Creating Holistic Abusive Partner Intervention Programming: A View of the Field

In this episode of In Practice, Rob Wolf discusses the history, trends, and current innovations in the abusive partner intervention field with Juan Carlos Areán, program director of Children and Youth Programs at Futures Without Violence. They highlight the Abusive Partner Accountability and Engagement Training and Technical Assistance Project, a collaboration between the Center for Court Innovation and Futures Without Violence to help communities enhance their responses to people who cause harm through intimate partner violence.

The following is a transcript of the podcast:

We talk about that intergenerational cycle of violence but there's such thing as the 

intergenerational cycle of love and we don't talk about that so much. To change that, to change 

that legacy is not only to change it on your children, but it's changing it in many generations to 

come. 

Rob Wolf: I'm Rob Wolf at the Center for Court Innovation with a new episode of In Practice, our podcast that tells the stories of practitioners -- people who work in or closely with the justice system, who are trying to make the system live up to its name, that is, make justice, more just. Today we're going to talk with a national leader in efforts to respond to domestic and intimate partner violence. Juan Carlos Areán, is a program director in Children and Youth Programs at Futures Without Violence. For the past two years, Juan Carlos has been working with the Center for Court Innovation and other organizations to enhance intervention programs for abusive partners. 

As part of this project the Center and Futures have developed guiding principles for this kind of programming and Juan Carlos has also hosted a series of podcasts, looking at abusive partner intervention programs from various angles. As a leader in the field, he has numerous areas of expertise, including the intersection of fatherhood and DV, cultural approaches to end violence, and curriculum writing. He was previously the director of the National Latino Network at Casa de Esperanza and the Sexual Assault Prevention Specialist at Harvard University. He has led hundreds of workshops and presentations throughout the United States and around the world, and he is also an ordained interfaith minister and holds a master's degree in music composition. Hey, Juan Carlos. Welcome to In Practice.

Juan Carlos Areán: Thank you so much Rob. Thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me.

Wolf: Well, it is a pleasure and an honor to have you here. So, why don't we just dive in, and for people who may not be familiar with some of the terminology, if you could just define what is abusive partner intervention programming and maybe you can reflect a little bit too on how it has evolved over the years and the factors that have fed its evolution.

Areán: Well, so what we call abusive partner intervention programs is basically working with people who use violence in their intimate relationships and that cause harm in those relationships. We are at a period in history for this field that we're changing language around it and different people use different names for this kind of work. It traditionally has been called batterer’s intervention, although some people prefer to call it battering intervention. And I think some of us are trying to talk more about intervention of the behavior, rather than the person. But whatever you want to call them, these programs work with people who use violence -- originally men, but in the last few years, more people across the gender spectrum. 

These programs started in the 1970s pretty soon after the battered women's movement started with the second wave of feminism. I think there were men who were allies to the women in this movement, and, as I hear from people who are originators of this kin