|
There is never an excuse for any act of violence, by anyone to anyone: yet violence exists. There is never an excuse for crime of any kind: yet crime exists. Both remain issues that must be resolved, at both a personal and a societal level. Strictly speaking, violence or any criminal behaviour is a choice. In practice, however, it is generally not so much a choice as habitual learned behaviour in other words a non-choice or evasion of choice. If violence is learned behaviour, it can therefore be unlearned, and alternative, more constructive, behaviours learnt in its place. This philosophy forms the background to all non-punitive approaches to the problem of violence. The Duluth Wheel The Duluth Wheel map of violent and non-violent behaviour is one well-known example of such a methodology. It was devised by the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, Duluth, Minnesota, USA, as the core of a 'perpetrator' programme to help men convicted of domestic assault to modify their behaviour away from violence and towards mutual co-operation with others. The programme is intended to be facilitated by a group of peers who use the Wheel's 'map' to help participants identify their own violent behaviours, who consistently remind participants of their responsibility for reducing violence, and who model alternative behaviours and alternative solutions to conflict. The 'map' divides violence and abuse into eight categories: coercion and threats; intimidation; economic abuse; gender-privilege; isolation; using children; minimising, denying and blaming. The respective target behaviour for each category is: negotiation and fairness; non-threatening behaviour; economic partnership; respect; shared responsibility; trust and support; responsible parenting; honesty and accountability. Need for revision The programme has been somewhat more successful than previous punishment-centred approaches, but its methodology suffers from a number of serious flaws which inherently limit its validity and usefulness. In particular, it is unusable for resolving anything other than explicit male-on-female domestic violence - a relatively small proportion of the whole - and even for this its rigidly gendered approach is rarely constructive in practice. These structural problems in the Duluth methodology are addressed in a critique and revision section here. Guidelines and procedures for practical work based on the revised model are also presented, together with a detailed commentary on each section of the revised model, and a discussion on common perceptions of the problem of violence and abuse. Commentary The notes in this Commentary section are primarily addressed to persons interested in facilitating programmes based on the revised Duluth model. General notes - Notes on social context - Notes on gender - Notes on programme facilitation Notes on specific abuse-types The notes in this section focus attention on particular issues which may arise whilst addressing each category of abuse and/or violence in a programme based on the revised Duluth model. Within the descriptions, a firm emphasis is placed on abuse by females, and/or against males: as explained in Notes on gender, the purpose of this emphasis is solely to provide a balance to the often extreme gender-bias in most existing materials (particularly in feminist or 'pro-feminist' models of abuse and violence), so as to assist facilitators in developing an awareness of likely overall patterns within abusive interactions.
DISCUSSION Violence - a psychological perspective This revision of the original Duluth model is based on a psychological model of human behaviour. Its formal research background is derived from transpersonal psychology (including writers such as Sam Keen and Robert Johnson), from the documented histories of psychologically-based spiritual traditions (particularly Taoism, Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism), from the work of practitioners in the 'recovery movement' (particularly writers such as John Bradshaw), from certain feminist theorists (such as Germaine Greer, Nancy Friday, Starhawk [Miriam Simos] and Erin Pizzey), and from direct observation and practice. The basic principle of such a model is that it identifies violence and abuse as arising primarily from a single, simple psychological error: the belief that unpleasant feelings such as fear and the felt sense of powerlessness can be avoided by 'exporting' them to others through abuse and violence. In short, when any form of powerlessness - such as fear, or uncertainty - is felt, there is a tendency to attempt to prop up one's sense of self either by putting others down (violence) or by offloading responsibility for the issue onto others (abuse). In neither case does this social behaviour actually resolve the personal feeling of powerlessness: there is usually a short-lived sense of relief, but which is rapidly followed by a return of the original feelings (often increased in strength as a direct result of not having been faced), leading to a classic addictive cycle. As with other addictive behaviours, the only way out of the cycle is to re-address the issue at its actual base, in the personal experience of the individual. Whilst social support for the individual within this process is often both crucial and essential, socially-based 'solutions' cannot in themselves resolve the problem, and often serve instead only to exacerbate the underlying issues at a personal