Domestic Violence Initiatives - a more rational iteration.

http://ocadvsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Toward-Evidence-Based-Practice-with-Domestic-Violence-Perpetrators.pdf

Dear Amy Adams,

I'm writing to you directly in response to a recent NZ Herald article by Catriona Maclennan regarding DV initiatives , funding and strategy and your recent media comments about reviewing DV and its jurisprudence responses. I have previously contributed to Owen Glenn's review and made submissions to Paul Bennett's call for white papers in her role as Minister of Social Development as well as submissions to the local Family Court.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11499773

I have previously contributed to Owen Glenn's review and made submissions to Paul Bennett's call for white papers in her role as Minister of Social Development.

The seminal document I would hope you find time to review, linked immediately below, is this by Dutton, Corvo and Chen, looking at the nature of DV programmes and questioning their efficacy, ethics and scientific basis.

http://ocadvsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Toward-Evidence-Based-Practice-with-Domestic-Violence-Perpetrators.pdf

I do lecture research methods for a tertiary Institute and am following issues such as this as examples for students on how quality research is either manipulated, ignored, sidelined, disputed and eventually overruled by public opinion, by pressure groups or expediency, despite the very comprehensible and widely understandable recommendations and observations that it offers.

I use the analogy of a person walking along a beach at the bottom of a cliff asking the partly dead and mangled bodies how their respective falls may have been assisted, large mattresses to land on ?, balloons to hold or small parachutes ?, softer sand ? and never bothering to look up and realize the fence at the top had been allowed to become dilapidated through disinterest, lack of funding or torn down through sheer ignorance if its purpose.

Agencies such as Women's Refuge, Police , Lawyers asking for Judges for protection orders are all good people, but fixated on carnage, wandering among the pile of bodies prostrated and near lifelessness after their calamity, never bothering to lift their gaze to the long dismantled fence of Early Quality Relationship Counselling. Dutton makes this point in his volumes of research and documents how he was an early adopter of the road you seem to be intent to pursue, I'm guessing based on your policy advisers, but can I please ask you to review his and his colleagues work and consider the issue from the Psychological and Scientific point of view, where the greatest affectation of simple and practical policies can be achieved. I imagine he would be gladly available as a consultant for your perspective and greater understanding of the issues, if you were to directly approached him.

To quote Dutton

"The current best evidence clearly does not support investing substantial public funds in the continuation, let alone the mandating, of the standard DV program model. In the face of overwhelming countervailing evidence, why does this model persist? There is no scientific reason why causal explanations of DV and the principles of perpetrator treatment should exist outside the biopsychosocial framework used to understand and address contemporary mental health and social problems. In some sense, then, the political issues in the policy framework "trump" the science to a greater degree perhaps than in most other social problems.

Perpetrators are vilified in such a fashion so as to make them appear unworthy of a broader range of services (e.g., as in comparison to parents who physically assault their children; Corvo & Johnson, 2003). There are few advocacy groups to put pressure on legislatures for legal or regulatory change. In short, within the existing policy framework of mandated interventions, there is a lack of political support to reframe the issue so that implementing an evidencebased approach becomes feasible. Whatever benefits to violent families that may result from improved, evidence-based practice await a more rational iteration of the policy framework."

My hope is that you will entertain "a more rational iteration".

https://sites.google.com/site/nzchinatravels/an-even-more-unfortunate-experiment

yours sincerely

Christopher Smith