You are listening to Relationships Shouldn't Hurt, a podcast brought to you by Central Bedfordshire Council. During this series, you'll be able to hear us talk all things domestic abuse and raise awareness of the support available to those affected.
Hello and welcome to our podcast, Relationships Shouldn't Hurt. My name is Nina Page, and I'm the Domestic Abuse Specialist Officer and I work for the Domestic Abuse service for Central Bedfordshire Council. Today I'm going to be speaking with Luke Martin, who has over 15 years’ experience in working in the violence against women and girls sector, and more recently has been specialising in working specifically with perpetrators. Today we're going to be talking about perpetrating behaviour, and by that we mean any kind of harmful behaviour in an intimate relationship, this could be coercive control, gaslighting, economic abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse or any kind of physical abuse. Welcome to the podcast Luke, how are you?
Luke
I'm very well, thank you. Wednesday we're halfway through the week.
Nina
That's it, nearly there, right? Nearly at the weekend. So let's just start, because I'm aware that I've used the word perpetrator a lot in our intro, and I know that when we talk about domestic abuse, when we're talking about those that harm, perpetrator is a really common, well used word. But I know that there's different schools of thought around the wording that we use. So should we just start having a conversation about what your thoughts are on that word perpetrator?
Luke
Yeah. So historically in the sector, we've used the term perpetrator and I think it's still something that's commonly used. We have perpetrator programmes, which we’re shifting the narrative on and often referring to them as behavioural change programmes. The notion of perpetrator is that it's something that is not controlled, that it's a label that we're giving somebody who's using harmful behaviours and that there's no shifting on that point, and there's a connotation that somebody can't change their behaviour. So we're moving more towards people that harm. So we have high harm offenders, or we look at the language around the use of violence and we've had a bit of a shift, because when we look at women who are using abusive behaviours, we often come from a more trauma informed approach. So we talk about women using violence and we're starting to see that shift when we work with men as well, so more of a focus on men using violence, abusive behaviours. But we probably, as we can agree this, will use the term perpetrator interchangeably.
Nina
I will try actually to amend my language. That's a really interesting point about how the word perpetrator is quite deterministic isn't it, it does really suggest a set pattern or a set mode of behaviour. So I'll try to amend going forward. So let's just start with that big question then, why do people harm people that they love or are in intimate relationships with?
Luke
There are lots of different schools of thought on this and why somebody chooses to use abusive behaviour, and there's no real definitive answer on it. So we boil it down almost to this notion of power and control, that somebody who is using abusive behaviours is getting power and control over their partner and they're getting their needs met through that. We also look at other various pieces of research that give us categories of perpetrators of domestic abuse that will distinguish between those where there is an element of behavioural change and those that there's an unrealistic expectation that behaviours could change. But ultimately, we look at if I shout or swear or use some kind of violence or abusive behaviour, I then get my needs met, and it's often quite a short-term focus. Although when we look at our data around perpetrators being held accountable for their actions it's really low, we know that one in five victims will never report their experiences to the Police, so it's very hard to engage with perpetrators and get them linked in with services.
Nina
Do people that are
being abusive, do they know what they're doing? Is it always a really
calculated campaign of behaviour? Because that that sense of getting needs met
doesn't suggest that it's always actually really conscious, that kind of
pattern of behaving.
Luke
So we can look at it at different stages and if we were to look at Liz Kelly's model of coercive control we think about those early stages of grooming and trying to get a victim/survivor on side of the perpetrator, that when we look at these subtle behaviours, we might see somebody not necessarily identifying that what they're doing is abusive behaviour. When we think about the physical violence, I think intrinsically as a society we know that the use of violence isn't okay, and when we look at patterns of behaviours that those using abusive behaviour might see after those incidents of abuse or violence, we see that suffering too, as a honeymoon period or flowers and chocolates stage and that remorse coming through. So what we see there is somebody apologising for what they're doing, and if we are apologising for something then we've got some awareness that something that we have done isn't okay and that something might potentially need to change. And then often following that, what we have is this period of normalising where somebody might minimise or deny what's happened or blame their partner for what's happened. So generally we can explore patterns of behaviour and what we see with people using abuse is that they will have used that in other relationships, previous relationships that they've had, and they may have been called out on that by previous partners. So there is that level of understanding there I'd suggest.
