The Operational Challenges for Batterer Intervention Programs: Results From a 2-Year Study

Abstract

Batterers intervention programs (BIPs) constitute a primary intervention for perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV). There is little understanding as to what operational, or program-level, challenges BIPs face that can impede their effectiveness and adherence to state standards. As part of a 2-year ethnographic study, we conducted 36 individual semistructured interviews with professionals working with BIPs and identified five themes related to program-level challenges for BIPs: (a) information barriers, (b) safety issues, (c) facilitator retention and training, (d) the need for monitoring, and (e) funding constraints. We conclude that continued work needs to be done at both the state and local level, and in coordination with community judicial, mental health, human services, and other agencies to help provide resources that support BIPs in sustained, safe, and as effective as possible work.

Keywords

intimate partner violence batterer intervention

Introduction

Over the last two decades, the United States has seen a nationwide adoption of mandatory arrest laws and, subsequently, greater numbers of perpetrators arrested for intimate partner violence (IPV; Barner & Carney, 2011; Gelles, 2001). As such, programs for IPV perpetrators, or what are commonly referred to as batterer intervention programs (BIPs), have proliferated across the country, with reports of 2,500 now in existence in the United States (Price & Rosenbaum, 2009). These programs have become an integral part of both the criminal justice and social service response to IPV (Barner & Carney, 2011; Jackson et al., 2003). Courts now increasingly rely on BIPs as the predominant form of criminal adjudication for perpetrators of IPV (Barner & Carney, 2011; Saunders, 2008; Stover, 2005). Today, an estimated 80% to 90% of perpetrators arrested for IPV are mandated into a BIP (Price & Rosenbaum, 2009).

Despite the overwhelming use of BIPs, concerns about their legitimacy have arisen. Experimental or quasi-experimental studies that test the efficacy of BIPs through measures of recidivism and/or reassault as outcomes have demonstrated at best mixed results (Alexander, Morris, Tracy, & Frye, 2010; Babcock, Green, & Robie, 2004; Brannen & Rubin, 1996; Dunford, 2000; Feder & Wilson, 2005; Gondolf, 2009a; MacLeod, Pi, Smith, & Rose-Goodwin, 2009; Mills, Barocas, & Ariel, 2012; Morrel, Elliott, Murphy, & Taft, 2003; O’Leary, Heyman, & Neidig, 1999; Rempel, Labriola, & Davis, 2008). Other concerns have been raised about the interaction between the courts and BIPs, and the overwhelming reliance that these programs have on court systems to provide them with clients, and ultimately their financial livelihood (Danis, 2003; Holtzworth-Munroe, Meehan, Herron, Rehman, & Stuart, 2003; Tolman, 2001). Furthermore, some BIPs operate in absentia of any parent organization or relationship to women’s programs, and as such, some have cautioned about the dangers of dishonest or uninformed practitioners entering in the field (Danis, 2003; Tolman, 2001). In addition, others have worried that the philosophies of BIPs and those of the women’s movement may not align, and that the risk to victims when programs collude with perpetrators can be deadly (Gelles, 2001; Holtzworth-Munroe et al., 2003; Tolman, 2001).

To improve services and promote quality, consistency, and safety for victims, 45 states to date have developed formal standards for BIPs based on what policy makers and practitioners believe are best practices (Austin & Dankwort, 1999; Maiuro & Eberle, 2008; Price & Rosenbaum, 2009). In theory, standards are designed to maximize the efficacy of BIPs and protect victims by promoting quality assurance and monitoring. However, as some have pointed out, the research on BIPs is limited and there is not enough evidence to support the development of standards for how BIPs should operate (Austin & Dankwort, 1999; Holtzworth-Munroe, 2001; Maiuro, Hagar, Lin, & Olson, 2001). In fact, most of what is known about how BIPs function is from general descriptions of the theoretical models and approaches for various BIPs (Dutton & Corvo, 2007; Morrel et al., 2003; Pence & Paymar, 1993; Saunders, 1996, 2008). Very little information exists that describes how BIPs work, the processes they use, or even what challenges and difficulties they encounter that might impede their efficacy (Aguirre, Lehmann, & Patton, 2011; Buchbinder & Eisikovits, 2008; Chovanec, 2012; Pandya & Gingerich, 2002; Rosenberg, 2003; Scott & Wolfe, 2000; Silvergleid & Mankowski, 2006; Wangsgaard, 2000). Without a good understanding of contextual factors and circumstances in which BIPs function and the various issues and concerns they face in trying to accomplish their missions, there may be the risk of creating and adopting policies that are unrealistic and unattainable. It is therefore imperative to provide an in-depth, multifaceted description of BIPs from the perspectives of those who work in or with these programs.

