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POSTGRADUATE PROGRAM OF STUDY

Theatre of the Oppressed as an effective methodology in therapeutic interventions with men who have used violence against women and children

“I wouldn’t really say that I am violent. I’ve been given reason to be violent. I’m not just violent for the sake of it”

“I have no violent behaviour…She knew she deserved it. She does my head in.”

Statements like these motivate this research. Violence against women, especially from their partners, continues to be as pervasive as it is disturbing. ‘Perpetrator’ programs aim at bringing violent men closer to accepting responsibility for their violence and at encouraging alternative behaviours; a number of models are widely used today by those working with men. For many perpetrators of violence accepting responsibility for their behaviour is the most difficult first step, because they simply cannot see it, or they cannot imagine alternative behaviours.

Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a social theatre approach to personal and social transformation based on a methodology that assumes that all human beings are actors and must enact and reenact their protagonist role in order to transcend obstacles and externally and internally imposed oppressions. Developed by Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal, TO has been used and continues to be used in social and behaviour change interventions throughout the world with great success.

As its original name suggests, TO concerns itself with power and its structures; with those that hold power and those that do not; with those that hold power over others and those over whom power is held. Conventionally, it is used to work with those that experience oppression as a strategy for deconstructing the oppressive structures and empowering the ‘victims’. As a methodology it has been used in the area of violence against women, specifically domestic violence. However, in this particular case, I want to look at its use in working with oppressors, i.e. those who perpetrate violence towards women. I believe that TO can play a powerful role in making both visible and palpable to the oppressor the part they play in the oppression[1]. In the aesthetic space of the theatre the oppressor can enact and witness not only his behaviour but also the alternatives to that behaviour. One of the many hypotheses of Boal’s work is that ‘…knowledge acquired aesthetically is already, in itself, the beginning of transformation.’ (Boal, 1995)

Two of the most important aims of TO are:

• To help the spect-actor[2] transform into a protagonist of the dramatic action and rehearse alternatives to a situation or behaviour
• Through this rehearsal to take into real life the actions that have been rehearsed in the forum/space (Boal, 1995)

In other words, if the oppressor/oppressed perform an action themselves, that performance in the play of the theatre has the potential to generate the ability for him/her to perform that action in their real life. (Boal, 1995)

I want to evaluate the effectiveness of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) as a complementary tool for those working with perpetrators of domestic violence, and argue that TO offers ‘oppressors’ a medium for self-observation, re-creation, re-invention and re-enactment which is not yet fully tapped. I believe that TO has therapeutic benefits that complement and enhance the work of other therapies such as, in the case of programs for DV perpetrators, the invitation to responsibility, core hurts, and cognitive and behavioural therapy models. In addition, it has the potential to offer an effective conduit for assisting participants in the often difficult expression of emotions and feelings.

The aim of this research is to examine whether TO is effective in affecting a shift in the attitudes towards violence in the men who participate and to establish a set of indicators to measure whether this is true or not. This research will be centred on the evaluation of an existing TO intervention in a program called “Breathing Space”, which is a Communicare run and funded residential program for men who have perpetrated violence against women and children. The men who attend this program have been referred or made to attend by various agencies: the police, social workers at various community based initiatives, Department of Corrective Services, Department of Child Protection or Department of Communities. During their residency at Breathing Space, the men undergo 12 weeks of rigourous counselling including group and individual therapy around their use of violence.

The Breathing Space program uses a combination of psychological therapeutic approaches for working with violent men including cognitive behavioural therapy and core hurts therapies. Also at the heart of the approach is Alan Jenkins’s constructivist model ‘invitation to responsibility’, which by deconstructing the various causal factors often cited as responsible for the violence, questions their validity and thus opens the way for the perpetrator to accept responsibility for his abuse (Jenkins, 1990). In addition, This researcher is involved in running a weekly Theatre of the Oppressed session as part of the Breathing Space program. Within the TO intervention the men are engaged in the numerous exercises, games and practices that constitute Theatre of the Oppressed, in particular Image and Forum theatre, Rainbow of Desire and Cop-in –the-Head techniques (Boal, 1992, 1995).

The research will evaluate the effectiveness of these TO techniques to affect oppressive behaviours by interviewing the men participating in the Breathing Space program and having them undertake a self-evaluation of the impact TO is having, or has had, on their violent behaviour and on their ability to see themselves as active in their choice to use violence. Formulating the self-evaluation process will form part of the research.

