The area of discussion on psychological issues was fine. But comments and discussion that are geared toward “not all men” or try to steer the discussion to how toward men are also victims of domestic violence, aren’t.
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Of course, and I appreciate the intervention. I’ve just been contemplating something rather long and was unsure if that would be too much of a tangent, and decided to pester you now that you were rather conveniently in my sight. Thanks!
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First of all, only some of them. People with mental disorders run the full spectrum of intelligence and other traits that make them more or less able to function. While there may be a handful of high functioning sociopaths who are able to really game this type of program, those people are just generally such problems that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Someone who is able to really game such a program (that is, actually convince the people running it they are recovering rather than convincing the people running it that they are glibly going along with it) is unlikely to wind up in such a program to begin with. If you can fool social workers, there’s a good chance you can fool cops, lawyers and judges. They are probably also pretty good at gaming employers, customers, banks, people online, etc.
Well, I’m glad the instinct here is to call it out anyway. Fortunately, the same sort of people who are willing to accept that these disturbing admissions are part of a program to help people change how they behave are probably willing to accept that people often choose words without a lot of thought. Um… I’m not sure if that was a joke or not.
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I brought up the point because there is an intersection between hallmark traits of abusers/controllers and traits of the upper levels of the personality disordered such as borderlines and anti-socials. Perhaps my use of forensic terms such as sociopath or psychopath was misguided.
As far as being in the program, it was my understanding that it was court mandated. So it would seem that any number of different types of people could be ensnared into the net, get caught, and be required to attend. Not all of the disordered are geniuses who never get caught. They are, however, brilliant at manipulation.
I don’t understand why people took such offense at broaching the subject, frankly. It’s not as if I began speaking on something completely unrelated.
The younger someone is when there is intervention, the better. But more importantly, is the genuine desire to change, which is a very long and intensive process.
Nowhere in my comment did I assert that the program was not worthy or that it shouldn’t exist.
Yeah there are totally probably some psychopaths in that course who have no problem admitting to trying to control their partners and don’t see anything wrong with that because to them other human beings are objects to be manipulated, too.
Those folks are hard to truly reform, because they’ll play the role of reformed person as long as it gets them what they want. This process won’t fix them. Unfortunately, that level of psychopathy isn’t something that teaching empathy can cure. Part of what makes folks like that so scary is that they’re hard to detect and impossible to cure. Which is why nothing is a good substitute for educating the potential victims on how to handle themselves. I’m not sure we’ll ever live in a world where women are never abused by men, if only because of that bit of the population, so it has to be something an individual woman can handle even if society doesn’t stop it in time.
I don’t think I took offense at your comment, but aside from a very tiny handful of cases I think you are wrong.
I think you are overstating the case for psychopaths as masters of manipulation. To be functional, psychopaths have to manipulate other people - they have to practice just so that they can pass as normal. There are plenty of people who are psychopaths who are not really good at manipulating people at all, they just have a lot of trouble getting jobs or otherwise functioning socially. They are probably pretty lousy choices as romantic partners.
I’d lay down money that the majority of the time if a remorseless individual thinks they gamed their way through one of these programs, the reality is that the person running it is thinking, “Oh crap, another one of these guys” and is just wishing that anyone would listen to them when they said that the person’s abused partner is going to be at high and continued risk if this guy isn’t put in prison.
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Clearly people who fit the description of what I mentioned have some degree of success at manipulation because they were able to spot weaknesses in which to draw their victims in, in the first place. Women don’t get hit and abused first and then carry on the relationship, for the most part. It is something that happens over time. That is not to say that they are successful at manipulating everyone. The people running programs may be adept at spotting those types, or they may not.
But I’ll end on that note since, for whatever reason, this point is controversial here and creating upset for some commenters.
I just don’t get this. People who think you are wrong in the internet are not irrationally upset about it.
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I love everything you said there. Grok.
To take the less optimistic side, how likely is it that they are just repeating what they feel the instructors want them to say? You don’t even have to be sociopathic to go along with what you’re told so you can leave sooner. Maybe I’m just being cynical, but some of the answers look kind of spoon fed and a little too well versed in feminist ideas to be credible as the unrehearsed and unprompted statements of someone who’s just been in court for beating up women.
