EAN 9781905541409

This book is a practical guide for counsellors and therapists who work in the field of interventions with men who have engaged in violence or sexual abuse towards partners and family members. The book argues that intervention practices must move beyond attempts to coerce, confront or educate a seemingly unwilling or unmotivated man. Instead, it offers respectful intervention practices, necessitating a parallel journey by the therapist, which: assist men in finding an ethical basis and the means to cease abusive behaviour and to develop new ways of relating; are informed by political, rather than psychological, metaphors of explanation and understanding, seeing intervention in terms of power relations and practices within families and communities, and within the institutional, statutory and therapeutic settings in which men participate; move to a restorative project which promotes - the cessation of violence and abuse; the restitution for harm done to individuals, community and culture; and a reclamation of a sense of integrity for the person who has abused.