Not long ago I posted this piece about a German professor's excoriation of that country's domestic violence shelter system (See, "German Prof. Nails DV Industry").  Much of what he said about the DV shelter industry in Germany closely matches what little we know about it in this country.

Among other things, Prof. Amendt referred to a study that was done by Dr. Peter Doge of DV shelters in the state of Thuringen in northern Germany.  Although the study itself hasn't been translated into English, a short summary has been.  Here are the salient findings of the study:

"Methodological Approach:  In Thuringen (a federal state of Germany in the former GDR with 2.1 million inhabitants) there are 16 refuges for battered women.  Our study is based on open interviews with the executives of these 16 shelters.  Additionally we requested some data with a questionnaire: the number of women and children seeking help in 2007 and 2008; their socio-demographic characteristics; the duration of stay.  The interviews were conducted by a female interviewer during July and August 2007.  The study was conducted in behalf of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health of Thuringen.

Main Results:

• The shelters' staff overwhelmingly conceptualized violence as "masculine violence."  Thus there is a clear dichotomization between men as offenders and women as victims:
• Almost all interviewed executives of the refuges see themselves as "partisan," as women's advocates.  Therefore, for them an integration of men in the process of developing strategies for solutions is undesirable.  Systemic approaches are widely unknown;
• The staff does not regularly take part in  supervision sessions.  In general, the funds for staff training are very small; most of the staff training is organized and conducted by feminist organizations;
• There was no consistent method for documenting the cases of help-seeking women and there existed no unified statistical census in the shelters.  Above all, no distinction was made between a single case and a person in the statistics;
• The help-seeking women in Thuringen often are socially underprivileged.  Women with low degrees of education and unemployed women are overepresented in the sample of 2007 and 2008;
• The help-seeking women stay only for a short period of time in the refuge (approximately 50% for only one month); as estimated by the staff of the shelters, about 60% of help-seeking women are returning to their former partners after leaving the shelter."

If all that sounds familiar, it should.  What little we know about what actually goes on inside DV shelters in the U.S. leads us to believe the same things. 

Specifically, the DV industry in this country suffers from the same recording and reporting maladies that the German ones do.  As the President's Office of Management and Budget reports, DV shelters in this country are "non-performing."  That means they have established no criteria for success or progress and, in any event, don't report to the government that doles out hundreds of millions of dollars annually to them. 

Also, it should come as no surprise that the executives who run the shelters fail to recognize the need, much less provide services for male victims of DV.  That's the same as here.  

Likewise, treatment of male or female perpetrators of DV is simply not part of the plan in the German shelters.  The goal seems to be there as here, not to make abusers stop abusing, but to separate men and women.

The first part of the report summary makes it clear that DV is a relational problem between spouses/partners.  It's not, as feminists in the DV industry have long claimed, a political phenomenon of a powerful member of the "patriarchy" asserting dominance over a submissive non-member.  As such, the tendency to engage in violence can be dealt with therapeutically, whereas approaching DV as a perpetrator/victim phenomenon accomplishes nothing toward ending DV.

Again, we've heard this before.  With luck we'll hear it a lot more as society throws off the shackles of DV mythology and starts to address its realities.  We've known those realities for at least 34 years now.  It's high time we started doing something about domestic violence that everyone claims to abhor but few in the industry seem to want to take a constructive approach to. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Domestic Violence/DV System. You can trackback from your own site.