Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse—and thus a very worthwhile policy.
Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim?
Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work—because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
Depends on whether you intend the anger management course to teach the student or the instructor.
If the only lesson that is learned is by the abused, and the lesson is that “This won’t work,” that’s worth learning, too. A lot of abused people think they can fix things. I don’t think merely switching to another fix-me-up relationship is a solution, and that seems to be the standard procedure for abused people.
I just don’t see much, if any, commonality in the curriculum between the abusers’ classes and the victims’ classes. What little there might be seems unlikely to be sufficient to justify creating a common classroom, given the potential downsides.
Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse—and thus a very worthwhile policy.
Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim?
Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work—because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
For the abused, the practical limit is not personal willingness, but financing and social stigma.
Depends on whether you intend the anger management course to teach the student or the instructor.
If the only lesson that is learned is by the abused, and the lesson is that “This won’t work,” that’s worth learning, too. A lot of abused people think they can fix things. I don’t think merely switching to another fix-me-up relationship is a solution, and that seems to be the standard procedure for abused people.
I just don’t see much, if any, commonality in the curriculum between the abusers’ classes and the victims’ classes. What little there might be seems unlikely to be sufficient to justify creating a common classroom, given the potential downsides.