Nina
That's really interesting Luke, thank you. So when we're thinking about those that harm, who can be abusive in a relationship?
Luke
So anybody can be abusive, but when we look at our data, we generally see reports of domestic abuse perpetrated by men. So I think of the top of my head the split is that we see around 92% of perpetrators of domestic abuse, especially high harm domestic abuse, being men. But we do see women using high levels of physical violence. We had the case of Alex Skeel and Jordan Worth a few years ago, with Jordan Worth being the first female convicted of coercive control in the UK. And when we think about coercive control as a model, when Evan Stark first started talking about coercive control, he talked about it as something that was gendered, that it was almost solely perpetrated by men against women. And actually what we're seeing more and more is women being identified as using coercive and controlling behaviour, and the shift that we've seen in society is that we're moving away from some of that common language about being henpecked, to under the thumb to explore what that control looks like in reality. So, as I say predominantly, we're looking at men perpetrating domestic abuse, but not solely. We also see a huge amount of young people using violence and abuse against partners, but also against parents. And there's lots of projects that work around adolescent to parent violence or adult to parent violence, and that dynamic being very different. What we often see with parents in those cases is that they feel a sense of responsibility because of the way that they parented or things that have impacted the child growing up, and then take far more responsibility for that child or adult child's behaviour than actually, they should be taking responsibility for. And when we look at the definition of domestic abuse, which is due to change with the introduction of the Domestic Abuse bill, we are generally talking about those that are 16 and above, but we do work with 13, 14, 15-year-olds who are in intimate relationships where abuse is taking place. What we will see in the new statutory definition, our first statutory definition of domestic abuse, is that there won't be an age in there, but we look at intimate partners and family members were generally focusing on immediate family rather than distant relatives.
Nina
So we often hear cases where initially it appears that both parties are being physically abusive or violent towards each other. Now I know we know that mutual couple violence is not a common occurrence and so where both parties are being accused of domestic abuse, it really is that, in fact, that it's one person that is controlling and dominating the other. And so what we're seeing is, in fact, something that we call violent resistance, where the victim or survivor in that scenario is using physical violence or abuse as a means to defend themselves, to fight back or to escape as a last resort. And so can you tell us a little bit more about that, Luke, about violent resistance and how or where we might see that?
Luke
Yeah, so we can look at violent resistance in two ways. We can look at an aspect of self-defence where we're looking at reasonable and proportionate force to protect yourself, another or any property. When we're looking at violent resistance, we're looking at that unreasonable or disproportionate use of force. So if you were a victim and you're under attack, to push somebody out of the way so that you could flee would be reasonable and proportionate, pushing the person out of the way and then to continue to physically assault wouldn't necessarily fit that category. But what we also consider is that trauma response. And we can explore the case of Sally Challen, ultimately killed her partner after 35 years of experiencing coercive and controlling behaviour, and that impact on somebody's mental ability and whether somebody at that point then has capacity. But we generally look at a victim to use some kind of abusive behaviour back towards their partner, and that often being manipulated and used against them. And sometimes that will be verbal abuse, shouting, swearing, and other times that might be physical. But often victims/ survivors will talk about using these behaviours so that they can start that incident, they know their partner is going to be violent or abusive, they have a feeling of anxiety and walking on eggshells, and what they might then do is try and instigate this instance, get it over and done with so things can go back to that period of normality.
Nina
The other thing that was really interesting was what you were saying around the adolescent to parent violence and that, again, we're seeing increasing numbers of referrals and concerns being raised about young people and adults being abusive towards their parents, and in those cases, does that need a different approach in terms of working with those that are harming.
