WIFE batterers can and do unlearn their violent expression of anger when shown compassion and non-judgement for their behaviour, experts said yesterday.
“US studies have illustrated a very high success rate where treatment programmes are concerned,” marriage and family therapist Andreas Orphanides said.
He said people who displayed violent behaviour had to recognise the negative behaviour pattern they had developed, take responsibility for their negative feelings, and learn how to handle difficult situations using their internal value system.
Orphanides was speaking at a news conference to announce the launch of the island’s first ever pilot treatment programme next week.
The education therapy programme, named ‘Love Without Pain’, will run for a course of 24 weeks made up of once weekly two-hour sessions. Initially, it will include 12 participants, who Orphanides said would be followed up to determine the programme’s effectiveness.
It aims radically to change participants’ behaviour and, based on its success, organisers have plans to extend the programme to include women and couples, he said.
It has been set up by the Association for the Prevention and Handling of Violence in the Family, with support from police and the social welfare services.
Orphanides said anger was a normal reaction, but that it was for protection and not to gain strength.
“The tendency to control or cause pain to the people we love is an indication that we have a reduced internal value system, so we have to strengthen this system through the use of exercises that then activate it,” Orphanides said.
He said the false power that anger gave abusers only lasted for as long as the anger.
“Then people tend to feel very bad; the greater the outburst of anger, the greater the degree of depression afterwards. Our aim is to teach abusers to develop resistance to low levels of anger so as to avoid its escalation and explosions,” he said.
Prevention and Handling of Violence Association president Aliki Hadjigeogiou said sentencing batterers to therapy rather than making them do jail time was an effective behavioural change method.
“People can then return to their families with reformed behaviour and not with feelings of vengeance. Previously, by putting them in jail nothing was solved and so they’d go home and the violence would continue,” she said.
Orphanides said the treatment method was effective for the majority of willing participants and that it rarely had to be repeated.
“Most people do not want to be violent. Once they unlearn that kind of behaviour they don’t revert to it,” he said.
Hadjigeorgiou added that with love and compassion the anger could be beaten and that families would benefit as a whole from the programme.
She said the offer of treatment was necessary in Cyprus as the rate of family violence was concerning.
Over the last three years, the domestic violence helpline had handled 3,105 cases, of which 1,684 victims were women, 359 were men and 346 were children.
From 1999 until September 2006, 246 women and their children had also been housed at the association’s safe house.
But these statistics were likely the tip of the iceberg, as international statistics showed that for every 10 cases of violence, only one was reported, Hadjigeorgiou said.
In the last 25 years, 55 women aged between 80 and 17 were murdered, 36 of whom were Cypriot and 19 foreigners. Last year alone, six women were murdered, she added.
