This is a guest blog by Dr Nicole Renehan and Professor David Gadd.
Beyond Building Better Relationships
In our paper published in the British Journal of Criminology in January 2023, we sought to engage policy makers and practitioners in reflection about what can be learned from Building Better Relationships (BBR), the only accredited intervention for domestic abuse offenders on probation in England and Wales. The Ministry of Justice intends to replace BBR with a new ‘generation of programmes’, despite no evaluation following ten years of its delivery.
Our paper was also written on the backdrop of a recent inspection into domestic abuse work in the newly unified Probation Service in 2021, following the failed privatisation of the supervision of low to medium risk offenders, the work contracted out to private companies. The thematic inspection makes for troubling reading and, contextualised within multiple HMIP inspections, tells a story of a service that has struggled to surmount many years of under-resourcing and under-valuing those who work within it. The result has been an understaffed, overworked and (in part) inexperienced workforce, who nevertheless shoulder the burden of negative press attention when failures in the probation system transpire into another domestic homicide that could have been prevented.
The importance of the Therapeutic Alliance in improving programme outcomes
The quality of the relationship (aka the ‘therapeutic alliance’) between probation practitioners and their clients has in recent years become the cornerstone of probation practice for improving outcomes. We argue however that therapeutic alliances are difficult to forge on the backdrop of those issues outlined above, and, we suggest, has become somewhat tokenistic in the absence of the time, supervision or skills practitioners need to maintain such alliances. With the onus placed firmly on the practitioner, we further argue that there has been little meaningful consideration of how working alliances can become ruptured when the personal lives and crises of practitioners and clients play out within the dynamics of domestic abuse delivery work.
By speaking to a cohort of BBR domestic abuse offenders, and intervention practitioners, it was revealed that practitioners’ experiences of working within a fractured and overstretched service was experienced as something akin to working on a ‘conveyor belt’. This had consequences for how they worked with a population of men with many personal and social adversities, reduced opportunities to learn from reflective practice, and compromised the professional identities of those who delivered BBR, as one said:
[W]e were complaining about how under pressure we all are, how stressed we all are, how we don’t have time to do things and… [they said] “don’t spend too long on your notes…get down the important bits…we’re only aiming for bronze standard” which says to me “we’re not bothered about the standard of work that you’re doing…go for a lower standard, but more of it”, rather than the highest standard but we’re taking slightly longer to work with people. It…offended me a little bit [be]cause these are real people that we’re working with. That doesn’t sit right with me because I’m not a “bronze standard” working person.
The pressures on the service and the time limits placed on programme practitioners, translated into men sometimes being ‘dumped’ onto BBR with little involvement from their probation officer, and later signed off from BBR without meaningful follow-on support. This was equally raised as an issue by both practitioners and clients, as one BBR programme completer who felt ‘let down’ stated:
I said, “I’m scared of reoffending again.” And she said, “Dale” she said, “Don’t worry.” She said, “I wish I had a pound for everybody who thinks that when they’re leaving this course…” And, and the one thing that has really, really pissed me off and it’s put me on a downer about the course… I have to keep really thinking in me mind about the good I got from the first three modules… The course [finishes] and it’s game over. “Right, go on, jog on”.
Some of the practitioners spoken to had experienced similar adversities to their clients and could relate to such difficulties. For others, the work could be unsettling when the men’s violence accounts resonated with domestic abuse and insecurities in their own familial and intimate relationships. At times, the complexities of such feelings and frustrations of an overstretched workforce played out in ways that was not conducive to building a therapeutic alliance. Such revelations point to the importance of supportive supervision, and reflective practice.
The effects were not always negative, with some practitioners describing how their own experiences helped them to relate to and relay back to clients in more simple ways often complex concepts written with the programme manuals:
I can get a little bit wrapped up in oh, God, I’ve got to do what the manual says. I, you know, look at this kind of deeper meaning, this deeper understanding and if I kind of, not ignore it ‘cause it’s very important. But if I don’t overthink that and try and just relate, er, to where they’re coming from, I think I can just talk to them on a level that helps them to kind of understand what it is that we’re talking about or…make things a little bit more simple for them.
Conclusions
Our research highlights the importance of:
- Providing practitioners with the time, supervision and skills to develop a therapeutic alliance.
- Listening carefully to men’s rationalisations for violence (however unpalatable) and engaging thoughtfully with their accounts of what happened.
- Understanding that clients will also need support after groupwork programmes have concluded, and anticipating that feeling abandoned after intervention support has ceased can evoke new crises.
- Support for practitioners – many of whom will have had difficulties in their own relationship that resonate with disclosures made in group work interventions – to utilise their own lived experiences in positive ways.