Luke
So it depends on the age of the person, and it would also depend on what kind of behaviours they were demonstrating. So when we talk about domestic abuse, we're generally talking about somebody choosing to use a certain type of behaviour towards one or a very small number of people within a home. So when we look at children, young people who are acting out we’d want to look at whether they were using that behaviour towards parents and siblings, but also whether they were using it in wider society, so if they were using it at school or towards peers or other professionals that might be involved in the family. Because we want to draw that distinction of whether somebody has clear control over the behaviour that they're using and when we're talking about domestic abuse we're generally talking about that choice, that it will be used towards a partner and potentially children within the home, but not within that wider societal context. So the dynamic is very different when we're looking at adolescent to parent violence and there's probably a far more robust way of working alongside both the parent and the child to manage that. And there's some great organisations, there's an organisation called Break for Change who are based in Sussex and have got some sites across the UK that look at how we can work with adolescent to parent violence.
Nina
That's great, thank you. We'll put details of Break for Change up at the end of the podcast for anyone that's interested and would like to follow up. I'm really conscious as we've been talking, Luke, that we've been focusing on straight relationships. We’re doing a piece of work in Central Bedfordshire at the moment with Galop just trying to understand the prevalence of abuse in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities here. We just want to make sure that we can, all individuals can receive support irrespective of how they identify. So I just wonder what your thoughts are on what abuse would look like if someone was in an LGBT relationship.
Luke
So we can look at this distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity, and we might be working with somebody who identifies as lesbian, gay or bisexual and transgender, so we look at the complexities that that might bring. We see a fair amount of normalising of domestic abuse in same sex relationships, and often that stems from this belief that domestic abuse is a gendered issue. And that doesn't benefit if we're looking at two men or two women in a relationship together. We still see conversations around who the man in the relationship is, which obviously doesn't sit, I mean, look at same sex relationships. There are some additional risk factors that we might consider when we're looking at working with LGBT+ clients, we might see a higher prevalence of substance use. We might look at impact on mental health when we look at internalised homophobia. We might also look at risk factors such as first same sex relationships. We have higher levels of disclosure of sexual violence within same sex relationships, especially when we're working with gay men and that figure being much higher than when we look at working with heterosexual men. And some of that sits within the context of gay men more likely to be accessing sexual health services where they're encouraged to talk about the kind of sex that they're having and therefore feeling more comfortable to be open about disclosures of sexual violence. The challenge when we think about LGBT+ clients is that there's very few resources for working with LGBT+ perpetrators. There's no recovery programme, behavioural change programme, as we see for generally heterosexual and cis gendered men. And so there are services that are looking to develop that, I'm working on a couple of pilots at the moment where we're looking at how we can develop a group programme. But when we think about capacity, to be in an area where we would get enough LGBT+ perpetrators onto a programme, you're probably looking at your larger cities that have got a bigger LGBT+ population, so London, Manchester, Birmingham, Brighton. So a lot of this work is being done on a one-to-one basis at the moment and a lot of those one-to-one waiting lists being really long, so that provision not necessarily being accessible.
Nina
We know that we've seen a real increase in calls to LGBT support lines over lockdown, who are at home with family members who are not accepting of their identity and experiencing domestic abuse from family members. And a lot of that appears to be around threats to out people, dead naming them, kind of refusing to acknowledge or accept their identity. When we're talking about supporting families with that kind of domestic abuse and coercive control going on again, are those kind of ideas of perpetrator programmes appropriate for those family situations? Or do you think that another approach would be more effective?
Luke
I think a lot of that’s around education and when we look at perpetrator programmes, we’re not necessarily looking at parent to child violence or abusive behaviour and it stems from something often very different, so it's around that lack of understanding around somebody's sexual orientation or gender identity. And we talk about that notion of homophobia and whether we take that into consideration, or biphobia and transphobia. I guess the challenge that comes with it, again, is that we've had, as you say, a lot of young people who have had to move home to be with their family, and we have seen that risk escalating and there not being safe spaces for LGBT+ people to go and the challenges. So thinking about whether a perpetrator programme would be suitable for a parent using that kind of behaviour towards a child, and I would say probably not. I think it would be more around awareness raising and education and that cognitive behavioural therapy model to improve safety.
