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 today, men felt free to say sexist things and expect other men to join in the laugh—often in the presence of women.

Today beer ads are notorious for presenting men as feeling more attached to their beer, feeling freer to describe their feelings of love and loyalty to their brew, than to their girlfriend. And then, when she reacts in dismay or disgust, he looks at us as if to say, "What's her problem? I was just playing."

So what does it mean that while there's been a slow but seismic shift in men's consciousness regarding sexism, Anheuser-Busch still makes millions of dollars selling men mocking women? And in that same genre of beer ads, we are also seeing a woman bartender refusing to pour beer for a guy because he's carrying a purse, introducing the apparently lucrative connection between sexism and homophobia. I think of these beer ads as barometers of the extent to which corporate sponsors feel free to use sexism and homophobia to promote products to men. Hard to imagine these sponsors seeing racist humor as profitable. Not that racism is any less alive and any less crippling in its effects. It's just that the public in general, and media moguls in particular, know better than to make blatant attempts to profit from racism.

I think that in the early 80s, Gus and I were struggling with how to create the kind of tipping point among men where it would become as unacceptable to say and do anything blatantly sexist as it was to be blatantly racist. But we were clearly knee deep in our efforts to deal with our own sexism, which brings me back to those intense supervision meetings with Kathleen and Leigh Ann.

There was one particular incident in which I tellingly revealed my unexamined sexism. Kathleen had requested that I submit a monthly written report on our work with the men in our group. I remember the stunned look on Kathleen's face when I handed her several somewhat rumpled pages of notes with cross-outs and scribbles in the margin. And then she handed it back to me, saying something like "You'll need to present this in a readable form." I recall Leigh Ann either saying or looking like she was saying, "What were you thinking?" It was, no doubt, occurring to all four of us that my report revealed my tremendous lack of respect for her position as my supervisor. And I'm sure that Gus, too, was wondering, "What is he thinking?" It was flagrant enough for us both to revisit the question we would ask ourselves and other men who do this work: "So are we that different from the men with whom we work in our groups?"

While it was clear that Kathleen and Leigh Ann were distressed by these discoveries, they seemed to know that making mistakes was inevitable in this work and were often more understanding of us than we were of ourselves. Later in the car ride home, Gus and I would laugh at the weird ways we had acted in the room, but I think we knew that our bodies were responding to the serious consequences of our well-intended efforts in the best way they knew.

Setting the Bar

Nonetheless, given the choice of looking to women for feedback or relying on our own experience or judgment, Gus and I still instinctively looked to our selves as the experts on men. After all, conventional wisdom told us that men know men best. On the other hand, analysis of how oppression works tells us that members of subordinated groups have to know the dominant group, and be experts on them, just to survive. Just as slaves on the plantation had to know the master's every move and mood in order to survive safely, women have learned the importance of studying and knowing men's tendencies in order to avoid men's rage. And so, in the course of our supervision by Kathleen and Leigh Ann, we began to hear things about their experience of men, including ourselves, that were disturbingly insightful.

Take, for example, the decision to audio-record our classes with men. After the "Ted" debacle, Kathleen and Leigh Ann decided that they needed a clearer picture of how we did our work, so they decided that we would tell the men at the beginning of the group that we were being supervised by two women's advocates who required us to record the class.

As we sat down to begin the class, I sincerely believed that once the men heard that we were being supervised by women who "required" us to be accountable for our work, they would, in disgust for our acquiescing to women, vehemently protest, and or just get up and walk out. So I read my opening statement, which I had carefully written out so that I wouldn't forget or minimize the message, turned on the recorder, and waited for all hell to break lose.

But nothing happened. The men just went ahead and began the class as usual, one by one introducing themselves and acknowledging whether or not that had used controlling behaviors on their partners during the preceding week.

I was amazed. For one, the men didn't appear to have much difficulty with the idea that two women were supervising us. And second, if they weren't having difficulty with it then it probably meant that I was the one having difficulty with it; I was the one experiencing resistance to the idea that women had the right and the knowledge to tell me and Gus how to work with men. I think that what I was also struggling to understand then was that Kathleen and Leigh Ann were much more focused on the obstacles and anxieties of the women who weren't in the room than on the needs and challenges of the men who were in the room. Therefore, their expectations of those men, and, for that matter, of Gus and me, were high. I, on the other hand, and particularly in the early days, was caught up with the importance of "joining" with the men in order to gain their trust and ultimately their confidence in our program and me. My thinking was that once you earned their confidence you could then require more of them. I was pretty sure Kathleen and Leigh Ann didn't understand the importance of that. Over time I grew to understand that it wasn't an either/or proposition, that in fact one of the best ways to gain the respect and confidence of men who came to us to "change" was to expect a lot of them from the very outset: set the bar of expectations for men early and set it high and men will rise to that level. And when we began with low expectations of men and set the bar low, men would go low.

When Kathleen and Leigh Ann matter-of-factly expected me to tell the men that women were requiring the recording, I was, in effect, telling them that the priority in the room was the safety of the women who were not in the room. I had to shift my stance to one where I expected men to bond around the primary needs of women. And when I did that and men responded positively, I discovered that by making women's needs a priority could actually be experienced by men as being in men's interest.

Kathleen and Leigh Ann understood that. That understanding was difficult for Gus and me to hold on to. Without the weekly supervision we couldn't see when we were compromising that. Our first challenge was to do something that we were asked to do that really didn't make sense to us, go ahead and do it anyway, and then have the unnerving experience of knowing that they were right. But if Kathleen and Leigh Ann had not been in position power to require that, Gus and I, whenever we felt uncomfortably challenged, could have easily agreed to disagree with them and proceeded with our own ideas of how to work with men.

Because Men Must

Our supervision experience was providing us with the tools to understand the meaning of women's reality so that we could consistently bring it into the room. But why wouldn't we solve the issue of how to bring women's truth into the room by simply making women co-facilitators in the room? Many batterers' programs were already doing that, so why wouldn't we?

Kathleen had strong opinions about that, which she laid out in her article "Working With Batterers: What is Women's Role?" In it she presented compelling reasons for her insistence that men co-facilitating classes. Incidentally, none of her reasons suggested than women were unprepared or unqualified to work effectively with men. In fact, she stated early in the article that many women want to be in the room precisely so that men can hear directly from women what it is to be the object of their violence and abuse and, because they have co-facilitator authority in the room, so that they are less likely to be ignored or discounted.

Kathleen built her case for male co-facilitators in the article by naming the goals of a batterers' program:

"What is the task, ultimately, of a batterers' intervention class? Ultimately, that task is the undoing of sexism.... The premise that is often stated is that a man learns to be violent from his family—either from abuse that was perpetuated against him or that he observed. While this is true as far as it goes, it misses the more profound basis for his violence: a sexist culture, which is then played out in families. Our belief is that men learn primarily from other men to be violent, so that's where they have to unlearn it. Therefore, the batterers' intervention class should simulate the sexist society, not the family. A group co-led by a man and a woman tends to suggest the family, with the facilitators subconsciously representing husband and wife or mother and father, further suggesting that the violence is of concern only within the confines of the family—in other words a private matter."

And, to further explain her preference for having male facilitators in the room, Kathleen spoke to the conditions under which men "get real" with each other:

"It seems likely to me that when a woman is in the room with a group of batterers, some version of chivalry will kick in, meaning that men won't `get real.' Possibly the batterers will behave in the ways they are supposed to behave with "good women" (in this case, women with authority in their lives). But it's how men talk about women when women aren't in the room that counts. If men don't talk directly about their contempt for women, get challenged, have to take responsibility for it, they won't change."