Wishful thinking or Occam's razor? A response to ‘Dancing on a razor's edge: systemic group work with batterers’

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We are delighted to see in the Journal of Family Therapy the publication of a description of a community-based men’s group for those men who physically assault their intimate women partners and behave in otherwise abusive ways. This paper by Mark Rivett and Alyson Rees makes an important contribution to the growing systemic literature on working with family violence in the UK. The description of their approach to their group work raises a number of interesting, important and challenging issues for us, on which we are pleased to comment. Most importantly for us is their description of their commitment to working within a context of support for women partners, liaison with professional colleagues and community-based access to their group work. Co-operation, clarity of purpose and sharing of information lie at the heart of successful community-based approaches to domestic violence. We all espouse a commitment to safety in our work with perpetrators of family violence, but in our view, unless we can achieve this network of communication and support, it is harder to corroborate our information about risks and safety. For this reason we do not offer confidentiality in our work, and only undertake assessment and family reunification work in co-operation with our referrers. We respond to this paper from our experience of co-directing a community-based family violence project, offering risk assessment and intervention. Those readers who know us will know we work with individuals, couples, and household and extended family groups, often as part of an inter-agency package of intervention and support. We put safety first, and have written about our methodology elsewhere (Vetere and Cooper, 2003). For those readers who do not know us, we thought it would be helpful to spell this out. Even though the field includes a range of responses to family violence, we noticed in the Rivett and Rees paper a tendency to define their group work approach in contradistinction to couples work in particular, as if both interventions are not potentially part of a r The Association for Family Therapy 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Journal of Family Therapy (2004) 26: 163–166 0163-4445 (print); 1467 6427 (online)