Nina
The Galop Helpline does offer advice and support to people who are experiencing domestic abuse who identify as being LGBT. Those details for that service, that helpline, will be at the end of the podcast, along with all the other information that we will be sharing about support services available. And just picking up on those issues around mental health, I just wonder if we can talk a bit more about that and the impact mental health issues can have on relationships more widely. A lot of practitioners will come to us with questions around people who have mental health issues and see those as being the cause or the underlying trigger for domestic abuse. And I just wonder what your thoughts are on that?
Luke
So we will see mental health being used often as a justification for somebody's abusive behaviour or a reason not to put an intervention in place, and actually, when we look at our data what we know is that people that have poor mental health, a majority of those people will choose not to use abusive behaviours. So although it's a justification from perpetrators, and if we think about the term gaslighting, where we might have a perpetrator telling a victim that it might be their poor mental health and that actually nothing's happening, and we can see it used in the same way, a perpetrator saying, well I only do this because of my poor mental health. But if we think about some of the diagnoses that are used and we think about, it used to be borderline personality disorder, and it became a bit of a sticking plaster for anybody that didn't fit in any other category. And now we talk more so about emotionally unstable personality disorder. Actually a lot of the time these diagnoses don't really help, there's very little treatment or management of them, but it becomes a fix or label almost. Something that we've seen far more is people coming forward, and generally our victim/survivor, saying that they've identified that their partner has got a narcissistic personality disorder or that they're a narcissist, and the challenge is that we can all log on to the internet and read some of the traits of somebody with a narcissistic personality disorder, and we can probably relate to some of those identities. We've all got very similar factors in ourselves that sit within that identity, but we're not mental health professionals, we’re not in a position to diagnose, and as a practitioner working in the sector, I couldn't diagnose somebody with these disorders that we're talking about. But what we often want is to be able to have an answer as to why somebody is behaving a certain way. So if I can then say it's because of a mental health condition, that it makes me feel more at ease rather than considering that somebody is choosing to use abusive behaviours. And when we label people with some of these diagnoses, and literally when we look at the diagnostic statistics manual, it gives us lots of identities that are very similar in presentation. So you really have to be at the top of your field to be able to draw that distinction between what that mental health issue might be. But it becomes a justification and what we might do is normalise somebody's behaviour because of that mental health condition or because we've deemed it a mental health condition. And actually what we see again is that demonstration of control. And when we think about all these diagnoses about mental health, what we continue to see with perpetrators is that they still demonstrate that control. And that's what we come back to, that whether it's the UPD Narcissistic personality disorder, substance use, whatever we use to justify somebody's behaviour, that they still continue to only use that behaviour against one or a handful of people. That if it weren't domestic abuse and it were an anger management issue, the people choosing to use those abusive behaviours would use it towards colleagues, other family, friends, strangers on the street. But actually what we see is it's something that happens towards the partner or ex-partner, towards children within that home, and it's generally something that happens behind closed doors. Everything that we see demonstrates a level of control over this behaviour.
Nina
Just for anybody that's currently living or experiencing domestic abuse or was working with somebody that is experiencing domestic abuse and they're saying that their partner actually has mental health issues, in your opinion would they be able to access a perpetrator programme as well as having their mental health problem managed by appropriate services? Would that be something that would be open, and people should be able to think about accessing?
Luke
So your perpetrator programme would do an assessment as to whether somebody is suitable, because it's going to be varied and we talk about mental health and actually everybody's got mental health, and sometimes it might be in a good state, sometimes it might not be so good, but a lot of the clients that we work with, victims/survivors and perpetrators will have mental health conditions that they're often managing through talking therapies or through medication. So having a mental health condition isn't going to be a barrier to engaging in a service, it's just around how well that's being managed and again when we think about working with victims/survivors and perpetrators, we're talking about managing risk, so we would want to understand where them engaging in service is going to increase the risk to anybody. And when we think about addressing the issue of domestic abuse, what we see is that somebody's mental health might worsen, so we’d want to know that, again, there was a strategy in place to manage that. And again, when we think about substance use is the other that we often talk about in this situation, that we might see somebody using substances more to manage the impact of addressing some of their behaviours and that coming out.
