Bad attitude

When Wilfredo Cordero, an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, was arrested for assault and battery against his wife in the summer of 1997, he never suspected he would be the indirect beneficiary of feminist theory. Allegedly Cordero, intoxicated, had struck his wife with a telephone, tried to choke her, and threatened to kill her. He pleaded guilty, and in exchange for a 90-day suspended sentence his attorneys assured the judge that he would receive domestic-violence counseling.

The next day, Cordero and his wife flew home to Puerto Rico. Within a month the couple had separated and his wife took out a restraining order against him. Cordero--who has been arrested for or accused of abuse by three different women--was saying, "I am well into my counseling program, and I realize the value of my counseling. I look forward to it helping me return to a normal life. I also look forward to returning to my baseball job." Soon enough, Cordero was back patrolling the outfield grass--this time for the Chicago White Sox at $1 million a year.

Cordero's case is typical. Of the 136,000 men arrested on charges of domestic violence last year, 86 per cent were ordered into counseling--either as the sole consequence of the arrest, or as a condition of probation or some other sentence. In those counseling programs, the treatment the men are most likely to get is "gender therapy," focused on eradicating the male need for power, control, and dominance.

Lenore Walker, the psychiatrist who developed the concept of battered-woman syndrome, is the chief advocate for the idea that batterers, in turn, are trapped in their socially conditioned role as controlling men "A feminist political gender analysis has reframed the problem of violence against women as one of misuse of power by men who have been socialized into believing they have the right to control the women in their lives even through violent means," she wrote in a 1989 article. "The underbelly of interpersonal violence is seen as the socialized androcentric need for power."

This feminist analysis is buttressed by a more general victimology: not only are batterers the victims of their socialization, they are the unhappy sons of dysfunctional families with absent or abusive parents. Although some states have recently swung too far the other way (with mandatory arrest and prosecution for batterers whether or not the wife wants to press charges), in many states acts of domestic violence have effectively been decriminalized. Since a batterer suffers from a mental disorder, he requires therapy, not punishment ("Mr. Cordero, tell us how you feel.").

The leader in gender therapy is the Emerge program in Massachusetts. Established in 1977, Emerge is the oldest of the programs in this country and one of the largest, typically with 350 men enrolled at a time; it is generally considered a model for treating batterers. Explains Chuck Turner, co-director of Emerge, "We believe that men come into the program focused on their own feelings, needs, and concerns and with a sense of being entitled to subservience on the part of their partners. So, what we try to do in our educational program is to strengthen their awareness of the many forms of abuse, moving beyond physical abuse to look at psychological abuse, economic abuse, and sexual abuse as well as helping them develop the ability to understand the effect of their behavior on the feelings of their partners."

Treatment in programs like Emerge takes place in groups, where the presence of supportive fellow members is meant to diminish batterers' sense of isolation. Many groups begin each meeting with a recitation of each man's past and most recent violent acts. Success is usually measured by changes in attitude. A man who completes the program (half simply drop out) is asked if he feel differently about sex roles, anger, and control. If the answer is "yes," his treatment is considered successful.

But do these "attitude changes" do anything to reduce violence? As Zvi Eisikovits and Jeffrey Edleson point out in their 1989 review of the literature in the field, "Most of the studies have been conducted by the very people who have designed the intervention and thus should be regarded as self-evaluations at best." Some show that men who complete the programs are marginally less likely to be rear-rested than men who don't. But there is no evidence at all that men who complete the programs treat their women any better than men who don't.

One of the soundest studies (it was not a self-evaluation) compared batterers who had been treated to ones who had not been treated and found that after a six-month program about one-quarter of each group remained non-violent for six months. About one-quarter of each group shoved, bit, or slapped their partners within that time period. About 15 per cent of those treated burned their partners, punched them unconscious, or threatened them with a weapon, as opposed to 22 per cent of the untreated. These are not encouraging numbers.