If a perpetrator reaches out, it shows they want to do better. But what happens after they hang up?
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About one in four women and one in ten men in the United States experience domestic violence, and 55 percent of female homicide victims are killed by their current or former intimate partner. And yet for decades, the bulk of efforts to end intimate-partner violence have focused on criminalization rather than prevention.
Experts believe that intimate-partner violence surged during COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. According to JAC Patrissi, the 10 to 10 Helpline’s co-founder, removing victims from an unsafe situation had already been a challenge in the rural areas the helpline serves. “This whole idea of moving the survivor as the main intervention was never going to work before the pandemic, and especially not during,” she said.
Harris listened and nudged him to see that hurting his partner is a choice. She asked, “How do you work with employees when you’re not getting what you want from them or they’re not doing their job correctly? Do you use violence?” The man responded that, while he doesn’t get physical, he has yelled at his reports. Once, he even made someone cry, which made him feel bad.
At the end of the debrief, Patrissi and Harris discussed a few ways in which they could nudge similar callers toward being a safe partner. “He’s still minimizing, denying, blaming, and using violence. In terms of the process of change, he’s at the infancy stages,” Patrissi said. “What you want to do is paint a picture for him to look at himself a little bit differently, naming this pattern of behavior, naming what the impact is.
The system as it is puts the burden of ending the cycle of abuse on survivors. Harris, who previously worked in shelters, said some of the women she’d worked with would say that the labor-intensive aftermath of abuse — having to live in transitional housing, go to court and figure out how to co-parent with their abuser — was as traumatic as staying in their relationships. If their partner was the main breadwinner, the women knew they would be financially insecure on their own.
Stover thinks the helpline is a great access point for perpetrators who want help, particularly because conversations around domestic violence are often cloaked in denial and shame. “I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t think there should be domestic-violence laws or criminal charges. I think there needs to be, because some people really harm their partners and really need legal intervention as well,” she said.
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