Beating the rap

AS STEPHEN MARSLAND was screaming at his partner and threatening to throw her down the stairs, he didn’t realise that the landline was connected to the emergency services. When he shouted, “Want me to punch your fucking face in?”, his victim feared for her life. It is rare for domestic violence perpetrators to end up facing the consequences of the law, and, ordinarily, Marsland’s conviction at Dumbarton Sheriff Court in 2019 of threatening and abusive behaviour would never have been reported in the press. But unluckily for him, two things made it newsworthy: every word of his threats had been recorded, and he had only just completed a perpetrator programme for domestic violence abusers at the time of the attack.

Domestic violence perpetrator programmes (DVPPs) emerged in the UK in the late 1980s — in Scotland with a programme named “Change” and in London with the Domestic Violence Intervention Programme (DVIP). Course conveners in the UK took their lead from a programme in the US known as the Duluth Model, developed by Ellen Pence, a feminist activist and expert in domestic violence.

The idea behind DVPPs was that men would be held to account without clogging up the criminal justice system, and women would be offered support at the same time. The domestic violence programme advocates were well aware that the vast majority of perpetrators were not even reported to the police let alone processed through the system, so they pretty much gave up.

Here lies the problem. Whilst many victims and survivors of domestic abuse refused to give the men a get-out-of-jail-free card by endorsing what appeared to them to be “treatment programmes” as opposed to jail, well-meaning advocates believed they had hit on a solution. If the police and Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t deal with these dangerous men, perhaps they could be sufficiently rehabilitated so that they reform their behaviour.

Current calls in the light