Objective

The purpose of this analysis was to describe what programmatic challenges BIPs encounter from the perspectives of those individuals who work directly with and within BIPs, as well as those who rely on BIPs in their professional practice (e.g., court officials, law enforcement, victims’ advocates). For the purpose of this study, we define “programmatic challenges” as some of the logistical, operational, and systematic realities that BIPs must contend with on a daily basis and that have the potential to affect their work. Understanding the difficulties these programs encounter in their day to day existence is imperative for devising holistic ways to support these programs and maximize their potential for promoting behavioral change among male IPV perpetrators.

Method

Parent Study

This current analysis is a part of a 2-year ethnographic study of BIPs for male perpetrators of IPV against female partners in an urban area in the United States. An ethnographic approach was taken because such studies are better suited for obtaining a more in-depth, nuanced understanding of contexts (Giacomini & Cook, 2000; Patton, 2002) by allowing investigators to interact with study participants in their real-life environments and provide a detailed description and analyses of the culture, processes, and practices related to the population or the situations studied (Genzuk, 2003). The parent study used in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations to achieve two aims: (a) to understand and describe the processes and content of BIPs and (b) to explore the perspectives of BIP group clients, their partners, and professionals who work with or whose work relies on BIPs, regarding these programs.

Current Analysis

This particular analysis is derived from in-depth, open-ended interviews with those professionals who work with or whose work relies on BIPs. We interviewed BIP administrators, BIP group leaders or facilitators, IPV victims’ advocates, law enforcement officers, members of the judicial system, county health department officials, state and county policy makers, attorneys, and other relevant community leaders about their perspectives on the barriers/challenges to intervention, definitions and perceptions of best practices for BIPs, and beliefs about what factors contribute to perpetration of IPV. Here, we present the findings from these interviews on the key challenges encountered by BIPs at the program level. Questions relevant to this analysis included the following: (a) What are the main challenges for BIPs? (b) What barriers exist to intervention with male perpetrators of IPV? (c) What logistical needs do BIPs have? (d) How can BIPs improve their services?

Setting

This study was conducted in collaboration with two local BIPs. The two BIPs represented the largest (by volume of clients) and most experienced programs in the area. Each program had been in existence for 10 or more years at the time that data were being collected. One program utilized an adaptation of the Duluth model (Pence & Paymar, 1993) as the basis for its curriculum; the other an adaptation of Emerge (Emerge, 2016). Each program had a client volume of greater than 100 perpetrators per year and sustained five or more locations in the area where BIP sessions were held. To ensure participation, promote safety, and facilitate open, rich discussions in the interviews, study participants were recruited with assurances that their statements would be anonymous. Due to the relatively small community in which the research was conducted, participants would be easily identifiable given explicit demographics. Thus, we do not provide details of participant characteristics such as specific roles or professions. Instead, participants are categorized into one of three professional domains: BIP experts/IPV victims’ advocates, judicial and legal professionals, and policy/human service professionals.

Data Collection

Data for this study were collected over the course of 2 years during 2013-2015. We began recruitment by using two BIP facilitators with whom we already had contacts who served as consultants on the study. These individuals had been involved in developing one of the BIPs and in creating our state’s BIP standards. We identified, approached, and recruited additional participants using a snowball sampling technique with current study participants suggesting and facilitating contact with additional individuals they felt would have a valuable perspective to share regarding BIPs.

All interviews were conducted by the research coordinator (P.K.M.), a PhD-trained anthropologist, in a private space selected by the participant. While an interview guide helped to focus the interview, effort was made to ensure an open, conversational, subject-directed interaction. Each interview lasted between 45 and 90 min. Verbal consent for participation in the study was obtained prior to each interview. The institutional review board at the University of Pittsburgh approved this study.

Analysis

All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim by a trained transcriptionist. Interview data were organized in ATLAS.ti, a qualitative data management program, and a two-coder iterative approach was used to analyze the data. Analysis focused on content and global coding of broad thematic categories and subcategories across all participant types. First, the first author and a qualitatively trained research assistant each independently reviewed the transcripts line-by-line to identify preliminary themes. The coders then met to compare themes and refine each, creating hierarchical categories of codes and subcodes. Definitions were delineated for each major and minor theme to assist in the final coding step. The two coders then independently recoded the transcripts using the codebook and met once more to reconcile any differences if needed. Reported themes are those that arose consistently across participants.

