FYI Research:
Wood studies abuse in relationships

For Julia Wood, a professor of communication studies, her route to the Albemarle Correctional Institution began with her students at Carolina.

In her 29 years on faculty at the University, Wood has included discussions on intimate-partner violence in her courses on personal relationships. And over the past decade or so, Wood has noticed more and more students nodding their heads in interest and familiarity during these discussions; more and more students asking questions during class; and more and more students dropping by her office to talk about violence in the lives of their friends, their parents and themselves.

"I don't know whether the incidents of abuse actually increased over the years, or whether there was a greater awareness," Wood said. "But it became very clear to me that we needed to be doing something about it (abuse)."

For Wood, doing something first meant interviewing 20 victims of intimate partner violence, all women, in order to understand how they made sense of abusive relationships. But this addresses only the victims' point of views.

So Wood went to the Albemarle Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in Badin, and interviewed 22 men who admitted to abusing or killing their partners. The study was published in the October 2004 issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

The men's stories, Wood said, provide insight into why men abuse their partners and how it might be decreased.

All the men she interviewed, Wood said, lacked the cognitive skills necessary to think through their options before committing acts of violence.

"Many of these men have never been taught how to think through their options," Wood said. "I didn't believe that thinking through options was a skill. But, by golly, it is."

Environmental conditioning, or their upbringing, also influenced the way men defined manhood, Wood said. All the men said they believed they had a right to control their partners because men are dominant and superior to women, Wood said.

A 23-year-old inmate, for example, told Wood: "A woman's kind of like a dog. You got to break `em. A dog don't do right, you beat it `til it do what you say."

These findings, Wood said, have implications for intimate-partner violence behavioral treatment programs. Traditionally, treatment programs have been empathy-based, "trying to get (the abusers) to understand what a woman feels like when you beat her up," she said. "But if you're trying to make a woman feel bad because she has made you angry, that's not necessarily going to stop you."

Instead, Wood said, treatment programs should move into greater practice. The STOP program, the only treatment program offered in a state prison in North Carolina at the time Wood conducted the interviews, worked with men to redefine manhood and, as the STOP acronym suggests, develop the skills to Survey the situation, Think about consequences, consider Options to violence and Prevent violence.

All the men Wood interviewed completed the 20-week STOP course after she interviewed them. Then, Wood visited the men again and witnessed "genuine changes." She watched, for example, as one man who knifed his partner applied what he learned in STOP to an incident on the prison's yard, where he broke up an argument between two inmates, telling them to think about the consequences of fighting. "Do you really want solitary confinement?" he asked. They stopped arguing and shook hands.

Wood acknowledged such examples may be fleeting moments. Nonetheless, the interviews with the men, Wood said, gave her hope.

"Almost all of the men I talked to were really torn about what they had done to their partners," Wood said. "They knew what they did was wrong because they had also heard about the code of chivalry that is part of manhood. That means there's already something there that we can work with."

Since Wood conducted her interviews in the summer of 2001, the STOP program has been suspended due to a lack of funding.

"We make a serious mistake if we look at abuse as an individual problem; it's a cultural phenomenon," Wood said. "But we don't start talking about violence and why it's wrong until maybe late high school--maybe late high school.

"We've got to start getting this woven into people's awareness at a much earlier age, because I don't want it to happen to my daughter or my son or my best friend. I don't want it to happen to a student in my class," she said.

Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle. Writer: Cherry Crayton.

Technology transfer update

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