The Battle Over Batterers : Violence: Some feminists say traditional therapy for spouse abusers is a failure. They should be forced to confront their behavior in classes and taught that abuse is a form of oppression.

The Woodland Hills woman had been reluctant to attend marriage counseling with her abusive husband and it didn’t take long for her fears to come true.

Hours after a joint session, ordered by the court after he was arrested for beating her, the man erupted in anger at his wife. He shook her, shoved her and punched her so hard he blackened an eye and split her lip.

For social worker Betty Fisher, the incident shows all too clearly the pitfalls of trying to treat abusers with traditional psychotherapy.

“Three people sitting in a room dealing with a volatile situation, and none of them recognized how dangerous the situation was,” said Fisher, director of the Haven Hills women’s shelter in the west San Fernando Valley.

Fisher and others are on one side of a national debate that questions whether domestic violence is an individual or societal problem and challenges the conventional wisdom on how abusive spouses--mostly men--should be handled.

The traditional approach among mainstream therapists has been to treat batterers as patients. Either alone or with their wives, clinicians say, they should be allowed to privately discuss the emotions underlying their violence.

But feminists argue that batterers should be confronted with their behavior in classes with other batterers, turned in for new acts of violence, and taught that domestic abuse is a form of sexist oppression. Women’s safety is their main concern, and their approach has slowly gained acceptance.

Traditional therapists counter that although classes on sexism have their place, they are a simplistic answer to complex problems that vary from person to person. Even ardent supporters of the feminist approach warn victims it is no panacea and concede that the handful of studies on its effectiveness so far have been inconclusive.

Nevertheless, feminists have prevailed recently in changing laws in California, Colorado and elsewhere to require batterers to attend classes espousing the feminist philosophy.

California adopted regulations for batterers’ programs this summer. Feminists succeeded because of concern over a host of fly-by-night operations, spawned by a law that mandated attendance in batterers’ programs but set no standards for their content. Los Angeles County alone has about 100 programs, many of them with little or no track record, victims’ advocates say.

“Women’s lives are in the middle of all this,” said Antonio Ramirez, director of a batterers’ program in San Francisco called Manalive. “If I do something wrong, someone is going to die.”

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Domestic violence occurs each year in one out of every seven couples, and two-thirds of American couples have been violent at least once during their relationship, says Murray A. Straus, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire and a pioneer in the 20-year-old field of research.

About 200,000 American women a year are hurt badly enough by their partners to need medical attention, says Straus, who has conducted a series of national surveys.

In Los Angeles, the city attorney’s office files about 20,000 misdemeanor cases a year involving domestic abuse. The number of incidents reported to the Los Angeles Police Department has risen steadily--from 19,418 in 1986 to 43,691 last year.

But, despite the statistical attention recently lavished on the subject, feminists say, conventional psychotherapy continues to fail victims.

Photojournalist Vera Anderson, whose seven-year marriage to the late cable TV executive Jerry Harvey ended in divorce, recalled that efforts to discuss his abuse with his longtime psychiatrist led nowhere. Anderson said that in several joint counseling sessions with Harvey’s doctor--each sparked by a violent incident--the therapist admonished his patient but offered her no advice.

“I didn’t really feel that the danger I felt was being taken seriously,” Anderson said.

Anderson never filed criminal charges against her husband, mainly, she said, out of fear. She said she left Harvey in 1983 after he held her hostage at gunpoint in their Hollywood home, threatening murder-suicide for several hours. Five years later, Harvey fatally shot his second wife and killed himself.

Anderson’s experience is a dramatic example of a phenomenon that women’s rights activists say happens all the time--that conventional therapy protects batterers with its cloak of confidentiality and history of male dominance. Although clinicians say their methods have evolved, feminists contend serious flaws remain.

Marriage counseling is considered especially dangerous because it can so easily backfire, as in the case of the Woodland Hills couple. Feminists also say the premise of joint counseling--that people living together inevitably influence each other--perpetuates sexism by blaming the victim.

And individual therapy lets batterers off the hook too easily, feminists say, allowing abusers to delve into a bottomless pit of emotion without confronting their danger to others.

Fernando Medero, executive director of Common Purpose, a batterers’ program in Boston, described a videotaped counseling session in which the therapist clearly delighted in a patient’s epiphany that when he hit his wife, he was really thinking of his abusive father.

“If I were seeing that man,” Medero said, “I would say, ‘The problem is, you’re not beating your father, you’re beating your wife.’ ”

Instead, feminists argue that men who beat their wives and girlfriends should be confronted about their behavior.

When battered-women centers began opening in the 1970s and victims’ plights were chronicled for the first time, advocates concluded that the violence was part of a pattern of tactics aimed at isolating women and controlling their lives. That anecdotal evidence has since been backed up in national studies by sociologists such as Straus.

Abuse was not the result of uncontrollable rage, they found. Men tend to hit when no one is looking and aim for places covered by clothes. The violence can be traced to moments when men felt their authority was being challenged.

“This is not an individual issue or some kind of psychological problem,” said Phyllis Frank, an early shelter founder from Rockland County, N.Y. “It is sexism that is the root cause.”

