A chance to interrupt cycle of abuse

By Kate Campbell

INQUIRER SUBURBAN STAFF

Inside the dim kitchen, Jackie and Curtis were yelling again. Curtis had been out late and drinking heavily. He’d missed the meal Jackie had cooked for him. He was hungry. She was tired.

“What is it, Jackie?” he asked, jutting his chin out as he blocked the doorway. “You too good to make your husband dinner?”

Physical abuse often first smolders with threats and intimidation, social worker Chuck Gallun reminded the eight men seated in school desks in a small meeting room in Pennsburg.

Gallun was using a low-budget video highlighting a fictional couple’s battles as a teaching tool in a pioneering Montgomery County program for male batterers.

Such programs can interrupt the pattern of violence, experts say. But their success is impeded by the number of dropouts and the justice system’s inability to monitor them.

Several evaluations of batterer programs are ongoing at a national level, said Bernard Auchter of the National Institute of Justice. While the findings are still inconclusive, early indications are positive for men who do not drop out.

“It’s like so many things: It works for some of the people some of the time,” Auchter said. “There are guys at the far end of the spectrum that we’re not sure that we can help—they are criminal in many other ways—but where there’s a desire for change, there’s a better chance of success.”

Many of the men gathered on a chilly weeknight at the Open Line community agency in Pennsburg cannot shut off their anger. Whether it manifests itself in shattered limbs or raw bruises, seething threats or quiet control of a partner’s activities, some of these men’s relationships have crossed the line into a potentially fatal realm.

Gallun and therapist Audrey Leffler lead weekly meetings in Pottstown and Pennsburg as part of a court-ordered, 26-week program for first-time male offenders. The sessions, sponsored by Creative Health Services Inc., a nonprofit mental-health organization that serves parts of Montgomery and Chester Counties, are designed to address the batterers’ issues of anger, control and accountability.

The program, which costs participants $20 a week, is a condition of bail, sentencing or probation. Occasionally, a batterer will volunteer to participate at the behest of a friend or a social worker.

A reporter was permitted to sit in on one session on the condition that none of the men be identified.

“We ask the men to face squarely how they have been abusive and not to minimize or deny or blame the other [person] for what they have done,” said the gravel-voiced Gallun, a former member of the Army Intelligence Corps.

Gallun has run an outreach center from a cluttered office in the Pottstown Police Department for 23 years. After witnessing domestic violence on the job, he helped start the Montgomery County program with Leffler in 1993. Creative Health Services also offers counseling for women and children victimized by domestic abuse.

“Until you can say what you have done and make some atonement, you can’t begin to think about changing your behavior,” Gallun said. “We talk about how a situation could have played out without being abusive or controlling.”

By using frank questions, Leffler and Gallun nudge the men from discussions about the video to examining their own circumstances.

The men respond with candor.

“I am in control of my household, my children, and I can’t change tomorrow,” one said. “I’ve been accustomed to doing it one way: Fear is respect … I respected my father because I was afraid of him.”

Batterer therapy began nationally in the mid-1970s as a result of the attention the women’s movement brought to domestic violence. Between 1976 and 1996, 29 percent of women slain in the United States were killed by their partners, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics.

The Pennsylvania State Police have tracked domestic-violence calls only since mid-1997. In 1998, local officers responded to 29,105 such calls. Federal and state laws enacted in the mid-1990s require the police to arrest suspected batterers if the evidence warrants it. Officers used to have to wait for the victims to file charges.

Improved police response and handling have “led to increased cooperation [among prosecutors, victim services and police] and increased referrals,” said Carol Lavery, director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Victims’ Services at the Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

Most of the participants in the Montgomery County program say they were not initially happy about having to attend.

“People don’t like change,” said one man, his arms crossed tightly across his chest.

He carefully wiped one hand across the desktop.

“Change is tough,” he added.

Batterers must be highly motivated to reform deeply embedded abusive behavior, said Paul Bukovec, founder of Menergy, a private Philadelphia agency that has a batterer’s program.

“It can be done,” Bukovec said, “but it’s hard.”

Between 60 percent and 70 percent of batterers stop hitting after the Menergy program, he said, adding that batterers typically cross every racial, age, social and economic strata. About 65 percent of the men in his program are white, 30 percent are black, and 5 percent are Latino.

“We have blue-collar [batterers], and we have physicians,” Bukovec said.

Edward Gondolf, a sociology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, has identified some traits common to batterers: They tend to be preoccupied with traditional role expectations. They lack communication skills. They tend to have high levels of hostility and poor impulse control. And despite idealizing a macho male image, they often have low self-esteem.

Alcohol and drug problems often play a role in the lives of batterers, and the majority experienced or witnessed childhood violence, Gondolf said.

And they frequently deny that a problem exists.