes home completely fixed. Life just doesn’t work that way.”
Dee says these expectations that a ‘stopping violence’ course should cure everything is doing more harm than good.
“Think about how long it takes you to break a habit you’ve wanted to change. Adults who learned as children that violence is a way to communicate can’t make drastic changes in four short months. In fact, it’s almost too much to ask of them. We have to be honest about this if we’re going to really help because otherwise we are jailing people who want to change but just don’t know how to do it.”
RISE clinicians will tell you that most men who come to RISE suffer from long-term trauma that takes time to unpack.
“That’s not an excuse for their behaviour,” Dee says. “They should be appropriately responsible and accountable for their behaviour in a justice system. But the reality is our non-violence programme and those like it around the country are only the first step. It takes time to understand what you’ve done, to become self-aware, and then to actively change your behaviour.”
The experience of a person who uses violence
When you first come to RISE as a perpetrator, it’s either mandated or self-referred. Mandated clients come to us following a Police action that results in a court order or a protection order. A self-referred client comes voluntarily, although for some this might be a soft form of a mandate according to RISE Clinician Dr Victor MacGill.
“We sometimes call this ‘wife-mandated’ because the partner is using one of our programmes as a final effort to bring about changes in the relationship,” Victor says. “Other times it’s a lawyer who said it’s a good idea if he proactively takes our course or maybe there’s a restorative justice process. No matter how they come to us, there’s a lot to uncover in the first assessment meeting that everyone attends prior to starting the programme.”
The initial assessment can take up to five hours over several meetings, but often takes less. Most new clients begin their assessment by putting up walls, being resistant to change, and perhaps feeling judged about the event(s) that brought them to RISE.
Dee says starting off this way is common and, as a new client transitions towards entering the group programme, the clinician guides them forward.
“The aim from these assessments is to build a relationship with this new person. The client starts out as the accused person, feeling a form of judgement while talking about intimate details in front of a stranger. But our clinicians are trained for these conversations and seek to listen first while building up a rapport. Each clinician has their own training and approach and by the end of the assessment, their goal is to map the event that brought them to us and help them prepare for the group.”
Alcohol and drugs
Clinicians estimate easily over half the incidents that involve a client referred to RISE involve alcohol and/or drugs. When this is the case, clinicians say continued use can affect a person’s progress through the programme and their ability to make a success of it.
It’s important, however, for a clinician to distinguish between drug or alcohol use and drug or alcohol dependence/addiction, says RISE Clinician Michiel van Boekhout.
“We often know there is alcohol use [from Police reports], not necessarily addiction, and that the use has been part of their abusive behaviour. Sometimes it takes awhile for clients to acknowledge this. Other times their lives are so otherwise chaotic that they don’t make progress on their use of alcohol and so they don’t engage in a consistent way with our programme. They need to be willing to engage with the alcohol or drug use as well as with their violent behaviour.”
When clinicians determine there is an addiction present, they respond swiftly.
“If there are obvious addictions that are current and affecting the person or the whānau,” Michiel says, “we could refer the person for treatment first. In some cases these services are going to have more of an impact on someone than we are and it’s important to be flexible when discovering this information.”
Mental health issues
The presence of mental health issues could also factor into a new client’s ability to succeed at RISE. Depression or anxiety or more serious difficulties that stem from personal trauma need to be dissected a bit more to determine how a new client should manage them in coordination with their participation at RISE.
Victor MacGill co-facilitated a group earlier this year where he noticed one of the group participants seemed to use language more common with small children than with adults.
“He was extremely resistant to admitting to the most basic of emotions. I felt like he was speaking as if he were four-years old. He couldn’t unpack what he was like as a child and instead focussed on blaming everyone else for all that was wrong in his life. In my experience, he was not in touch with his emotions and we were dealing with someone who would have to do more therapy, more exploration into his childhood and traumas, before he could even begin to address the use of violence that brought him to us. Of course he would have to want to do that therapy.
“Sometimes the course ends and a person like this just hasn’t made the leap yet. There isn’t much we can do if a person doesn’t even want to engage. We can hope we’ve planted a seed for the future.”
It’s about changing behaviours
For someone to be successful in the Non-Violence Programme, a great first start is to become more self-aware. Sometimes this happens by the end of the programme, and other times it takes longer, even after the programme is over.
RISE Clinician and co-facilitator of the programme Mark Banks says he looks for small changes in group discussions that might mean very big changes in thinking.
“Group members start the programme most times saying things like ‘she’s vindictive,’ ‘she’s the problem,’ or ‘she has something against me.’ There is often a lot of blame from the mandated group members, in particular, in their first few weeks in the programme.
“It took six months for one guy I’ve been working with to just stop blaming his partner. He finally decided something needed to change and started used language like, ‘I need to change.’ Now that is progress. That is the kind of thing that gets me excited in this work.”
Mark says he has continued working with that client for more than a year and only now is he getting to the stage where Mark sees potential behaviour change, not just a change in language.
“That’s a whole year for one guy to make a very big step. But we know that’s a success. Now if the wider community, the general public, would also see that, we might hold more compassion to give these men the space they need to succeed.”
… Next week
Next week we’ll look in detail at the RISE Non-Violence Programme, the curriculum, and what participants discuss and learn.
Dee Cresswell, RISE General Manager
Dr Victor Macgill, RISE Clinician
Michiel van Boekhout, RISE Clinician
Mark Banks, RISE Clinician