Building Better Relationships Project

Interrogating the ‘black box’ of a statutory domestic violence perpetrator programme

Overview

Domestic abuse is a global issue which disproportionately effects women and girls. There are many advocacy services that support women to leave abusive relationships. But it is widely agreed that it is perpetrators who must be tackled, not least because many will repeat the same behaviour in other intimate relationships.

Domestic violence perpetrator programmes seek to support men in changing their abusive behaviour. These are both voluntary and mandated. However, there is disagreement about whether they work, and little consensus about how their effectiveness should be measured. Random control trials that measure programme effectiveness in terms of reduced violence across experimental and control groups are often considered the gold standard. But such designs do not tell us how, or why they may work for some and not others.

My ESRC funded PhD research examined the criminal justice programme Building Better Relationships (BBR). BBR is an accredited Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) programme for heterosexual men in England and Wales who have been convicted of a domestic abuse offence and identified as suitable to attend. BBR uses a combination of emotion management techniques to reduce the potential for impulsive actions and cognitive skills to challenge problematic and bias thinking that underpin justifications for violence. In short, it is cognitive behavioural in its approach.

In doing my research, I wanted to understand how, rather than if, domestic violence perpetrator programmes (DVPPs) work to identify what it is that abusive men need to help them build and sustain non-violent/abusive, egalitarian and healthier relationships. I set out to explore how BBR works, how change unfolds, upon what this is contingent, and what factors may facilitate or hinder this process. This meant exploring the individual lives of the men attending BBR to understand what motivated their violence and abuse and to examine whether this was aligned with the BBR theory of change that underpins the programme structure and aims. It also meant listening to what practitioners said about their experiences of implementing and delivering BBR, the practical and emotional difficulties they faced, and what they said should be improved to help men to build better relationships. I was also interested in what motivated facilitators to do this work, whether they themselves had experienced abuse, and if so, how, and to what end this experiential knowledge shaped their practice. These issues were also examined within the context of Transforming Rehabilitation and how the part-privitisation of probation services had exacerbated some of the difficulties they faced.

Method of inquiry

The research was conducted between 2017 – 2020 with the period of fieldwork lasting five months between August – December 2018. Follow up interviews (where possible) and a workshop were undertaken between six and twelve months later. Interviews were undertaken with ten men attending BBR from two parallel cohorts across two sites, eight facilitators, two women’s safety workers, and a practice manager. The main thesis is overall limited to facilitators and six men from just one site. This allowed for an in-depth cohort study, although observations across both cohorts were included. The views of the women’s safety workers will also be written about elsewhere but you can read about some comments they made which I presented as a poster at the ESRC Postgraduate Summer Showcase in 2019.

I used Appreciative Inquiry as the research design which has ordinarily been used for organisational development (Cooperrider and Srivastra, 1987). It has subsequently been adapted to research relationships, diversity and inequalities in prison and for exploring probation practice (Lavis et al., 2017, Liebling, 2015, Cowburn and Lavis, 2013; Grant and McNeill, 2014;Liebling; 1999). Victoria Lavis from The Appreciative Partnership developed some bespoke training for me to apply this methodology within the context of my study and I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in using this in their own research.

AI is an applied methodology which involves four key phases:

  • Discovery – identifies best practice and peak performances.
  • Dreaming – invites the interviewee to imagine how things might be improved, with both imagined resources and those which have worked in the past.
  • Design – invites participants to plan their service drawing upon the relationships and resources identified in the previous stages.
  • Destiny – represents the phase in which these changes can be managed and sustained over time.

The research involved various strands of data collection including:

  • Five months’ onsite observations – usually twice a week.
  • Informal discussions.
  • Analysis of presentence reports and programme reviews.
  • In-depth interviews.