level. Violence and abuse are thus identified as arising from a human error, affecting, created by and maintained by all humans of all ages, races, societies, sexes, sexualities and social groups. As has been clearly indicated throughout human history, and particularly as documented in 'non-violent' spiritual traditions such as those of Tibetan Buddhism or the Quakers, there are no general exceptions to this principle. In particular, many common models of abuse and violence, such as those which define violence and abuse as exclusive characteristics of a particular sex or social group, are not only shown to be based on invalid assumptions, but are also, in themselves, inherently violent and abusive, particularly through the form defined by Duluth as 'Minimising, denying and blaming' - immediately negating many of the assertions made by such models. This perspective needs to be contrasted with the current politically-based approaches to the social problem of violence - which in turn, at present, are based primarily on feminist models of power and violence. Feminist models of violence From personal observation, reading and general discussion, there seem to be two main threads in feminist approaches to violence, both of them based on concepts of power rather than addressing the actual root issue of the felt experience of powerlessness. One thread is typified by writers such as Starhawk (The Spiral Dance and Dreaming The Dark), and emphasises the centrality of personal responsibility for power. Starhawk indicates that the only true source of power is 'power-from-within', as an expression of the individual's self and choice; whilst this is personal, the same power can be used to help others and, in turn, the self in finding that power, through constructive interactions which Starhawk terms 'power-with'. This is contrasted with 'power-over', the illusion of power created through the semblance of controlling others. Unfortunately, Starhawk did not complete the model with an understanding of 'power-u nder', the semblance of control created by manipulation and the artificial manufacture of guilt and blame. One reason for this omission may have been that whilst power-over is easily stereotyped as 'male violence', it is just as easy, and equally valid, to stereotype power-under as 'female violence' - a concept that would have been anathema in the obsessive climate of male-blame considered to be 'politically correct' at the time. Whatever the reason, the issue of 'power-under', especially in its female-on-female forms, has really only been addressed in feminist writing in fictional form, by novelists such as Helen Garner (The First Stone) and Margaret Attwood (Cats Eye) - superb explorations and personal observations, but unfortunately without providing a firm underpinning of theory. The work of Starhawk and her colleagues is further weakened by an inadequate understanding of the roles of competition and cooperation. These are, once again, often crudely stereotyped as 'male' and 'female' respectively, and again crudely defined respectively as entirely destructive and entirely constructive. Yet in practice both are entirely essential: neither is inherently constructive or destructive, and neither is the sole and exclusive characteristic of one sex or the other. For example, some form of competition, if only 'against' the self, is usually crucial in providing stimulus to develop skills and to resolve fears; whereas a veneer of cooperation can easily mask destructive manipulation to co-opt others' time and energy without their clear consent. A functional model of power relies far more on a clear distinction between power-from-within and power-with versus power-over and power-under; the forms through which these energies are expressed - such as through apparent competition and apparent co-operation - are generally of lesser concern. The second main thread in feminist theory on power and violence avoids making any such distinctions: instead, power is defined strictly in social terms, on gendered boundaries, with men defined as having power over women, and women having little or no power at all. Men are assumed to have total power through the nebulous concept of 'the patriarchy', from which women, by definition, are expressly and intentionally excluded. In this type of model, power is essentially equated with violence: unlike the Starhawk model, there is no constructive aspect, and little or no concept of personal responsibility, especially by the supposed 'victim' class - women, in this case. Historically, feminist models of this type, which were developed in the 1960s and 1970s by theorists such as Shulamith Firestone, were adapted directly from theories on racism in Marxist 'revolutionary' groups such as the Black Power movement. As a result, most classic feminist concepts on issues such as sexism and 'the patriarchy' are essentially invalidated by fundamental flaws inherent in all Marxist-derived theory - particularly with regards to its concepts of power, which are essentially based on a crude and simplistic model which defines all interpersonal interactions exclusively in terms of 'win/lose' ("it is in the nature of power that it is impossible for one to have more without others having less"). Although such models of power are easy to understand, and hence seductively easy to present within a political context, in practice they have only very limited usefulness: they are rarely constructive at the social