Invitations to Responsibility – An Introduction

Alan Jenkins’s  (1990) book is a combination of a fascinating and tough read.  It is tough because it covers many of the cognitive distortions and patriarchal myths of gender and rape discourses.  Yet, it is fascinating for the use of questions that emerge in collaborative inquiry with the client.  Written in 1990, the book is somewhat dated in its focus on heteronormative relationships, yet relevant in the underlying patriarchal values and discrepancies that it seeks to address.

Identifying Responsibility

Jenkins (1990) outlines responsibility as the full acknowledgement of the existence and significance of abuse, along with an understanding of its (potential) impacts on the victims and other(s).  Ceasing abuse and changing behaviour is placed on the client.  There are a series of ways clients may try to make sense of the abuse that has taken place.  Jenkins argues that “causal explanations” are often what a client will go for, and it is often distressing to the client if they can not find a causal explanation.  These explanations are often unhelpful, however, as they distract the client from taking ownership of their transgressions.

Abuse is often attributed to external events/stressors, and the acceptance of responsibility is often diverted from the client and placed on others.  This leaves the client feeling that they have little influence or control over the events that take place in their life or can provide a pathway to unhelpful thinking or solutions that place the blame on victims – who then carry the burdens of shame, guilt, and responsibility for the actions of the client.  Because abuse does not happen in a vacuum, there is a broader social system impacted by the violence.  This can include other members of the family, friends, and extended social system.  Multiple individuals may feel trapped by abusive behaviour – the abuser feeling unable to stop abuse, the abused feeling unable to leave, and the larger social system feelings powerless to intervene.

Causal explanations can create a false sense of relief through the abdication of responsibility – reducing their culpability and increasing entitlement for forgiveness from all groups impacted by the abuse.  As I have written about in other papers in the bachelor’s program (see my learning products section), shame and guilt are pieces of a puzzle that guide individuals towards acts of reparation.  Thus, causal explanations are counter-productive to the client taking responsibility.

Furthermore, the search for a cause can become a means for an end within itself.  This quest, as such, reduces the action the client takes in taking responsibility and ending abusive behaviours.  Introspection becomes a means of “trying hard” without concrete steps of creating change and accountability for one’s actions.  Partners of the client can also become preoccupied with the “why” of abuse.  This plays into discourses of victim-blaming by providing an opportunity to locate circumstances where shared responsibility can be used as an explanation for violence and abuse.  Should blame or avoidance become emerge from the “cause,” affirming conclusions prevent the discovery of a rich narrative of how abuse emerged, grew, and took over the lives of the abuser, abused, and witnesses of abuse.  Such a path misses opportunities to have the client seek out reparatory solutions that would benefit the client and victims.

From this perspective, I look at systems theories (at a macro level or micro level within a family) as offering no benefit to the intervention.  Looking at how society/family shapes the client to either be desensitized or normalized to abuse misses the choice that the client can still make to accept partaking in abuse over time.  While contexts and discourses of gendered norms and violence may be useful, the displacement of personal choice onto societal norms sets the client up to displace their responsibility.

If we do want to look at applying psychological and sociological concepts into the intervention, my understanding is that it has to be quite localized around the client’s phenomenological reality.  Similarly, Jenkins (1990) believes that the perpetrators of violence have a series of values and beliefs that act as restraints towards the acceptance of responsibility.  Jenkins refers to these as restraining beliefs.

The restraints need to be considered in the context that they are developed and maintained.  They often exist in views of the self and views of the relationship, as well as experiences and expressions.  Practitioners can explore what cooperation in relationships looks like, along with the client’s initial perception of explanations for abuse and attributions of responsibility.  This allows the practitioner to see what types of “solutions” the client has tried to carry out and understand the limitations these have had on ceasing abusive behaviour (eg. does buying flowers repair relationship damage if the reasons for buying the flowers are not addressed).

Explanations are thus only useful if the proposed solutions can harness an intervention that seeks to place responsibility on the client for their actions.  To do this, the client needs to understand the impacts their actions have on others and learn to relate more sensitively to others.  To be successful, the practitioner needs to help motivate the client to take responsibility for their participation in the interventions(s) and change(s) in behaviour.

References

Jenkins, A. (1990). Invitations to responsibility: The therapeutic engagement of men who are violent and abusive. Adeide, SA: Dulwich Centre Publications