Nina
I was going to move on to talk about that impact of alcohol and drugs, because that is also another reason is often cited as a cause of domestic abuse. And it feels like you're saying that pretty much the same thing would apply to the things that we've been talking about with regard to mental health issues. Would that be right?
Luke
Yes, so when we look at substance use, we're still talking about that level of control. So I imagine for a majority of people listening to this, at some point in your life you might have consumed a large amount of alcohol, and you’ve still chosen not to use abusive behaviour towards anybody. And what we see with substance use is that for those using abusive behaviours, they might use high levels of physical violence or abuse whilst under the influence of substances. But all of our research shows that there's still coercive control, other aspects of abuse that sit there through the rest of the relationship. What we also see is this justification of, well they only use that behaviour when, quite often the example that's used is around the World Cup and actually again, our research tells us that it makes no difference whether teams win or lose, that we still see the same increase in reports of domestic abuse. And again, what we often see is that justification for somebody using abusive behaviour and deciding to do that because of the reason of a team winning or losing or consuming large amounts of alcohol. And when we think about substance use, if we've got a perpetrator who is telling us that they are only violent or abusive whilst under the influence, then we might start tackling that problem of substance use first. So you're telling me that you don't want to use abusive behaviour, but using substances make you do that. So actually maybe we should focus on your use of substances then and think about how we can reduce and manage that.
Nina
So the first step in asking for help for behaviour is really tough. So what advice would you give to anyone who is thinking about asking for help or is concerned about their own behaviour in their relationship?
Luke
I think when we look at asking for help, we often consider Prochaska and DiClemente Stages of Change model. So we have this stage of pre-contemplation where we don't know that something's wrong, and then our second stage is contemplation where we know that something is wrong, but we don't necessarily know what to do next. And often that's where people will sit in accessing help and support and not really knowing what's available and what they need to do next. But the first stage is being able to recognise that what we're doing is abusive and then we look at the preparation stage. So what we might need to put in place and a lot of that is around continuing to raise our own awareness. Once we know that we're doing something wrong, we can't unknow that. So it might be that we start to look at resources and I guess, really thinking about organisations that we have in the UK so Respect operating the Respect phone line, they've got a wealth of resources on their website. Some of the challenges that we do see is that we've got very few publications and resources in the UK around people choosing to use abusive behaviour. So a lot of what's used comes from the States, and the language that's used in the States around domestic abuse is very different to what we use here in the UK. So they talk about batterer intervention programmes and battered women's refuges. And a lot of both victim/survivors and perpetrators that we work with wouldn't associate their behaviour with being battered or battering. So being really mindful as to where we pull those resources from. But the Respect phone line’s got quite a clear website that talks about different types of abusive behaviour and what somebody can do if they've got concerns.
Nina
And with that phone line I just wonder what people can expect from that first phone call? Just as you know, a way of helping people to decide whether they need to make that call or not. Would they need to announce their behaviour to the call handler, how do those calls go?
Luke
So it's an anonymous helpline, you wouldn't have to give your name or telephone number or anything like that and calls generally last for about half an hour. And the idea is that the call handler will work with you to explore some of the behaviours that you're using and raise your awareness of the impact of those behaviours and then look at where they could link you in locally to access some kind of behavioural change programme.
Nina
And I guess for people living in Central Bedfordshire that would be coming into our Bridge Programme and project, who offer one-to-one support for people that are exhibiting harmful behaviours in their relationships. And they also run the group programme. And I guess I wonder what a perpetrator group looks like. So for people again, just that might be thinking about making that call or enquiring about a group, what does that entail? That first group session, I guess, what can people expect?