Results

Thirty-six open-ended semistructured interviews were conducted with participants. Across all professional domains, participants were a majority female (70%) and Caucasian (75%) and had at minimum 5 years of professional experience in BIPs or IPV. A majority worked as BIP experts/IPV advocates (52%), 12 of whom were BIP group facilitators (i.e., the service providers who run BIP group sessions and work directly with BIP clients, providing group counseling). BIP experts/IPV advocates were followed by judicial and legal officials (33%), and policy and human service professionals (15%), respectively. Our analysis identified five themes related to program-level challenges for BIPs: (a) information barriers, (b) safety issues, (c) facilitator retention and training, (d) the need for monitoring, and (e) funding constraints. A note on the analytical presentation of the data: For ease of presentation and logistical flow of the manuscript, these challenges are presented as unique themes. However, it is clear that these challenges are an interrelated set of difficulties that holistically affect BIPs on multiple levels.

Information Barriers

Participants described the challenges related to obtaining relevant information on clients both in terms of the difficulties related to information sharing across systems and the nuances of gathering information from clients and victims.

Participants discussed the difficulty of obtaining information from some of the other systems clients were involved in, such as mental or other health services and the courts. Some information is confidential. For instance, one participant explained about mental health records: “I would like to know a little more about the mental health background of each person, but I understand, that is confidential, I mean you can’t.” Other information was often simply not shared with BIP facilitators. For example, court records containing information on the client’s arrests were often not provided to BIPs: “Having the docket sheet of all of the times they’ve been arrested would be an incredibly useful resource which we just don’t get unfortunately.” Another participant described how he used public records to try and supplement information on clients:

Information sharing is a huge barrier because we historically don’t get court information in terms of if a client had 15 past arrests. We go in blind. We can do web searches, legally of course, what is public record, but it would make our life easier if we didn’t have to do that.

Thus, many participants felt BIPs received little information on their clients due to information and confidentiality barriers between systems.

Our participants described that BIPs often use self-reports from clients to gather relevant information on abusive behaviors and client history. However, such reports were viewed as problematic in that clients fail to report certain behaviors. As one participant stated, “The programs try to get as much information as they possibly can; they get clients’ self-report, [but] frankly how much of what you’re hearing is true?” Similarly another participant said, “They give us their history. But how true is it? That is a challenge.” Obtaining information from victims was also problematic. Many programs require contact with the victim for the purposes of risk assessment and safety planning. Yet, sometimes this task could be logistically challenging. One participant describes how time constraints affected BIPs’ capacity to connect with victims:

It takes time to contact victims, with going to court, preparing for group, doing group, and all the other responsibilities of the job, that is a challenge, especially as you get more and more men, to contact all their victims.

Another described how often victims were simply lost to follow-up: “Sometimes it is unrealistic to talk to the females to get some input from them. It is hard if they are not with them anymore, to get phone numbers, figure out how to reach them.” A third participant discussed the issue of having to rely on clients to provide contact information for victims who therefore may feel compelled to downplay their partner’s behavior:

We have to rely on abusers for survivor contact information, which is unbelievably problematic. Some people we get the sense that they’re waiting by the mailbox and coercing her to give a glowing report, “he’s never done anything wrong, he doesn’t need to be in a program.”

More problematic, however, was that most felt that having inadequate information on clients limited programs’ ability to effectively address clients’ needs. One participant discussed how having more complete information on a client would alter his approach: “I don’t have any way of seeing any last arrests, like I don’t know if there were 8 arrests. I would ask them more nuanced questions around that if I knew that.” Another described how information barriers affect treatment delivery: “Not knowing if this is a pattern across relationships . . . [or] over time in this particular relationship? So I mean I think that’s a barrier to delivering treatment.” Similarly, a third participant explained how having a complete picture of a client’s violence history would help to holistically frame the client’s behavior:

Getting information on a rap sheet or . . . if there’s been phone calls to police that haven’t resulted in an arrest, that would be highly relevant as well because that would provide a kind of sense of when did the problem begin to impact quality of life, or begin to get out of control for this person?

Thus, obtaining information about clients that provided a more holistic picture of their behavior in support of improved service delivery was seen as a challenge.

Safety

Participants described safety challenges as well; specifically, they discussed safety issues related to not inadvertently putting victims at risk and the safety concerns for facilitators who run groups.

As stated above, obtaining information from victims could be logistically difficult; it also, however, presented challenges in terms of safety for victims. Many participants cautioned that programs had to be careful when obtaining information from victims that it did not put them at risk. As one participant described, merely talking to victims could be dangerous for them: “Are they [the victim] willing to talk to us, are we putting them in that risk when they talk to us?” Even when BIPs received a victim’s input, they had to be careful so as not to inadvertently breach confidentiality and jeopardize her. Programs therefore had to be strategic on how they used information gleaned from victims. One participant described how she confronted a client’s behavior in group without exposing the victim’s disclosure:

An ex-partner sent us some hardcopies of explicit pictures. We could build in exercises that confront people who think like that, but we couldn’t directly say something to him. I’m not sure how we would do that and still protect her and not have to worry about her safety.

