News Release

Photo note:  To download a photo of Wood, see end of story.

Understanding why men hurt women
seen as one key to designing treatment

By L.J. TOLER and JENA WITTKAMP
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- This year, some North Carolina legislators want to require behavioral treatment for prisoners convicted of assaulting or murdering intimate partners. Dr. Julia T. Wood of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says her research shows they’re on the right track.

A bill to strengthen laws on domestic violence, introduced in the N.C. House May 11, includes the requirement. Treatment would be designed to prevent repeated violence after inmates are released.

"We’re trying to do more than just put them in jail and let them sit there," said Rep. Joanne Bowie (R-Guilford), co-chair, with Rep. Earline Parmon, (D-Forsyth), of a treatment subcommittee of the House Select Committee on Domestic Violence.

Wood, UNC’s Lineberger Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences’ communication studies department, interviewed 22 imprisoned men about why they beat or murdered their wives or girlfriends. Understanding their perceptions is one key to designing programs that can succeed in changing them for the better, she said.

"If we can provide information to society on their mindset before intervention, that will be more helpful in designing effective interventions," Wood said. She has sent her findings to state legislators advocating the new treatment requirement and to groups across the nation that have treatment programs.

The study, "Monsters and Victims: Male Felons’ Accounts of Intimate Partner Violence," will be published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in October. Its title comes from tendencies to see batterers at either one far end or the other of the spectrum from good to bad.

"As a society, we want to keep seeing people like them as monsters, but they are also victims," Wood said. The monster view helps some leaders rationalize against spending public money to help them change, she believes. "It would take a real commitment by society, and yes, it would cost a lot of money, but probably a lot less than what we spend to deal with the problem itself in terms of victims and prisons," Wood said.

The problem, authorities say, is serious. The N.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence counted 68 murders in the state resulting from domestic violence in 2003 and 74 in 2002. Those numbers represent reports to the coalition from local agencies, not convictions or incidents confirmed as domestic violence cases by the criminal justice system. There, many such cases are classified as assault or murder. Another part of the House bill would create a way to track when an offense involves domestic violence.

Wood cited estimates from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence that about 4 million cases of violence against women by intimate partners are reported each year. Of those, 1,000 were murders by husbands or boyfriends. Quantifying the problem is difficult because not all cases are reported.

In North Carolina, recent cases in the news have kept the problem in public view. In October, Michael Peterson of Durham was convicted of murder in the death of his wife, Kathleen. Last year, Ian Campbell was convicted of murder in the strangling death of his fiancé, Raleigh school teacher Heather Domenie. And on Friday (June 4), a female UNC-Wilmington student was found shot to death; previously, the woman had taken out a restraining order against the ex-boyfriend who was charged with her murder. The man died late Monday (June 7) as police sought him out; his vehicle went over a cliff.

Wood conducted her interviews in summer 2001 in the Albemarle Correctional Institution, a medium security prison in Badin. The men were racially and ethnically diverse and ranged in age from 23 to 54. Most were from low-income families.

Wood insisted on interviewing each man one-on-one, behind closed doors, without a correctional officer present. When she waived rights to hold the N.C. Department of Correction responsible for any harm, her request was granted.

Only once during the interviews was Wood afraid, she said -- when one large man stood up to re-live his thoughts leading up to an incident, with great animation. But Wood was never hurt. "The men were all respectful and very generous with me," she said. "They told me things they’d never told anyone before."

Trying to understand them, she wrote in her study, "is not at odds with denouncing violence against women, which must be condemned without qualification." She was able to remain neutral and unemotional during the interviews, "but afterward, I was terrorized by nightmares, and they were all very violent." She woke up screaming.

Wood’s study described two conditions that can create batterers: environmental conditioning and modern cultural views of the ideal male. All the men had grown up amid violence. When one was 5 years old, he saw one of his brothers shoot another one.

"I don’t know what I’d be like if I had grown up in his family," said Wood, a Roxboro native. Many youngsters have parents that teach them appropriate ways to deal with anger, she said; these men didn’t. "They haven’t learned to think of options," she said. "Instead, it’s just, ‘I’m mad’ and – whop!’

"We especially need to change families in terms of how they raise their sons," she said. "Age 22 or 58 may be too late. People don’t get to be monsters, saints or just regular, decent people without a lot of shaping."

All 22 men said they believed that men are dominant over and superior to women and have the right to control them. Most said the reason they kicked, stabbed or shot a woman was that "she didn’t respond to me as a man" or "she didn’t ask permission to go out" or didn’t have his dinner ready on time, Wood said. "A lot of them were getting validation for their manhood."

Some felt they didn’t measure up to codes of manhood they admired. In today’s world, that’s increasingly hard to do. Many workers, men included, have been laid off, taking away the status of breadwinner.

"I couldn’t get a decent job," one inmate told Wood. "I didn’t feel like I could take, uh, like I was the provider, you know what I’m saying. I didn’t feel like a man."

With most careers now open to women, they no longer need men for economic survival. Cultural attention has shifted to women, minorities and diversity. Men, especially white men, "don’t have that high social standing anymore, so the need for a woman to be subordinate increases because they don’t have validation from other sources that they are men," Wood said.

Most men cannot achieve the physique of Shaquille O’Neal or Brad Pitt in the new movie "Troy." Yet those are the images of manhood that society embraces today. Especially since 9/11, Wood said, society has glorified the He-man image, in sports, cartoons, magazines and movies. "Gladiator" comes to mind, and G.I. Joe. "Over the years, his biceps have gotten bigger," Wood said.

"There’s such a contradiction in society today as to what men are expected to be ideally and what they can be – just as most women can’t measure up to the models on the covers of magazines," Wood said. "It’s an enormous problem, and it’s so widespread."

Finding other ways to define manhood, and convincing men in treatment that violence and masculinity aren’t synonymous, are essential to stopping intimate partner abuse, Wood believes. Those are among the goals of STOP & Change Direction, a treatment program at the Albemarle prison where Wood did her research.

Many North Carolina counties have community treatment programs for probationers, but STOP is the only one in a state prison. The acronym stands for survey (the problem), think, options and prevent victims. The program defines resisting violence as more powerful and manly than engaging in violence. The 600-hour, 20-week pilot program began in September 2000 and had graduated seven classes through last December. Of seven graduates who have been released, none has been reported to have re-offended or re-entered prison.

Wood calls on researchers to work with staff at correctional institutions and elsewhere to develop programs that aim to reduce intimate partner violence, and to teach men to change their views of manhood and male-female relationships. After her interviewees completed STOP, Wood revisited them. Some of their comments were:

• "I can control myself and focus on that responsibility. Aggressiveness is being out of control. I realize I have choices to make."
  
• "Being in the STOP program has taught me many aspects to bring a man that are not about violence or control."

The statements, Wood wrote, could have been crafted to win approval from the prison staff or reflected a short-lived conversion. But it’s possible, she wrote, that the men truly were embracing new definitions of manhood. "If so," she said, "the bill now in the legislature could be a significant way of helping these men redefine themselves."

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Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/wood_julia.jpg

Contact: Dr. Julia Wood, 919-967-5332, turbiville@aol.com

News Services contacts: Print, L.J. Toler, 919-962-8589; broadcast, Karen Moon, 919-962-8595.