level, and are, at best, highly misleading at the level of individual choice and expression. The Black Power movement - at least initially - did arise from a situation of genuine oppression; yet the same could not be said for the middle-class feminist students who so stridently declaimed the 'sexist oppression of women by the patriarchy'. In the absence of real evidence, self-centred fantasies about 'oppression' - developed primarily as a means of avoiding personal responsibility in the face of massive social change - could only be maintained by active falsification, active invention, and active exaggeration - all of which dominate almost all feminist theory on violence to this day. It is unfortunately a truism that feminist theory currently dominates all public policy on violence - particularly inter-gender violence. So total is this domination of theory that domestic violence is described almost exclusively in gender-based terms, and several attempts have been made (such as by Australian politician Anne Sherry) to formally define it in law as 'a specific women-only problem'. Yet it is a sad indictment of feminist theory and practice that it is extremely rare to find any self-declared 'feminist study of domestic violence' that is based on anything resembling a valid methodology - one which is defensible or sound, either in an objective mode, such as those of statistics or scientific research, or even in a subjective mode such as that of psychology or the social sciences. Almost all studies, especially those from a supposed 'feminist research methodology' framework, suffer from fundamental methodological errors such as arbitrary assumptions, arbitrary selectivity, unwarranted induction (reasoning from the particular to the general) and - far, far too often - blatant circular reasoning. For example, it is still argued that since most of the available studies have researched only women victims, therefore only women are victims, hence support facilities should be made available only to women, and that only women should be studied in future: it is surprising, and disturbing, to discover that many self-styled theorists and most policymakers fail to understand that this reasoning is entirely circular. Faced with the fact that the few studies which do research the experience of both sexes, and which do have fully defensible methodologies, indicate beyond any reasonable doubt that domestic violence is not a gender-problem per se, most policymakers still seem to want to shout it down, or silence it, or dismiss it as 'anti-feminist', or simply ignore it - anything, it seems, rather than simply face the fact that the fact is fact. Yet it is fact that, in reality, almost all of the supposed 'facts' about domestic violence are the result of little more than wishful thinking, prejudice, blame, hysteria and hyperbole. For example, the only factually correct figure in a press-release by Australian politician Dr Carmen Lawrence for 'National Stop Violence Against Women Day' described the amount of money being provided to 'selected women's organisations' to spread the press-release's misinformation: all the supposed 'shameful facts about violence against women' in the release, compared against the sources subsequently provided by Dr Lawrence's own office, were exaggerated by twenty times or more - as was the case with the release's claim that 'violence against women accounts for 70% of all police time'. To give another example, a much-quoted 'study' of hospital statistics (Stark and Flitcraft) claimed that 50% of all women attending emergency clinics were 'probable' victims of domestic violence: yet this figure was achieved only by classifying all upper-body injuries, including all car accidents, as domestic violence. Subsequent studies consistently show a figure barely one tenth of that claimed by Stark and Flitcraft: yet it is the higher - largely invented - figure which is still used in documents on public policy. One Australian study carried out to check the Stark and Flitcraft figure (Routley, Sherrard et al., Domestic Violence: Patterns and Indicators, Monash University Accident Research Centre, December 1994) showed a maximum victim-rate figure for female hospital attendees at just under 5%, and claimed a female-male ratio of approximately 5:1, with an acknowledgement also that "the more serious the injury, the more likely the victim was to be male". Yet even this supposed 5:1 ratio is illusory, the result of basic statistical errors and an indefensible methodological 'fudge'. The study's published base-data in fact indicate a ratio of just over 3:1 female: male in the 'positive' category' (explicit domestic violence), 1:2 female:male in the 'probable' category, and just under 1:3 female:male in the 'suggestive' category - indicating that, if anything, males are actually more likely than females to be victims of domestic violence. Despite this, the authors arbitrarily applied to the second and third categories their (incorrect) 5:1 female:ratio from the 'positive' category - giving as their only reason for doing so "that these [nominal] results were not what we expected". In the simplified report on their study published in the more generally available magazine Hazard, the authors asserted that the supposed 5:1 female:male ratio had been explicitly identified in all three categories, even though they knew this was clearly not the case (especially for the latter two categories); yet no correction was