Another described having to balance the victim’s input with group rules and safety planning: “A partner called and made allegations that he’s been physically abusive. It’s a real sticky situation, that’s a violation of the rules, but if they kick him out now, is that going to make it more dangerous for her?”

Furthermore, participants felt BIPs also had to balance victims’ safety with their intention to try to change batterers’ behavior: “I think that’s part of the challenge—we give a false sense that there’s something magical gonna happen in this group.” Victim safety is a key component of BIPs; specifically, our participants felt that BIPs needed to ensure realistic hopes and expectations among victims. Thus, participants felt that programs had an obligation to not lead a victim on about the degree to which the program could change her partner: “I don’t want to send false hope to a survivor who’s waiting for this guy to come home a changed man.” Helping victims to understand the limitations of programs, however, was sometimes difficult; victims often had expectations for BIPs that were beyond what programs could deliver: “. . . Because the hope they have is that if he gets counseling he’ll change. So that’s difficult to get them to see that [the change may not happen], and it’s dangerous.” Thus, one safety challenge participants identified was the balance between offering an intervention designed to try to change batterers while providing victims with a realistic understanding of what to expect from their partners’ BIP participation.

Participants also described some of the unique challenges in terms of facilitator safety. Specifically, participants recognized the physical safety challenges for BIP facilitators. As one participant stated, “One of the challenges is feeling safe. The clients are very bold. They are very, they are fearless.” Dealing with threats and aggressive clients therefore was an issue: “I’ve been threatened. These men can be very intimidating so I worry about people that are running groups.” Others expressed concerns over physical safety of facilitators due to the logistics of groups. For example, one participant described how group location could be problematic: “These sites are not always in the best places and we used to get a police escort but they took so long, they kept taking longer and longer to get there. So safety is one concern.” Another described how simple group administrative tasks, such as collecting clients’ fees, could put facilitators at risk: “Safety is a concern too. Clients pay in cash [and] are watching you collect all this money and making comments. They do notice. That is a little bit unsettling when you are walking out with $500 cash.” Finally, others were also concerned with the facilitators’ emotional safety: “It is dangerous. The people who do the group need to have a lot of support, because this is not work that you just leave behind. I think so many times we don’t have the supervision that is needed.” Thus, contending with both physical and emotional safety concerns for facilitators was also a challenge.

Monitoring

Participants also saw challenges in terms of monitoring BIPs; monitoring was considered fundamental for accountability: “You know we say we teach this curriculum or guide a client through that curriculum but without being monitored every single session there is no way to hold us accountable for that.” Without monitoring, BIPs remain largely unregulated: “Anybody that gets it together and can have a meeting and run it with someone who used to be a batterer and charge people to come. I think we need to have regulations.” Thus, a lack of monitoring created the potential for delegitimizing programs:

Batterers [will] go to the program they’ve heard is the least restrictive. You can get away or sit in a corner, drink coffee and smoke a cigarette. There’s no watchdog for the group and I think that’s what we need.

Without some form of monitoring, therefore, participants felt that it was incredibly difficult to ensure minimum standards:

We need monitoring to [know] do you have to have credentialed people teaching the class. Are you guys just sitting around talking about “Yeah my old lady said this and that and I just smacked her upside the head?” What are you teaching? What’s your protocol and what’s going on?

Another stated, “Without a centralized system, it is very hard to track this. We need to know how many people, if our programs work . . . And we don’t have any long term ways of checking on that.”

Despite the awareness that a lack of monitoring was problematic for BIPs, participants equivocated on who should be in charge of such regulation. Some felt strongly that monitoring should be a component of the justice system: “The only way that can be done is through the criminal justice system.” Others felt that the monitoring had to be done by women’s advocacy programs: “Batterers programs should be monitored by a women’s program.” Others were completely unsure of who should be responsible for monitoring programs: “Well I think it’s like anything else; we have to know what works and what doesn’t work. So somebody should do it; I don’t know who though.” Another participant described the variability of approaches taken across different states to monitor programs:

There are some states where the programs are monitored by community mental health agencies. There are some states where they have their own network. There are some states that are monitored by the women’s programs overtly, yes. It’s different all over the place.

Thus, making sure programs were monitored and determining who would most appropriately be responsible for that monitoring was considered another challenge.

Facilitation

Another key challenge our participants identified was the staffing issues that BIPs often contend with in terms of recruitment and training. Some participants admitted that the minimal pay many BIPs offered played a role in being able to attract individuals to facilitate BIPs: “A barrier of course is recruiting staff, having dedicated people to work for minimal income.” Another participant discussed how pay affected the ability of BIPs to keep facilitators as well: “There needs to be more consistency with the facilitators that they would stay employed for a longer period of time, because the pay isn’t great.” However, more interestingly, almost all participants expressed the belief that, in general, it was hard to find individuals who were willing to work with batterers:

I think that there’s a shortage of people willing to work with the men . . . I think for a lot of the people it’s a job. So [we need] people that care enough to learn what they need to learn to work with particular people.

