Letters in Conflict: Analyzing the Construction of Discourse on Intimate Partner Violence

Background and Purpose:In the United States (US), the legal system has responded to the negative effects of intimate partner violence (IPV) by instituting mandatory batterer intervention programs (BIPs) for those charged with a misdemeanor offense. Research has suggested that BIP outcomes are inconclusive at best, and practitioners have begun to develop alternative voluntary programs whose success continues to be a priority.  The present pilot study uses a qualitative approach, analyzing the capstone writing assignment, “a letter from the future,” from one such innovative BIP, to examine how participants reflect on their experiences, and whether their language-use perpetuates discourse that sustains IPV.  Such data could help future programs assess participants’ progress and program engagement.

Methods: The study analyzed letters written by a random sample of male participants (N=46) in a voluntary BIP in a large southern metropolitan community.  Participants ranged in age from 22 to 66 (M=34, SD = 9.8); 24.4% reported Black, compared to 37.8% Hispanic, 31.1% White, and 2.3% Mixed Race.  As a part of the BIP curriculum, participants wrote a letter to themselves as though from a point five years after completing the BIP, describing what had happened in their lives. The letters were analyzed in a two-part qualitative process, beginning with an inductive grounded-theory approach that worked from open-coding toward comprehensive themes. Letters were also coded for narrative, tracking the participants’ creation of causal connections to show how they consider (or fail to consider) the consequences of their actions.

Results:  The inductive coding revealed that most of the letters operated in the mode of “reassurance”: the men used the assignment primarily to reassure themselves that they would attain successes (including financial, romantic, and family areas) commonly associated with masculinity in contemporary US culture.  These reassurances, in turn, tended to demonstrate conflict between dominant ideologies of gender and family dynamics that sustain IPV, and transformative ideologies that avow a need for behavior change and accepting responsibility for past actions.  In the narrative analysis, letters sometimes showed clear causal connections between events, but more often skipped connections, jumping from one state of affairs to another state of affairs without explaining how or why change occurred.  Both sets of results were axially coded for IPV-sustaining and transformative qualities.

Conclusions and Implications:  The combined results of the two analyses were used to derive a typology that placed letters on a spectrum, from “IPV-sustaining” discourse to “transformative” rhetorical gestures.  Most illuminating among these were the letters in the middle of the spectrum, many of which contained simultaneous examples of strongly IPV-sustaining and strongly transformative discourse.  All letters showed signs of cognitive dissonance or struggle, indicating that the men had begun working to reconcile disparate ideologies. The differences among the letter-types, however, suggest that the assignment may provide a useful measure of participants’ progress, or eventually, a measure of the BIP’s success.  Future research should link these qualitative results directly with antecedent IPV and recidivism rates.