Resistance to evaluation in batterers' programs in Israel

Abstract

The goal of the current paper is to clarify methodological concerns stemming from efforts to evaluate batterers' services, and specifically, issues concerning resistance to assessment, evaluation, and change. Whereas most published work dealing with evaluation of batterers' programs has focused on outcomes, the following paper focuses on the problems encountered by the researcher, and the researcher's methodological errors in an attempt to negotiate between the requirements of valid research, the politics of bureaucracy, and the distrustful attitudes of program participants, including both therapists and clients. Thus, the paper emphasizes the pitfalls of evaluation efforts conducted in a highly bureaucratic milieu, on the one hand, and the resolution of sensitive issues such as intimate violence, on the other. In this sense, the paper may be classified as meta-action-research, or an auto-ethnography of ‘batterers programs evaluation research,’ in which the researcher describes and analyses the pitfalls of evaluation research, while trying to construct a heuristic knowledge-base for himself and other researchers working under similar conditions.