Another similarly stated, “You have to have people committed to the work and very good at being able to reach the men.” Thus, participants saw finding qualified professionals committed to BIP work as a challenge: “I think you need to have a very skilled counselor, and there aren’t that many interested in working with the men.” As a result, BIPs are often forced to operate with minimal staff: “I only have currently 4 full-time employees. I only have two employees who facilitate. The rest of my facilitators have what I call their ‘real jobs,’ their day-time jobs.” As another participant stated, “Relying on dedicated volunteers and/or lower paid employees or contracted employees—that’s a challenge.”

Another key challenge for BIP facilitation was training. Participants agreed that at minimum BIP facilitators had to have training in domestic violence. However, participants admitted that even this basic standard was often hard for many programs to maintain: “I think a lot of the facilitators don’t have domestic violence training from their local program. So I think that part is missing.” Another participant similarly discussed how BIP facilitators needed some kind of expert training in domestic violence:

I don’t necessarily believe you have to have a master’s degree to do this work, but it doesn’t hurt to have somebody with expertise in domestic violence . . . But what kind of training are they really getting? Those are hard challenges.

Participants recognized that the availability and cost of training were often prohibitive. One described how he felt that there were limited training programs for BIP facilitation and what existed was uneven: “There’s training available, but there’s not much available, and it’s idiosyncratic.” Another discussed the costliness of some of the nationally recognized training programs:

If you’re looking at national training by Duluth, Emerge, the New York model, Amend, it’s not cheap to take their training. That’s 100s of dollars and then just because you went to the training then you have to pay for all the material. It’s a lot of money. So I think that holds a lot of people back.

Another stated, “There should be funding for BIPs because that way the facilitators that are running the groups would get training.” One participant even described not wanting to financially or logistically burden her already overworked staff by requiring additional training: “Facilitators can always use training. I don’t mandate my facilitators to do training because we don’t have the resources to pay for it, number 1. Number 2, my [facilitators] are all part-time. I have to take that into consideration.” Thus, ensuring that facilitators received the necessary training for working with domestic violence and batterer intervention was also a challenge.

Funding

Finally, although participants clearly indicated that some of the other barriers they described were related to monetary constraints, they also specifically detailed the unique financial challenges for BIPs in terms of finding reliable funding sources. Many BIPs rely on client fees to cover costs. However, frequently clients cannot afford to pay, can only afford a reduced payment, or simply do not pay. As such, BIPs face financial challenges when clients’ fees are not met: “I mean it is a business. We run into trouble when clients don’t [pay] . . . We can’t let them get into the hole and not pay.” Even when clients do pay, participants felt that those fees alone were not sufficient to cover all program costs: “The hypothesis is that the fees paid by the men will support the program. But if the fees are not high enough to do that, it can’t be self-sustaining.” Thus, most believed that BIPs could not sustain themselves solely on what clients’ paid to attend the program: “Surviving on the offenders paying for group can be very difficult. How do you survive on that alone?” Not having a way to offset costs when clients’ fees were not met was therefore a key issue: “The classes have to be paid for. Sometimes even the lowest level of payment is too much for some. And there’s not funding for it.” Similarly, another stated, “There are client fees involved. We don’t have any public money invested in paying for the service for the provider to cover cost when clients have an inability to.”

Most participants therefore agreed that there needed to be some resources for helping financially sustain programs. However, determining where to seek additional funding was also a challenge. Traditionally, IPV advocates have not wanted BIPs to take funding from victims’ services. As one participant stated, the perception was that “he was the bad guy and none of the scarce funding for women’s groups ought to be spent on men.” As another stated, “We have enough trouble finding funding to do what we need to with women that [we often] have no interest in sharing funding with men or having them be part of it.” Many felt that resources for BIPs should be separate from the traditional mechanisms used to fund victims’ programs: “The domestic violence programs want the BIPs to have funding. It just shouldn’t be taken out of victims’ services funding. But they do believe that there should be separate funding for BIPs.” Yet where separate funding for BIPs could be found was unclear: “We wouldn’t go after private grants because we go after private grants to support our victims programs. So where is that money going to come from?” Another participant stated, “People don’t invest in batterers programs. It is a hard one isn’t it? I don’t have any magic answers for this. But we are going to have to [find] some money somewhere.” Thus, another challenge for BIPs was to find sustainable, reliable funding that would not conflict with resources for victims’ services and that would help offset fees for indigent clients.

