A new University of Houston (UH) experiment takes an unconventional look at the treatment for domestic violence, otherwise known as intimate partner violence (IPV), by focusing on changing the perpetrators’ psychological abuse during arguments rather than addressing his sexist beliefs.
“There is a lot of research that studies the victim of intimate partner violence, but not the perpetrator,” said Julia Babcock, an associate professor in the department of psychology and co-director of the Center for Couples Therapy, a clinical research center at UH that offers therapy for couples. “The predominant model for IPV intervention is based on what was gleaned from women in battered women shelters and focuses on men’s patriarchal attitudes about power and control. Since most domestic violence occurs in the context of an argument, the experiment I conducted evaluated whether I could change how the communication goes during an argument with the batterer and his partner. The findings indicated the batterers could learn communications skills and when they applied them in an argument with their female partners, the argument improved and the participants felt better about the argument and more understood.”
Babcock notes this research is significant in that it breaks new ground in applying experiments to domestic violence and may improve batterers’ intervention programs. In a review of the research studies on the efficacy of batterers’ intervention programs, Babcock found the results disappointing. There was a small change when a perpetrator completed a batterers intervention program and only a 5 percent reduction rate in repeat offenses. “There is definitely a need to improve batterers’ intervention programs, since research suggests that they’re largely ineffective, but frequently prescribed by courts as a remedy for convicted IPV perpetrators,” said Babcock. Babcock’s research focuses on male batterers because men are the perpetrators in about 85 percent of the abuse cases, and women are 10 times more likely to be murdered by an intimate than are men.
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