Boone County officials say combining jail time with addressing control issues has lead to some success.
Every weekday, a steady stream of people passes through the glass doors of a nondescript brick building near downtown Columbia that houses the Family Counseling Center of Missouri.
Some of the men who pass through those doors come to take part in one of the center’s many outpatient programs, Men Exploring Non-violent Directions, or MEND.
“The primary goal of the group is to have members be non violent in their relationships,” said Ted Solomon, the program’s director. “Along with physical violence, there’s emotional violence going on long before the physical violence starts, so we really try to confront that.
The program is a form of re-education with a cycling enrollment, meaning a man can join at any point during the 27 week program. Participants spend three weeks each on eight separate themes, with extra time built in to spend on a theme if the group needs it. Each group is led by two facilitators — a man and a woman. Besides leading class discussions, facilitators show small vignettes, lead exercises and challenge the men’s ideas about relationships.
“We challenge people on how they’re seeing things,” Solomon said. “We really want them to be accountable for their behavior.”
Solomon is no stranger to mending domestic violence offenders’ emotional responses. Since the early 1990s, he has been involved in the center’s domestic violence programs. MEND, the most recent program, started in March 2006 and was expanded to offer treatment to more offenders than ever earlier this year.
The program is based on the Duluth Model of batterer treatment, where groups of men examine behaviors and attitudes toward power and control that lead to domestic violence as treatment and anger-management prevention.
“We just try to move men towards having respectful relationships, with non violence being primary,” Solomon said.
He said much of what is discussed in the group sessions is how men can avoid losing control when they get angry, and how they can express anger in a healthy way.
Michael Trapp, one of the program’s eight facilitators, said that while accountability and self-control make up most of the program, learning relationship skills is the other major component.
Accountability is a key part to the success of the program. Almost all of the men who attend are required to by a judge after being convicted of domestic assault.
“By making these people try to be held accountable for the their actions in this group, it’s better than mostly anger management,” Columbia Police Detective Randy Nichols said.
Nichols works with the Family Service Unit and the Domestic Violence Enforcement Unit of the Columbia Police Department. The Domestic Violence Enforcement Unit, or DOVE Unit, works closely with the MEND program.
While the program is helpful, Solomon cautioned that it is not a cure-all.
“If someone goes through, it doesn’t mean they’re going to come out of it and never be violent again,” he said.
But the program is the most common method of treating men convicted of their first domestic violence offense in Columbia.
“If we go for conditional probation, 99 percent of the time it’s always with MEND,” said John Roodhouse, a Boone County prosecutor who has handled an all-domestic violence case load for almost a year. “There’s no other anger-management program like it around here.”
Roodhouse said that regardless of what the program does for offenders, his office is most concerned with protecting domestic violence victims.
“Our case is likely the tip of the iceberg of the violence,” he said. “The MEND program helps address the underlying cause of the violence. Whether or not we send an offender to MEND, we’re looking for protection for the victim.”
Janet Amitin from The Shelter and MEND facilitator Sharon Giles also agree that the most effective way for correcting batterers’ behavior is through a combination of jail time and the program.
“Changing batterer behavior is very unlikely and can take a very long time,” Amitin said. “The first step to changing batterer behavior is accountability and the most affective way to hold batterers accountable is through jail time and attending MEND.”
She said she explains to women who ask about the program that, “just because he’s going to MEND doesn’t mean he is going to change his abusive behavior.”
Trapp said judges should balance the teaching element of MEND and the message of jail time when sentencing the domestic violence offenders.
“I would agree that they have to go hand-in-hand. I think that definitely jail sends a stronger message of society’s disapproval,” Trapp said. “But jail doesn’t teach you the dynamic of hitting is power and control and that there are more things to change.”
Roodhouse said that for repeat offenders, jail time is the most common punishment.
“We have people we convict, we sentence them to supervised probation, they do MEND and a few years later, they’re coming back through the courts,” he said. “We don’t want to give them the opportunity to hurt people again.”
Nichols was less optimistic about MEND’s effects, but said he thinks the effort toward fixing the causes of domestic violence make the program worth it.
“I think it’s better than nothing. I think that we’re trying,” he said, but added that he doubts offenders who are court-ordered to treatment get much out of the program. “I don’t think these guys change.”
Still, facilitators of MEND said the men do change as they go through the program. While Giles said the offenders often come into the program blaming everybody but themselves, many take responsibility for their actions by the time they complete MEND. The group that Giles and Trapp facilitate includes a graduate that has come back voluntarily and continues to use MEND as a resource.
“That particular young man wanting to continue on has given me a lot of hope,” Giles said. “That’s the first step of accountability.”