issued, and journalists still routinely quote the erroneous ratio as fact. Even more disturbing is that, in a methodological sense, this study is one of the best available in Australia: its methodological flaws, although fundamental, are actually quite minor by comparison with those of most other available 'studies' in this field. The result is that, as a society, we face serious difficulties in trying to collate an accurate picture of the overall problem of violence. These difficulties are greatly compounded by the unnecessary, unwarranted and largely inappropriate politicisation of the problem. The politics of violence resolution >From a psychological or family-therapy perspective, the problem of violence is relatively simple to describe, as a failure of individuals to fully manage their own responsibilities to themselves and others; and is a matter which is relatively simple (though rarely easy!) to address, through challenging and assisting individuals to learn to manage those responsibilities. A central theme in this is that there is neither need, nor usefulness, to focus exclusively or even primarily on the individual's membership of a particular grouping, such as race, sex, sexual orientation, socio-economic class or whatever. In this it parallels, in a wider context, Germaine Greer's famous dictum that "feminism is... about what it is to explore all the possibilities of being fully human, in a woman's body and from a woman's perspective": the aim here would be to assist each individual to explore all the possibilities and responsibilities of being fully human, in their own body (nature) and from their own perspective (nurture/experience). Within this therapeutic perspective, it is fully acknowledged that there are tendencies within particular groupings to express abuse in some forms more than others, and to regard certain types of abuse as more acceptable than others. In many working-class environments, for example, physical abuse is socially regarded as more acceptable - or at least understandable - than emotional abuse; in most 'western' middle-class environments, the opposite is true. In many cases, social control is maintained through socially-condoned violence: in most 'western' societies this takes the form of abstract or indirect punishments such as fines or the threat of imprisonment; whereas in many 'traditional' societies, such as Australian aboriginal culture, the social violence can be direct and physical, such as beatings (by club-wielding women) or, in some cases, a spear-thrust - potentially fatal, especially in the case of the serrated spear traditionally used to punish a woman convicted of meddling in her children's marriage. It is also understood that, in conformance with what is now known of sex-differences in brain structure and body structure, male violence tends to be physical, brief and direct, whereas female violence tends to be verbal and social, repeated often over long periods of time, and with a very strong tendency towards third-party abuse. Whether socially condoned or not, all of these behaviours are considered, within a therapeutic context, to be violent and abusive, and hence destructive, both to individuals and to the society as a whole. It is therefore considered to be the responsibility both of the individual and of the wider society to fully address and resolve the tendency to 'solve' conflicts through violence; and also the explicit and self-acknowledged responsibility of the therapist to assist in this process wherever practicable. This therapeutic perspective largely ignores social and other groupings, and - since it regards boundaries between groups as potential sources of abuse and violence - seeks to empower individuals and groups to bridge gaps between them wherever practicable. In that sense, this perspective is essentially non-political. By contrast, most common feminist perspectives on violence and abuse are exclusively political: and as with all Marxist-derived perspectives, their focus is entirely on 'other-blame' (on men as a overall group, in this case) and purported 'victimhood'. The practical problems this creates are exacerbated by another echo of Marxist theory within political feminism, in this case the adaptation of the mediaeval concept of the 'just war' in the common feminist claim that the supposed 'oppression' of women justifies arbitrary violence against individual men, and against men as a group. In 'feminist therapy' theory, for example, abuse against arbitrary males is considered a necessary requirement for the empowerment of women; and most 'western' states now have an equivalent of the Australian government's 'Office For The Status Of Women', whose primary task appears to be to condone, promote or even exhort such excuses for female violence. In reality, however, there is no defensible evidence for the purported exclusive 'victimhood' of women and the inherent abusiveness of men alone. The nearest entities resembling evidence for such a claim are a mass of known-inadequate (and in many cases known-false or even known-falsified) 'studies', and childish stereotypes such as a nursery-rhyme about 'sugar and spice and all things nice' versus 'slugs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails'. It is, bluntly, a myth, created from nothing more than feminist vanity and self-dishonesty. Yet since priority funding for a myriad of feminist organisations and women-only or women-centred services and policies is dependent