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I think it’s safe to believe that not only psychopaths are capable of manipulation. Some people are capable of empathy for some and completely withdraw it for others, without being totally devoid of it. Also, I personally don’t find these ‘confessions’ very shocking. Of course abusers are aware of what they’re doing. Most of them don’t do it in the midst of a psychotic episode. It’s very methodical, premeditated tactics to control the other person. Maybe I’m too cynical as well, but words alone are very cheap.
I was curious to see what the success rate of such therapy or programs is and found this from UK Center for Research on Violence Against Women from 2011: In conclusion, the paper stated that "almost half of all men who are assigned to attend batterers interventions do not finish the program "(source: Stover, C. S., Meadows,A. L., & Kaufman, J. (2009).
Interventions for intimate partner violence: Review and implications for evidence-based practice.)
Also: "Research that compiles and analyzes outcome studies from dozens of these mandated batterer intervention programs, however, finds at best a very minimal benefit from attending
batterer treatment, estimating treatment to prevent future violence only about 5% more than arrest alone. " (sources: Babcock, J. C., Green, C. E., & Robie, C. (2004). Does batterers’ treatment work? A meta-analytic review of domestic violence treatment., Stover, C. S., Meadows,A. L., & Kaufman, J. (2009).Interventions for intimate partner violence: Review and implications for evidence-based practice., Feder, L., & Wilson, D. B. (2005). A meta-analytic review of court-mandated batterer intervention programs: Can courts affect abusers’ behavior?)
I don’t know how it would compare to US results, but it’s rather sobering. Not saying that we should give up on the programs, every little drop in the ocean is better than nothing, but obviously violent behaviour is a severely tough weed to get rid of.
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When I saw the answers they reminded me of an admittedly less high stakes program about overeating. The first class involved asking for reasons people eat those reasons would fill a white board. Not everyone who volunteered reasons was speaking about their own reasons why they overate. Some of the reasons were even perfectly good reasons to eat (this obviously doesn’t have a mirror in the intimate partner violence class).
Some of the people in the class are trying to say what they think they are expected to, others are trying to say what they’ve heard other people say are reasons. Some are trying to look smart, others to look compliant, others will just stay as quiet as they can. I think that’s all part of the process. Someone who doesn’t know how to articulate how they feel might see something of themselves in something someone else says. Hell, even if it’s kind of BS it might still be helpful. To use an overeating example rather than a violence example, imagine someone hears that when they are hungry they might really be thirsty and starts drinking a big glass of water whenever they feel like eating. Maybe that had nothing to do with why they were overeating, but it could still break a bad habit.
But there;s a lot going against these men. If someone tries really hard to quit overeating and then after a week gets stressed and eats a whole pie, they can talk to someone about it and try to get back on track. Setbacks and relapses are to be expected whenever anyone is trying to change their behaviour. Unfortunately, any “setback” or “relapse” in this case means abusing an intimate partner (or maybe otherwise being violent if their partners have left) and is 100% unacceptable. Imagine someone trying to quit a bad habit, but if they ever relapse once they hurt someone
and go to prison.
I’m not surprised by @Seki’s numbers - 5% success rate (well, 5% of something) is not great but I wouldn’t think it would work better than that. I still feel like the only good way to regard these men is to assume they have a chance to change and that some are honestly trying (not that you said otherwise). I mean, I would absolutely never, ever suggest that a person they abused should give them another chance, but I think society at large should at least be open to people reforming themselves.
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Dumb socipaths do get locked up(because getting past executive guard secretaries can be difficult, while people doing life in prison don’t have many competing appointments, a lot of the more intensive research is done on them); but sociopathy doesn’t require that you be blind to consequences, or even unfamiliar with what people who aren’t you experience as ‘guilt’. Fooling a really sophisticated assay might be difficult; but emulating something within the normal range of behavior would not necessarily represent a challenge(especially in the context of a court that sees a lot of real assholes who aren’t diagnosable with anything other than being real assholes).