Discussion

In this study of two BIPs, we found that our participants described several key program-level challenges for BIPs. First, participants described information barriers that ultimately affect their approach. Second, they described safety issues for victims and the facilitators running the programs. Third, participants identified the need for program monitoring and for trained, dedicated BIP facilitators. Finally, our participants discussed the problem of finding sustained resources to finance BIPs. Interestingly, although our participants were not asked specifically about state standards for BIPs, the programmatic challenges they articulated nonetheless are reflective of the ongoing discussion and concerns raised in the literature about the appropriateness of such standards in absence of evidence-based practices (Bennett & Piet, 1999; Eckhardt et al., 2013; Gelles, 2001; Gondolf, 2009b, 2011, 2012; Holtzworth-Munroe, 2001; Maiuro et al., 2001; Murphy & Ting, 2010; Radatz & Wright, 2016). These findings are an important, therefore, in that they potentially not only highlight some of the impediments that BIPs might face in terms of integrating standards into practice but also point to the need to better understand the full range of operational challenges that these programs contend with before standards are developed.

We found that participants articulated difficulties related to accessing information on clients, information most felt would be useful for helping to adequately tailor intervention methods to clients’ needs. It is not surprising that confidential records, such as mental health information, were unavailable to BIPs. Although participants felt this information would be helpful, they also understood why such information was privileged. Perhaps more important is that our participants reported not receiving information from the courts who mandate clients into their programs. BIPs and court systems over the years have developed a somewhat symbiotic relationship in that courts contract with BIPs to provide programs and an overwhelming majority of clients BIPs receive are court-mandated as part of criminal adjudication for IPV charges (Babcock & Steiner, 1999; Barner & Carney, 2011; Messing, Ward-Lasher, Thaller, & Bagwell-Gray, 2015). Others have similarly hinted at a lack of integration and information sharing between BIPs and court systems elsewhere (Bennett & Vincent, 2001; Price & Rosenbaum, 2009). Our study supports these findings and further begs the question of how to improve communication across the entities that are responsible for batterers, entities that often have limited resources for record-keeping and strict obligations for privacy protections. Given the relationship between the courts and BIPs, and that one of the goals of most state standards is to promote a coordinated community response to IPV (Tolman, 2001), it is imperative to understand how to address informational gaps to ensure success of each BIP client without compromising the clients’ confidentiality. A possible approach to this challenge could be cross-disciplinary discussions to identify what specific information may be needed by each entity and for what purposes.

Our participants also articulated both logistical and safety challenges to obtaining information from victims. Victim contact is a practice that was established early on in BIPs to ensure that group practices did not risk the safety of victims; such contact allows programs to safety plan with victims when a threat emerges in the context of a BIP group and gives victims the opportunity to share information about their abuser’s behaviors outside the group (Mederos, 2002). Maiuro and Eberle (2008), in their review of state standards, found that 93% of states require BIPs to have contact with victims. However, Price and Rosenbaum (2009) found that, in reality, a very small proportion of BIPs make regular contact with victims; a majority (75%) of the BIPs they surveyed only contact victims once during the perpetrator’s time in the program. Furthermore, Bennett and Vincent (2001) found that more than 50% of the programs they surveyed only had written contact with victims. What is missing from this work is an understanding of the reality of what programs face to obtain contact with victims, and the logistical and safety concerns that arise from doing so. Our study helps to fill this gap and highlights the need to understand, when programs are able to contact victims, how exactly BIPs use this information and how best to ensure the safety of both victims and batterers when seeking such information.

Participants also described safety challenges in terms of balancing the program’s intention to try to change batterers’ behaviors with ensuring realistic victims’ expectations to prevent exposing victims to danger. Some have argued that state standards are problematic because they imply that BIPs work and are effective at stemming partner violence (Gelles, 2001; Holtzworth-Munroe et al., 2003). As Gelles (2001) stated, “Standards, irrespective of what they include, may well be regarded as a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for treatment programs, a sign that such programs work” (p. 18). Thus critics have argued that standards may increase the potential risk for victims, as victims may be more willing to stay with or return to partners who are engaged in treatment (Gelles, 2001; Gondolf, 1988; Holtzworth-Munroe et al., 2003). There are limited data to support this theory (Gondolf, 1988), and thus, it is unclear to what degree, if any, standards might increase the risk to victims. To date, however, only 18% of states with standards currently require BIPs to inform victims of their limitations of their treatment outcomes (Maiuro & Eberle, 2008). Our study shows that the professionals working with IPV across service types feel an obligation to ensure that victims understand the limitations of BIPs and that while BIPs hope to change clients’ behavior, this cannot be guaranteed to occur.