on maintaining social belief in a myth of female-only 'oppression', enormous political pressure is applied in order to conceal the reality of female violence, and to keep attention focussed rigidly on the supposedly inherent evils of males and maleness. It is well known, for example, that the scale, and even the fact, of violence in lesbian relationships has been systematically concealed at a political level: despite this, it is now known that women in lesbian (and particularly pseudo-lesbian - heterophobic rather than homophilic) relationships suffer a greater risk of domestic violence than their heterosexual counterparts. In some ways this fact is unsurprising, since men receive extensive social conditioning in management of aggression, whilst women receive none - a problem which has been greatly exacerbated in recent years by state-funded feminist organisations' active promotion of female violence. In this context, an alternate and more accurate term for this 'political pressure' is, simply, violence - conscious and, for most part, intentional violence, against men and, indirectly, against other women. To say that this is not constructive, and does nothing whatsoever towards resolving the real problem of violence, is something of an understatement. And yet by its nature this kind of violence is not only addictive, but in a way actually 'necessary' - or so it would seem to those whose self-definition depends on the self-dishonesty needed to maintain this vastly destructive type kind of social myth. To put it bluntly, once again, the standard blame-based model of violence common in current feminist politics is not only inherently abusive, and inherently destructive, but can only be maintained by peo ple who refuse in any way to face the fact of their own violence, to themselves and to others. In the design of the original Duluth Wheel, for example, this type of behaviour is expressed in the model's inherent third-party abuse and its failure to acknowledge its own 'minimising, denying and blaming' of male victims of abuse. From a psychological perspective, the self-dishonesty behind this behaviour is quite common, particularly amongst social activists, in whom it is generally acted out as the 'drive' and urgency to social action; but the fact remains that it is inherently dishonest, it is inherently violent, and it is ultimately destructive, for everyone - and that pretending otherwise, as is required by most current feminist-dominated politics, does not help anyone at all. Another potential problem arises from the fact that feminism, by definition, is inherently sexist: by definition, it addresses only the needs, concerns, feelings and fears of women. This is not in itself a problem, as is indicated by Germaine Greer's comment above: an awareness of self as 'woman' is an entirely necessary part of the process of women's empowerment. A problem arises only if, once again, a 'win/lose' concept is applied, and it is deemed that such empowerment is dependent on the disempowerment of others - in this case usually men, but also in some contexts other women (so-called 'equal opportunity for women' has been essentially a middle-class phenomenon, with their housework taken over by underpaid working-class women: hence the phrase "one woman's equality is another woman's poverty"). By definition, such an approach is inherently abusive and/or violent, and ultimately results in the disempowerment not only of the woman concerned, but also of those around her. In such cases, if - as in most current feminist politics - there is a refusal to acknowledge responsibility in that failure of empowerment, and instead exclusively blame others for the failure, the stage is set for an inevitable downward spiral. The only way out of that spiral requires scrupulous attention to honesty and self-honesty: qualities which, as far as the problem of violence is concerned, are conspicuous only by their absence in current feminist politics. The results are evident in all 'western' societies - and immensely destructive. There should be no doubt that, in certain cases, feminist models of violence can indeed be useful in designing appropriate responses to the problem of violence. However, it is essential to understand that they are inherently sexist - hence inherently limited in scope and applicability - and all too often are based on arbitrary belief-systems and theoretical models that have little or no basis in fact. The feminist politicisation of violence, and its obsessive focus on male-blame, has served only to obfuscate the real facts, and exacerbate the real issues therapists and other practitioners currently face. For real success to occur in resolving this real social problem, it is now essential that a therapeutic rather than political approach be generally adopted. Despite the current dominance of feminist theory in the politics of violence resolution, practitioners now need to to understand that feminist models of violence, whilst potentially useful, currently tend to create more difficulties than they resolve - and in some cases, for cynical reasons of politics alone, are intended to do just that. For these reasons, feminist and 'pro-feminist' policies on social violence should be assessed with great care before any action is taken to implement them, and should never be used as the sole basis for any practical programme for violence resolution. http://www.ozemail.com.au/~prussia/violence/partner/duluth/index.html
|