In centers of grass-roots activism such as Duluth, Minn., and Boston, women’s advocates have developed the theory of “power and control”--a feminist model that lists the ways men manipulate their partners. Categories include intimidation, isolation and economic abuse. Classes soon began on the subject.

During a typical six-month course, usually part of a court sentence, trained leaders keep discussions focused on the abuse, not what provoked it. Absenteeism, new violence or threats are reported and can send participants to jail--what most experts agree is the biggest deterrent of all.

“Batterers’ intervention programs ought to have very specific and narrow goals and ought not to replace other types of therapies for alcohol and emotional problems,” Frank said. “You can work through all those issues and you can still have a man who’s abusive.”

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Many therapists credit feminists with exposing domestic violence and concede that grass-roots activists identified an issue long ignored by clinicians.

But they also argue that many studies have shown that a large proportion of abusive men are products of violent homes, and are simply too sick to benefit from a class setting.

Boulder, Colo., therapist Ivan Miller told of a wife-abusing client who had endured childhood beatings so severe that he was brain-damaged and illiterate. Despite a need for medication and long-term therapy, the man’s treatment was repeatedly interrupted by court referrals to feminist-model classes.

“The (class) leaders weren’t able to see how badly damaged he was,” Miller said. “He went through three separate domestic-violence programs and was getting nowhere.”

The man finally landed in jail--no longer an immediate threat to his wife but not really changed, either.

“If you want to talk about society, you can say there’s a social problem the feminists have addressed. If you want to apply that to individuals, it’s a different case,” Miller said.

Miller, Straus and others also say the majority of domestic violence is relatively minor--”slapping and throwing plates of spaghetti two, three times a year,” Straus said.

“The people working in safe houses only see the most severely victimized people and they see no flexibility in stopping the SOBs,” Miller said. “Not one of the couples I’ve seen in couples therapy--and I’ve seen dozens--not one had a spouse who needed to go to a safe house.”

By giving couples psychological tests and independent interviews, it is possible to determine who are good candidates for joint therapy, says Robert Geffner, one of that method’s leading proponents.

If either partner is reluctant, if there is ongoing alcohol or drug use, and if the victim has no safety plan, then joint counseling is not a good idea, agrees Geffner, a founder of the Family Violence and Sexual Assault Institute in Tyler, Texas.

A key advantage, he says, is that most couples really want to save their marriages--despite pressure from feminists to put safety first and leave abusive partners.

But, as feminists have pushed their cause, their political orthodoxy has driven dissidents underground, Miller and others say.

The battle has been particularly heated in Colorado, the first state to adopt standards for court-ordered batterers treatment. Effective in 1989, the regulations prohibit joint counseling before an arrested batterer has completed a feminist-model program. They also set in place local panels of lay people to certify the programs and counselors who can accept court-ordered clients.

Miller and Denver therapist Jeffrey Goldman believe they’ve been blacklisted for their outspoken views, including statements calling the feminist classes “political re-education camps.”

Goldman cited several examples of what he called successful therapy derailed by Colorado’s standards, including the case of a troubled family making great strides until the father slapped the mother and pushed her to the floor. No one called the police, and the family--which began therapy because of a teen-ager who refused to attend school--wanted to discuss the incident with its counselor.

But the therapist--a colleague of Goldman’s--feared the consequences of treating the couple without official sanction. The therapist stopped seeing the family and referred each member for individual help. They couldn’t afford the extra expense and felt abandoned, Goldman said.

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This summer, California joined Colorado and several other states in enacting minimum standards for court-ordered batterers programs.

The California measure, adopted unanimously by both houses of the state Legislature, requires a minimum of 32 sessions in a certified program and sets the basic curriculum. County probation departments are charged with evaluating and certifying the programs.

Proponents say a key goal was to prevent defendants from shopping for easy courses and to democratize a process that allowed wealthier men to retreat to private therapy and avoid programs that could send them to jail.

Abusive men generally land in batterers’ programs two ways in California. Many times, attendance is part of their sentence, unless they are repeat offenders and are sent to jail. More often, they are first-time offenders who can get the charges dropped if they complete some sort of “rehabilitation” program.

A big problem was that without minimum standards, defendants could choose among options that included loosely structured self-help groups, religious counseling, traditional psychotherapy and even, reportedly, one-day seminars--all weighted in favor of the man and insensitive to the needs of victims, women’s advocates say.

Although skeptics question the wisdom of mandating feminist therapy, researcher Straus sees a silver lining.

“I think they’re wrong, but I’m glad to see them,” he says. “I’m glad because I want a further step in the process of changing our national ethos, our national attitude and culture about it.”

Where to Find Help (Orange County Edition)

A number of agencies and shelters in Orange County specialize in domestic violence, but in order to keep victims safe, they do not publicize their locations. Here are their telephone numbers:

* Battered Women’s Hotline: (714) 992-1931 (24 hours)

* Clinica Nueva Esperanza: (714) 834-9343

* COPES: (714) 836-3601 (24 hours)

* Crisis Intervention Center: (714) 839-6199

* Interval House (714) 891-8121 (24 hours)

* Women’s Transitional Living Center: (714) 992-1931 (24 hours)