Participants also cited challenges related to BIP facilitation. Participants recognized the challenges related to physical and emotional safety for those individuals working with perpetrators. To our knowledge, only one other study has explored the safety challenges facilitators might encounter during BIP group sessions (Tyagi, 2006). It is unclear, therefore, to what extent this finding may be unique to our particular study population. Perhaps a more compelling concern is that participants also identified difficulties related to recruiting and training qualified individuals to facilitate BIPs. The extent to which this study is generalizable to other BIPs and the staffing challenges that they face are not well understood as only a few studies have examined this topic and only one in detail (Boal & Mankowski, 2014; Dalton, 2007). Boal and Mankowski (2014), in their survey of 42 BIPs in Oregon, found that programs there faced numerous challenges related to finding and keeping qualified facilitators, as well as financial and other constraints, such as where training programs are located, and scheduling and workload considerations for employees, which limits facilitators’ opportunities for training. Our study therefore adds an important component to the literature in terms of highlighting some of the realities of recruiting and maintaining well-qualified facilitators that BIPs may encounter. It also hints at some of the additional concerns related to facilitation brought on by the operational demands of such programs, including the relationship between staff workload and training, and staff safety. Any assessment of programs, including adherence to state-specific training requirements or guidelines for facilitation, needs to take into account the logistics of staffing for BIPs and consider alternative ways to support programs in meeting their facilitation needs.

Monitoring of BIPs was also identified as a challenge by our participants. A key element of state standards is that programs are to conduct evaluations and make themselves accountable to women’s shelters and advocates (Austin & Dankwort, 1999), though such accountability and monitoring continues to be an ideal, rather than a reality, for many states (Dalton, 2007). Dalton (2007) showed that almost half of the BIPs surveyed in his study operate as for-profit agencies that have little to no association with any women’s advocacy group or shelter. Similarly, reviews of individual states’ standards show little to no monitoring or coordination with battered women’s advocates (Bennett & Vincent, 2001). Furthermore, regulation of these programs is challenging given that there are no national BIP organizations or registries for BIPs, and many states do not have the tracking or record-keeping required to know how many programs are in operation, nor do they have reporting standards for programs. In absence of these tracking mechanisms, there is no way to track or know how many clients are judicially mandated every year (Dalton, 2007) and monitoring of these programs becomes difficult. Furthermore monitoring of BIPs is complicated by the fact that there are no funding sources for monitoring, or clear guidelines for how programs should be monitored or by whom programs should be monitored (Maiuro et al., 2001). Given that a lack of monitoring can be dangerous for victims (Tolman, 2001) and that our study supports the notion that those individuals working “on the ground” with batterer intervention saw it as a vital component for maintaining victim safety and ensuring programs were accountable to state standards, this research suggests then that state standards need to take into consideration the logistical concerns for monitoring—It is not enough to recommend that programs are monitored or held accountable to women’s programs; states and other IPV agencies need to provide the regulatory guidelines both for how and by whom programs will be monitored and work to establish networks, funding, and supplementary resources to ensure compliance with monitoring.

Finally, our participants discussed the challenges related to sustainable funding for BIPs, including the difficulties of relying on client fees, and the need to secure resources while not diverting funding away from victims’ services. That our participants brought up the issue of funding for programs is not surprising as others have recognized the funding complications associated with BIPs (Dalton, 2007; Price & Rosenbaum, 2009). Inadequate funding resources for BIPs have been linked to lack of efficacy (Holtzworth-Munroe, 2001; R. B. Stuart, 2005; G. L. Stuart, Temple, & Moore, 2007), poor sustainability, the ability to adapt to clients and their needs (Price & Rosenbaum, 2009), and difficulty paying facilitators and covering location and material costs (Boal & Mankowski, 2014). In addition, the need to resolve the tension between funding for victims’ services and BIPs is something that continues to present a challenge for IPV advocates in general (Barner & Carney, 2011; Gelles, 2001). Without funding, any IPV program, including BIPs, is hard-pressed to maintain even the most minimal standards (Arias, Dankwort, Douglas, & Dutton, 2002). Our study adds to this work the voices of the individuals for whom funding challenges are a day to day experience, particularly highlighting the need to invest in BIPs as part of a system of responses to IPV. As Barner and Carney (2011) have noted, an equilibrium in funding trends needs to be reached for IPV-centered interventions to effectively promote a strong coordinated community response, one that considers BIPs as part of a holistic set of services and resources aimed at preventing and ending IPV.

