Women's Voices: Central to the Work

I'm a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard At times I can be quite difficult, but I'll bow to no man's word We who believe in freedom cannot rest.

"Ella's Song," Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sweet Honey in the Rock

One of the interesting ironies in the work to end male violence against women is that many of the men who come to it do so believing that if we just work and try hard enough we can avoid making mistakes that might make us look bad in the eyes of women or, for that matter, other men.

That belief reminds me of my earliest days of learning to become a family therapist, when I would attend workshops by the master clinicians in the family therapy world. Often they would present video excerpts of their therapy sessions with terribly difficult families in which they would invariably do dazzling work. Families would transform before our eyes. Those of us in the audience would applaud enthusiastically while quietly questioning whether we could ever measure up.

Then one day Gus Napier, one of the family therapy gurus of his time, intentionally showed a tape in which he took some risks with a family that didn't turn out well at all. And suddenly, those of us mostly novice therapists in the room became incredibly energized as we talked about his choices and what he could have done differently, or what we would have done differently in his place. The room was electric with learning.

No One Way

The lessons we learned that day mirror some of the more important ones we incorporated in our learning process over the years at MSV. One is that there is no "one way" to do this work. And when you do this work you will experience many moments when the answers aren't easy and often unknown. This work requires creative and bold risk-taking that sometimes results in incredible breakthroughs—and sometimes in painful mistakes. And—this is very important—in those mistakes lie amazing opportunities for individual and organizational growth. So often it was the mistakes we made that required us to stop and formulate the core principles that would guide our practice.

I can't recall when it was that I came to understand that making mistakes was an inevitable part of doing the work of confronting male hegemony. So much of that work was counterintuitive to the way I saw and did things. More often than not women had the unenviable task of pointing out our blind spots. So this book is also about the lessons learned when women brought difficult truths to me and other men and what we did when that happened. These struggles to we had as men to tune in to women's reality helped solidify our Core Principle, "Women's Voices Must Be Central to the Work."

Good Intentions

In 1982, Gus Kaufman and I were conducting a Wednesday night court-mandated class for batterers in the Powder Springs Library in Cobb County, Georgia. Two months into the six-month class, we began noting the leadership qualities of one of the men in our class, who was doing an exceptional job of keeping all of the contractual agreements: he had attended all the classes, arrived early, paid his fees punctually, participated actively by giving other men in class strong but caring feedback, and by consistently claiming the details of his abuse towards his partner in the incident that resulted in his being referred to our class. In short, he was emerging as the hands-down class leader, and both Gus and I were pleased to acknowledge his positive influence to him and to his classmates.

Kathleen Carlin and Leigh Ann Peterson were supervising our work at the time, and we provided detailed descriptions of each man's performance in the room. Leigh Ann was the staff liaison to the female partners of the men in our class.

When, in the second month, Gus and I began to dwell on the leadership qualities of the man I will refer to here as "Ted," Leigh Ann made a special effort to reach out to his partner, whom I'll refer to here as "Mary." After two weeks of failed attempts to reach Mary on the phone, Leigh Ann made a home visit to see how Ted's partner was, in actuality, faring. It turned out that the reason Leigh Ann couldn't reach Mary on the phone was because Ted had discontinued phone service to the house. He had also required Mary to quit her job, had taken away the keys to her car and had forbidden her to have any "unauthorized" contact with her family or friends. Mary was, in effect, being held hostage in her home by the man whom Gus and I had anointed the "star" of our class.

The supervision session following Leigh Ann's home visit with Mary was grim for Gus and me. It was the beginning of the end of our illusion that we could reliably determine how well a man was progressing in class based on his performance in that class. It was the beginning of our realization that the way to accurately assess how well men in class were progressing was to hear from the liaison/advocates truths about how men were treating their partners at home. And not just the court-referred batterers in the class. When Kathleen and Leigh Ann began to require us to provide audiotaped recordings of our work in class, they could give us concrete examples of when we were either establishing and maintaining a climate of accountability in the room and when we were consciously or unconsciously colluding with the men.

I recall several occasions during those revelatory supervision sessions when Gus and I would learn a very unsettling truth about how our choices would or could result in putting a battered woman more at risk. And I would just go silent and numb in the room. I couldn't really think or feel a thing. I'd just fix my gaze on the rug in Kathleen's office and wait for some kind of thought or feeling to return. Gus would excuse himself and, by his report, head for a stall in the men's room where he would wait out head-splitting sinus attacks. After we'd "collected" ourselves, we'd rejoin Kathleen and Leigh Ann and the rattling work of righting our wrongs.

We were beginning to learn, painfully, that our well-meaning efforts were not enough. As the old proverb says, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Sometimes during those intense meetings with Kathleen and Leigh Ann, when Gus would unwittingly say or do something sexist I would think to myself, "Damn, I'm glad I didn't say that." Looking back at that now, I wonder under what conditions does it become as uncool to say sexist things as it is to do or say racist things. In the early 80s, just like...