Research and practice working together?

1. Research and practice working together? The Respect experience of bringing research and practice on male victims together to help everyone Thangam Debbonaire, Respect Research Manager

2. Respect Research: What we want to do • Bring research and practice closer together • Make research work better for practitioners • Help research to help people to be safe from violence and abuse • Help practitioners to be involved in research

3. Examples of our practice-research work • Two user feedback surveys of our Helpline clients • Sharing our knowledge and data with researchers • Discussing research plans with academics • Helpline database records provide data • Current pilot of research on help seeking • Evidence base for the toolkit on work with male victim

4. Challenges • Resistance from researchers to collaborating with practitioners • Resistance from practitioners to collaborating with researchers (and the well, d’uh, reaction to research • The false “ideology – science” dichotomy Lack of recognition of different and overlapping needs • Possibility that some of this is because of income and correlations between gender, power and income • Assumptions that men just want same as women but painted blue • but does any social service department mandate male victims to the Freedom Programme? If not, why not? If so, are we really sure that there is evidence that any victims are safer as a result, male or female?

5. What do we want to know more about? • What help do men ask for? • What actually helps them to be safer? • Why don’t they seem to want drop-in or support groups? • Who else might not benefit from these? • What helps their partners to stop using abuse? • What are the specific needs of gay, bisexual and transgender men? • How does men’s victimisation fit into or challenge our understanding of crimes in the name of so-called “honour”?

6. What do we already know from research? • Women are the majority of victims of: Homicide, rape, sexual assault, post-separation violence, stalking • But the key word there is “majority” – that’s not all • Men who are perpetrators of domestic violence often or possibly mostly identify themselves as victims – of their partner’s intransigence • Michael Johnson describes different typologies of intimate partner violence: intimate terrorism; violent resistance; common couple violence – but it’s tricky to measure the latter • National crime surveys typically mix up “one or more” incidents with “many incidents and a pattern of fear and control”

7. What do we know from our own data? • Men don’t appear to present in the same ways as women • We need more consistent data on fear and control • We need comparative data from the helpline for women –in discussion about this at the moment • Perpetrators present to us as victims – and we don’t just guess!

8. Our academic partnerships • University of Bristol – PROVIDE and RE-PROVIDE • Universities of Durham, London Met and LSHTM – Mirabal multi site evaluation of perpetrator programmes • University of Manchester – Boys 2 Men impact study – evidence base for work with male victims, female perpetrators and young people • University of Manchester – visiting research fellow • IMPACT – Daphne funded EU project involving practitioners and researchers across EU

9. The future • Coordinated consistent data across national helplines • Ability to make direct referrals from helplines to local services • Evidence base developed for good practice • Recognition that men and women have different experiences and needs • Impact planning with practitioners built in to the research process from start • Impact measurement with researchers built into practice • Equality of partnerships between practitioners and researchers