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I wasn’t asserting that in the least, but clearly other people, beside yourself, wanted to lop off the direction I was going, and they did seem upset or at least insulted, whereby I didn’t want to spend an entire day engaging in the discussion. If you are interested, there are studies putting the % of the sociopath at fairly low levels in the general population, but a much higher % in the population of those incarcerated, The tests can be subject to bias, based on the test givers, but there is a consensus that there is a considerable jump in personality disorders within the system . Of course there are a multitude of other mental health issues, outliers, and whatnot. I made a statement about one group of people who may be in the program, but I didn’t disregard it’s value. I think it was a mistake in the article to attribute any signaling of regret or a turning point based on the statements written by abusers, because that is unknown. I offered an alternative to the
concept that haven written down motivations would necessarily imply that the authors felt guilt or remorse and I suggested an example with those who are personality disordered.
I was not offended by what anyone said to me, for the record, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I felt that people were much more hopeful and took at face value how the article translated the emotions of the participants and/or any level of regret. I felt that persisting sort of broke that line of positively and that was what was upsetting to some. It’s not an insult. And some people specifically mentioned that what I wrote was not in the article and so on.
*Part of this message is in response to a personal message where you believed I left the discussion because I was hiding, wrong or some other thing,
If you disagree with what I think that’s perfectly fine. It won’t kill me.
There’s an awful lot of supposition going on in this line of reasoning.
The initial problem with this story was that it framed the sorts of response you get from men in anger and domestic abuse intervention programs as being “unabashed” - it leapt to conclusions and instantly assumed the worst without regard for logical context or evidence. I and others pointed out the flaw in this supposition.
Then, appropros of nothing, sociopaths were brought up - I can only assume as a form of villification, as if trying to suggest that if men are in intervention programs, they must be sociopathic? I’m still not really sure. Regardless, I pointed out that it seems highly unlikely that the men in this program offering up these responses are, in fact, sociopaths - especially since there is aboslutely zero evidence to suggest such a conclusion.
And now you’re suggesting that they might secretly be cunning sociopaths able to hide their true natures from the (apparantly inobservant) courts and the psychologists and psychiatrists that one would assume they must have been evaluated by if they are, in fact, enrolled in an intervention program?
This is all extraordinarily unlikely. Sociopaths are very rare. Even rarer are ones that are aware of their condition and who are capable of hiding it. Even rarer still are the ones that can hide their condition, but that still get put into intervention programs.
Even making generous assumptions regarding the numbers of such people there might actually be, they and their behaviors would not be at all representative of the kind of people who end up in these programs. There’s just no reasonable foundation for assuming that the responses generated by this intervention program are the unabashed opinions of sociopaths.
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I don’t think any objective observer would agree. Maybe you could point to a passage that read as upset? If you feel like you are upsetting people and you want to stop then you can stop all you want. But when you say in a message that other people are upset by what you say it is read by others as saying they are irrational and they actually know you are right (why be upset otherwise, since you weren’t being insulting or aggressive). That’s why when someone talks about other people being upset, and I, as a third party to the discussion, can see no reason why someone would think that others are upset, I call them on it - also because I can’t tell if someone is doing this intentionally as a tactic, and if they are its pure sleaze.
And here is what I said:
I think that’s exactly what happens when someone believes that someone else has gotten upset at them.
I think that:
Demonstrates my point exactly. You made a point, someone disagreed, you didn’t want to bother engaging with them anymore because “they were upset”.
Yes, they are represented more in the prison population, and they may be overrepresented in treatment programs like this, but as the treatment programs apparently only work about 5% of the time, the fact that a few of the people they don’t work for have a certain disorder isn’t terribly noteworthy. You are right that sociopaths are unlikely to benefit from this kind of treatment. I don’t know about your idea that it might do more harm than good for them.
As for the bit where sociopaths will be particularly adept at pretending they are benefiting when they are not, I still believe that the kind of person who is great at manipulating other people is also the kind of person who rarely finds themselves in this kind of treatment program because they can talk their way out of it in the first place, and their abused partners probably recant a lot if they ever make a complaint in the first place. Those extremely rare high functioning, remorseless, master manipulators do quite well for themselves.
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This might be a good place to point out that women can be sociopaths too, so talking about sociopaths isn’t really talking about the issue of “why men abuse women”.
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Violators gonna violate