Limitations

Our study has several limitations worth mentioning. First, our study was conducted in a single county, focused on only two BIP organizations, and did not include professionals who may work with batterers in individual or other settings (e.g., couples therapy, independent psychotherapy). Thus, it is unclear to what extent our study and its sample population are generalizable to all BIPs, or all types of practitioners who provide therapeutic services to batterers and their families. Furthermore, we cannot presume that these findings reflect the challenges and barriers faced by BIPs in other regions or countries. However, in our discussions of these findings with BIP experts and community stakeholders from other parts of the United States, we have noted that these external experts expressed corroboration with our findings. Second, this is a qualitative interview study of a diverse group of community stakeholders whose professional positions were related to BIPs. Had we focused specifically on just one group—that is, limiting participation to only BIP facilitators or only law enforcement officials—we may have generated different findings. However, we chose this heterogeneous sample purposely as we were interested in the themes that were common across these groups. Third, our focus was on community-based adult male BIPs. BIPs that serve specific populations such as youth/adolescents, incarcerated individuals, or women likely face a different constellation of challenges and barriers.

Conclusion

Although our participants were not asked specifically about compliance to standards, their answers reflected some of the issues around standards implementation that remain unresolved in the scholarly literature. The difficulties addressed in running a BIP by our participants are not ones that can be solved by one entity or agency alone. Continued work needs to be done at both the state and local level, and in coordination with community judicial, mental health, human services and other agencies to help provide resources that support BIPs in sustained, safe, and as effective as possible work. Furthermore, more observational research is needed to highlight the logistical challenges BIPs face that impede their ability to meet state standards and to ensure state standards are adequately informed by empirical evidence and are appropriate to the contexts and realities of BIPs.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh for their support.

Author Contributions

Study conception and design: All authors. Acquisition of data: Penelope K. Morrison. Analysis and interpretation of data: Penelope K. Morrison and Judy C. Chang. Drafting of manuscript: Penelope K. Morrison and Judy C. Chang. Critical revision: All authors.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Support for this work was made possible by grant funding from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

Author Biographies

Penelope K. Morrison, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at the Pennsylvania State University – New Kensington. Dr. Morrison has utilized her expertise in qualitative methods to broadly explore issues related to gender and sexuality, with a focus on improving health services for underserved, vulnerable populations of women and children. Her research domains include intimate partner violence, opioid dependency and pregnancy, and adolescent substance use and sexual and reproductive health risk-taking.

Lynn Hawker, PhD, is formerly of the Women’s Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh. Dr. Hawker has over 20 years experience working with intimate partner violence as a women’s advocate. She has developed and led workshops on a variety of women’s issues, and continues to consult on intimate partner violence research.

Elizabeth P. Miller, MD, MPH, is chief of Adolescent Medicine at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Miller’s research has included examination of sex trafficking among adolescents in Asia, teen dating abuse, and reproductive health, with a focus on underserved youth populations including pregnant and parenting teens; and foster, homeless, and gang-affiliated youth. Her current research focuses on the impact of gender-based violence on young women’s reproductive health.

Patricia A. Cluss, PhD, is the Director of STANDING FIRM. Recently retired from her position as Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, she continues her professional work as a licensed psychologist and consultant for several regional nonprofit and health-related organizations. She is also an expert member of the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Intimate Partner Violence Homicide Review Team and a consultant for a PA Commission on Crime and Delinquency-funded research project at the University of Pittsburgh that is describing the methodology and impact of batterer intervention programs in the region.

Donna George, MS, is an AOD Program Director at California University of Pennsylvania. Ms. George has over 20 years of experience as an advocate and facilitator, working with both men and women in the area of intimate partner violence.

Rhonda Fleming, MSOL, is the Education & MEN/S Program Director at Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh. Ms. Fleming has 20+ years of experience training others both nationally and internationally in the area of intimate partner violence. Her expertise includes identifying warning signs of abuse, safety planning, teen dating violence, effects on children and understanding the batterer’s perspective.

Terry Bicehouse, BA, is formerly of the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh. Mr. Bicehouse has over 35 years of experience working with men who batter, both through private practice and as a batterer intervention program facilitator. He continues to share his expertise though training and consultations related to intimate partner violence.

Kalem Wright, MSW, LCSW, is a clinical social worker and therapist. Mr. Wright specializes in intimate partner violence, trauma, mood disorders, grief and loss, and relationships. He also has expertise and extensive experience as a batterer intervention program facilitator.

Jessica Burke, PhD, is an associate professor and Associate Chair of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences, at the Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Burke’s work aims to improve the health and wellbeing of women and children by addressing complex community health issues including intimate partner violence, HIV/AIDS and racial disparities in birth outcomes.

Judy C. Chang, MD, MPH, is an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Chang’s work has been primarily focused on violence against women, specifically on issues regarding health care screening and interventions for intimate partner violence. She has participated in multiple collaborative groups exploring various topics in women’s health services and outcomes, and is currently expanding her research to examine patient-provider communication in women’s health and obstetrics/gynecology.

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