The views and experiences of practitioners and the men who attended BBR were gathered through the application of two narrative interview methods – the Free Association Narrative Interview method (FANIM) (Hollway and Jefferson, 2013, 2000) and interview questions formulated on the principles of Appreciative Inquiry. The former invited participants to tell their stories in ways that privileged what mattered most to them and is premised upon the assumption that the meaning and motivation underlying the told narratives are best uncovered through ‘spontaneous association’ and the researcher should be attentive to the inconsistencies that are found in the account:

This is a radically different conception of meaning because free associations follow an emotional rather than a cognitively derived logic. Once we follow that logic, the result is a fuller picture than would otherwise have emerged, offering richer and deeper insights into a person’s unique meanings

(Hollway and Jefferson, 2013:141).

The appeal of FANIM for me was that it allowed for the expression of emotions that have been written out of much criminal justice policy, discourse, and practice (Knight et al., 2016). This method provided the permission that the men and practitioners needed to freely express their frustrations, the many difficulties they faced, their need to be appreciated, and to have their fears and performance recognised so that they could be nurtured and learned from.

In anticipation of such expressed difficulties, appreciative questions were formulated to explore specific areas of delivery and narratives of change which sought to appreciate the best of what was, what is, and ‘dreaming’ about what could be in DVPP attendance and implementation. Appreciative conversations seek to engage research participants in discussions that look for solutions, instead of pursuing negative spirals. This often involves reframing or ‘flipping’ negative responses such as asking them to ‘imagine the opposite is true’, what resources were needed for this to happen, and what it would ‘look’ and ‘feel like’ if this were so:

The vital component in this stage of AI research is the researcher’s role in the delivery of the questions. AI is achieved thorough the development of appreciative conversations; these place the participant at the heart of the inquiry and communicate that they are being taken seriously, and are thus very different from structured interviewing.

Lavis et al, 2017:193)

While the interviewees were able to say what they perceived to be important in building better relationships, being appreciative in such a precarious and unappreciative environment – in which working relationships could and should have been upon much more supportive foundations – meant that this imagined better future remained at the ‘dreaming’ stage. This was because those who had the power to change things were not those who were present in the room for the design and destiny stages and there were few mechanisms in place to address the issues the facilitators had raised, prior to and during the research.

Main findings

Where to access the thesis & key findings

I submitted my PhD in September 2020 and passed my viva on 11th December 2020. The thesis can now be downloaded from the University of Manchester.

I have also written a more accessible 33 page summary of the thesis and key findings which can be downloaded here.

Some unique insights

Understanding meaning and motive in domestic abuse perpetration and responding to neurodiversity in the context of rehabilitation.

Neurodiversity (and intersectionality more generally) is an under-explored area of those of perpetrate domestic abuse. This requires careful analysis so as not to medicalise domestic abuse. But it is a conversation that must be engaged with to reduce the barriers that abusive men who are also neurodivergent face when engaging in programmes that are not responsive to their needs.

All of the men interviewed for my thesis had experiences of childhood abuse and neglect, parental violence from fathers and/or stepfathers, witnessing domestic abuse, institutional care, poverty, exclusion and marginalisation. Some of these experiences played out in their abusive relationships. But few of the vulnerable feelings these engendered were addressed in the context of BBR given its narrow cognitive framework in which teaching men to manage their emotions without fully understanding them is the main treatment aim. This is not to say that some men did not attempt to incorporate some of the skills into their everyday lives; or at least speculate about how they might do so. It is that these appeared (at best) to be relatively short lived when faced with the reality of rejection, jealousy, and perceived masculine entitlement. For those who were neurodivergent, autistic, experiencing drug psychosis, and co-occurring mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, it was clear that there were further barriers to using the tools and learning the skills of the programme.

I published a paper on three men’s lived experiences of growing up in domestic abuse and unstable households, and excluded from school leading to premature criminalisation. A key insight was that domestic abuse should not be medicalised. It is still possible to discern the personal meaning and motives that violence holds for individual men, even for those who are autistic, ADHD, or experience. However, this does not obviate the need to develop more responsive interventions that are able to work with abusive men who, for whatever reason, are likely to struggle in group work environments, not least those who may need quieter spaces, containing experiences, or alternative understanding approaches. Nor should neurodiversity be treated as an ‘add on’ to cognitive-behavioural programmes.