50%
of high-risk
perpetrators
agree to engage
with the Drive
programmebehaviours, such as strangling, dropped from 50 per
cent to 2 per cent; and the risk of violence including
being beaten, punched, kicked or burnt also fell from
54 per cent to 2 per cent.
CWA offers two programmes devised by Emily
Alison, a psychologist who works for several UK police
forces and the FBI. One is preparatory — for abusers
who aren’t yet ready to accept that their behaviour
needs to change. It deals with definitions of abusive
behaviour and tries to encourage the participants to
accept responsibility for the harm they have done. The
second is a more in-depth programme of behaviour
change, which lasts between nine months and a year.L
iam attended the shorter CWA course a year
ago after his relationship with his wife
deteriorated. There had been incidents of
abuse between them. “Whether it was verbal
abuse or physical, it wasn’t overly aggressive
— someone might be pushed,” he says. They were never
violent towards their children, he says, but he was
concerned they were seeing the dynamic between
their parents spiral out of control.
Eventually he called social services himself and after
several more rows, including two where the police were
called, he was referred to CWA by a social worker. At
the time he didn’t see himself as a perpetrator because
the violence went both ways. “She’s been arrested
because the police saw bruises all over my body,” he
says. But after completing the course he could see
that he was responsible for the fighting as well.
The sessions involve groups of four or five men. Each
module covers an issue that can trigger abuse, such as
jealousy or isolation. Over the weeks the participants
are asked to contribute their own experiences and
strategies are put in place to stop the violence from
escalating. At first the men were “a bit cagey”, Liam
says. Some made jokes. “We were, like, why am I here?
But it gave us a different perspective and I could see
from their responses that something clicked.”
There is always a sense that abuse is something
that happens to other people, Liam explains. “I thought
it’s not for people like me, who have things in life —
we wouldn’t be seen doing this kind of thing,” he says.
“But the truth is nobody knows what’s going on in
other people’s houses.”
Most of the men on the course with him were there
because they were forced to attend. Liam thinks many
others would benefit from the lessons he learnt. “If we
were more open to it, I think society would be better
for it because secret abuse is the worst.”
A year on, the situation is not perfect, but he now has
techniques that help keep things calm with his wife.“If I’d had a bad day at work, if I was on edge and hadn’t
eaten all day, I know I could take things the wrong way.
I hadn’t acknowledged that before,” Liam says. Now
when he gets an angry text message he won’t reply,
so the row doesn’t build and explode the moment he
walks into the house. “I wanted to get myself in a
situation where if one person wants to bring fire to
a situation, I can just be that water,” he says.
Another area in which our understanding of
domestic abuse has changed since the development
of the Duluth model is our acknowledgment of female
violence, which is a bigger problem than many people
assume. About 1.6 million women and 757,000 men
in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse
between March 2019 and March 2020. The vital
difference, Lightburn-Ritchie says, is “the impact of
male violence is massively more problematic. It is six
times more likely that a female will be killed by a male
partner or ex-partner [than vice versa].”
That is why it’s so important to make sure that men,
in particular, are aware that it is possible to change
their behaviour and that people can show them how.
The bulk of CWA’s referrals come from children’s social
care, but during lockdown the charity launched an
awareness campaign on social media, letting people
know they could get in touch if they were worried
about their own behaviour. It received 40 self-referrals
in a matter of months.
If there is one thing the experts can agree on, it is
that lack of funding is causing real harm. According to
the charity Women’s Aid, 64 per cent of refuge referrals
were declined in 2019 due to a lack of spaces, and about
one in ten refuges receive no local authority funding
at all. The result is a “competition for resources”
between organisations that work with perpetrators
and those that focus on victims, Hester says. Last year
the government pledged £76 million for victim and
survivor charities and £10 million for those engaging in
perpetrator work. Yet Hester says the evidence is clear:
“You need to engage the victim and the perpetrator to
achieve meaningful change.”
Our failure to do this is allowing a conspiracy of
silence to take shape. In cases of domestic abuse it is
common for the victim not to support police action.
Three quarters of domestic abuse cases are closed early
without the suspect being charged and campaigners
say that contact is rarely made with the perpetrator at
all. But there is also uncertainty about how to engage
and what to say. Lightburn-Ritchie says there is a lack
of confidence in handling perpetrators among many
of those dealing with the consequences of abuse.
“No one is saying to them, ‘How do you feel about your
behaviour?’ They are scared of making it worse,” she
says. “No one wants to be the last person who spoke
to a perpetrator before a murder-suicide.”Now when Liam gets
an angry text message
he won’t reply. “If one
person wants to bring
fire to a situation, I can
just be that water”
A report in The
Sunday Times from
October 3 on the
women killed in
acts of violence
or suspicious
circumstances in
the seven months
since the death of
Sarah Everard40 • The Sunday Times Magazine