Illuminating Struggles for Gendered Responses: Practice with Women Offenders of Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

<p>The Duluth Model of intervention for those charged with domestic violence offences has for the past thirty years been instrumental in conceptualizing violence, abuse, power and control, how to hold offenders accountable and keep victims safe, and is reflective of a collaborative, feminist approach to violence intervention. The model’s design assumes that violence is perpetrated by men against their female partners as a mechanism to maintain/gain power and control. However, increasing numbers of women are now being charged with violence against their male partners and being referred for service. Problematically, there has been little development of policies or formal practices that recognize the different meanings of women’s violence or the particularity of their programming needs so that service providers in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) treatment programs find themselves working with female offenders under a male model of violence.</p> <p>The purpose of this project was to engage in a critical feminist analysis of the resulting tensions, specifically to ask how conceptualizations of gender and violence undergird policy development and how, in Duluth-dominated programming approaches, service providers understand and respond to women’s needs. To explore these questions, I took a two-fold methodological approach: an analysis of the extensive literature on Partner Assault Response (PAR) programs and female offenders, using the concept of policy framing; and an online survey of service providers that explored dimensions of their work and that included questions incorporating the policy frame distinctions that emerged from the literature analysis.</p> <p>The policy frame analysis underscored the power of problem construction and shed conceptual light on the challenges of working under the Duluth model with women. Survey participants described those challenges in the, as yet, dimly lit front-lines of practice, as well as their engagements at times in creative, subversive program delivery to meet women’s needs. Future research drawing forward the seldom heard voices of women charged with violence will be critical, as will continued endeavours to fashion gender-specific, need-driven policy.</p>