Signposts to perpetrator change – Reporting outcomes from change-focused family violence work
The CIJ and Stopping Family Violence considered that it was time to discuss ways to reflect and report on a perpetrator’s progress towards becoming safer. This avoids false assumptions and aids programs and evidence development.
Continuing our focus on court-based perpetrator interventions since Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence, the CIJ and external colleagues have released a new independent paper. Lead author Rodney Vlais, Elena Campbell and Damian Green from Stopping Family Violence in Western Australia explore a question which arose during previous CIJ projects, being the extent to which Men’s Behaviour Change Programs (MBCPs) or other change-focused interventions should report participant change when a perpetrator is referred by a court or other authority.
The CIJ and SFV considered that it was time to discuss ways to reflect and report on a perpetrator’s progress towards becoming safer. This avoids false assumptions and aids programs and evidence development.
Background
Courts and statutory authorities regularly make decisions about a perpetrator’s level of risk to adult and child victim-survivors without much information about the type and nature of risk that he may continue to pose. In the absence of any more detail, these authorities often look to measures such as an individual’s attendance at a MBCP as an indication of reduced risk.
Participation in – or even completion of – an MBCP or other change-focused program, however, offers little indication of a meaningful shift in a perpetrator’s attitudes or patterns of behaviour. Any steps towards change that could be apparent may be self-reported, limited in scope, or motivated just as much by the legal system’s intervention as by any individual recognition of the harm that a perpetrator has caused. Relying on completion of a program as a measure may therefore lead inadvertently to decisions made on the basis of false assumptions that a perpetrator has been ‘held accountable’, simply by virtue of his referral to an MBCP.
Because of the limits on the information that a MBCP may hold at any particular point in time, this means that programs have historically been reluctant to offer any comment about an individual perpetrator’s participation or ‘progress’ that could be misconstrued or given inappropriate weight. Accordingly, reports back from programs have often been limited to the number of sessions that a participant has attended. Perhaps ironically, however, in the absence of any other information, decision makers increasingly default to a perpetrator’s attendance at a program to inform their decisions – reinforcing, rather than debunking assumptions that participation in an MBCP equates to behaviour change.
Findings
The CIJ and SFV produced two resources:
- Signposts for assessing and reporting family and domestic violence perpetrator behaviour change – a concise, accessible paper designed to inform approaches by courts specifically.
- Reporting outcomes from change-focused family violence perpetrator program work with court referrals – a more substantial, technical paper designed to inform practice development of MBCPs and other change-focused interventions. The aim of the larger paper is to support the development of a set of ‘signpost’ indicators that programs may be able to use in providing sufficiently nuanced accounts of shifts in perpetrator behaviour and risk.