Luke
Prior to accessing the group you’ll be invited in for an assessment and that will look at the content of the course, it will look at behaviours that you've used and things that you've experienced. We generally work on a cognitive behavioural therapy or an educational model when we look at behavioural change and there's a bit of a shift to moving towards strengths-based working, which is more of a one-to-one approach. But what it looks to do is to help you be the best partner, best parent that you can be and help you address any anomalies that are impacting that. So it looks to increase your awareness around what a healthy relationship is, what abusive behaviours you might be using. And a lot of this work is now quite trauma informed, so it looks experiences that you might have had in the past that have impacted how you view what a healthy relationship is and where we get often these notions of men and masculinity. It also looks at things like healthy communication, so how we can have healthy arguments with our partner without our partner being fearful of any consequences of that. They'll give you techniques that you can use to manage any behaviour that you might be using, and they are really long programmes and that's because a lot of this work is around unpicking things that you've used for a fair amount of time and that have continued to work for you and they have become quite ingrained in your neural pathways and thinking about how we can get to address some of that behaviour.
Nina
We'll put details for both the Respect phone line and the Bridge Project up with the information at the end of the programme for anybody that's interested in learning a little bit more. So following on from that discussion about Respect, helplines and the perpetrator programme that's being run by the Bridge Project at the moment, how do they work and what kind of outcomes do they have for people?
Luke
So the general focus on behavioural change has been really positive. Perpetrator programmes of community-based programmes will generally focus on your standard and medium risk perpetrators and then we have projects such as the Drive Project which is a programme being delivered between Respect, SafeLives and Social Finance, and they do one-to-one work with high risk perpetrators or people using high harm. All of these have been hugely researched, so the Mirabal Research is probably the biggest piece of research that we have around community-based perpetrator programmes, which is an EU wide piece of research that tells us around 70% of perpetrators will stop using physical and emotional abuse, and we see that significant behavioural change. And then there's a new piece of research done around the Drive project and its effectiveness, which found that around 82% of perpetrators stopped using physical abuse after an intervention, 88% saw a reduction in sexual abuse, 75% saw reduction in stalking and harassment and 73% saw reduction in jealous and controlling behaviours. So we've been running these programmes long enough now to see the positive outcomes and really seeing that shift away from putting the onus on victims/survivors and putting more onus on behavioural change and the behaviour used by perpetrators.
Nina
Great, that sounds really positive, they’re really good outcomes. So for further information about any of the support services that you've heard today and you can go to Break for Change, so Break for Change aims to reduce the level of violence and abuse by children against their parents and carers, and it's aimed for children who are aged between 10 and 17 years. You can get in touch with your local authority to see if it is available in your area, it isn't available everywhere so that's the best place to start. Galop is the LGBT+ Anti Violence Charity, Galop provide confidential and independent advice and support for LGBT+ people who have experienced sexual assaults, abuse or violence. They provide a free and confidential telephone service. You can find out more about Galop at their website or you can contact them by phone on 08009995428. The Respect phone line is an anonymous and confidential helpline for men and women who are harming their partners or families. They provide specialist advice and guidance to help people change their behaviour and support for those who are working with domestic abuse perpetrators. You can find out more about the Respect helpline at their website or you can call them on 08088024040. The Bridge Project offers work with perpetrators of domestic abuse who demonstrate a willingness to change. The Bridge Project aims to reduce and prevent abuse and increase victim and survivors safety. They offer one-to-one work, support for professionals and a 26-week perpetrator behaviour programme. The Bridge Project is available for anybody living within Bedford Borough or Central Bedfordshire but do contact your local authorities for details about programmes that run in your area for those people who are harming others. If you'd like to get in touch with the Bridge Project for more information, you can contact them on 01234341977. It's been a really interesting chat Luke, thank you very much for coming in and talking to us about all the work that you're doing and all the different aspects of how we can help and support people that harm to get help and support to change that behaviour. It's been really helpful. Thank you.
Luke
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to Relationships Shouldn't Hurt. If you or someone you know has been affected by domestic abuse or the issues raised in this podcast, you can contact the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 08082000247. You can also find lots of information about domestic abuse on our website, and if you're in the Bedfordshire area, you can find local support services on the Get Help page of this website. If you are in immediate danger, please call the Police on 999.