In addition to the evaluation of the existing program, the research will also use the experience in that program to produce a series of creative Forum Theatre pieces that will be produced and performed to/with experts (therapists, counselors, police etc) working in this field, to engage them in the workings of TO in the context of oppressive behaviours. The experts will themselves have an opportunity to experience the effectiveness of TO and their experiences will also be evaluated.

The aims of this thesis are:

• To add to the academic body of work on Theatre of the Oppressed and its transformative impact, by exploring its potential complementary role and its effectiveness in working with those playing oppressor roles.
• To examine the use of TO tools as a complementary therapeutic tool to create deeper dialogue and shifts towards behaviour change in men who choose to use violence against women.
• To evaluate the effectiveness and therapeutic impact of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) and its various tools and techniques, as used in interventions with male perpetrators of violence against women.
• To create Forum Theatre pieces and conduct a TO Forum intervention with experts in the field of domestic violence including law enforcement officers, corrective services, child protection and community department personnel, and non-government support agency professionals such as counselors and managers of women’s shelters and drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres so as to familiarize professionals working in DV with TO by exposing and actively engaging them in a TO intervention and involving them in an evaluation of the work.

Contribution to scholarly knowledge

This research aims to add to scholarly knowledge in three specific ways.

Firstly, it will aim to add to the body of academic discourse on the use of Theatre of the Oppressed in therapeutic behaviour change interventions, specifically on working with those that take the role of the oppressor, such as perpetrators of violence against women. While TO has been and is used extensively in bringing those that are oppressed into a space of awareness and empowerment, it has not been used as extensively as a tool to work with those usually defined as oppressors. The work of David Diamond’s Living Theater in Canada (1992) and John Bergman’s Geese Theatre in the UK, are two of the few active and documented examples of direct work with perpetrators of violence and abuse.

Secondly, this research will evaluate the effectiveness of TO within the framework of Breathing Space’s psychological therapy framework and analyse its complementary potential in contributing to an internalized acceptance of responsibility and acceptance of alternative, non-violent behaviours. This may lay the groundwork for a wider application of this method in therapy programs.

As part of the evaluation, the thesis will endevour to establish a set of measurable indicators that can be qualitatively assessed in order to establish TO as an approach that is widely used across a range of issues and locations. TO is made up of a range of tools which include Forum Theatre, Image Theatre, Cop-in-the Head, Rainbow of Desire and Legislative Theatre, among others. Each of these features are used in the current interventions and each will be evaluated for its effectiveness and use in complementing the existing therapeutic approaches.

The third way in which this thesis will contribute to scholarly knowledge is through its potential contribution to feminist approaches to gender inequity and research methods. Can TO be used as a feminist research method and in what ways has it contributed to social transformation in its application with men and their violent behaviour towards women?

Methodology

This research takes place in three distinct parts and each has its corresponding research methodology and an overarching feminist methodology.

1. The evaluation of Breathing Space intervention

The question this evaluation is trying to answer is whether TO is effective in engaging the men and affecting and encouraging self-reflection on their use of violence. How has this intervention left the men with a deeper understanding of their own responsibility in the choice to use violence regardless of the causal factors to which violence could be attributed? In what ways has the TO intervention brought the men closer to an acceptance of responsibility and a willingness to pursue therapy and counseling seriously in order to transform their relationships and their behaviour? At the same time are there certain indicators that can be distinguished that point towards a shift in the men’s attitude towards their choice of violence that could be developed into an evaluation tool for TO interventions of this kind?

The evaluation aims to answer these questions through examining the men’s experience of the intervention. Therefore this evaluation sits within the paradigm of phenomenological hermeneutical enquiry in that it is an interpretation of the existing intervention by the participants.

The evaluative study will consist in interviewing the men to determine how they experienced the intervention. The interviews will follow a combination of semi-structured and unstructured format, to allow for some guidance by the interviewer while at the same time giving the participant enough space to recount experience with their own focus and detail. I will use three guiding principles in the interviews. The first is that the men will be looking at video recorded images of the intervention and looking for moments in which they were particularly engaged and then discussing this moment in more detail. This is modeled on the work of Fuller and Strong (2001) in which they searched for ‘alive moments’ within counseling sessions between clients and therapists. The reasoning is that the men themselves will be determining what was specially moving or remarkable about a particular moment in the TO intervention and whether that gives them any insights into their use of violence and thereby deepens their understanding of it. I am very aware that as both the facilitator of the intervention and the researcher there is a risk of putting across a subjective interpretation and so I aim at letting the men determine the moment themselves. Ethics approval will be sought for the interview schedule and permission will be sought from the Breathing Space program.

The second guiding principle will be reflexive questioning in the formation of the questions. This is guided by the work of Tomm (1987) who used reflexive questioning during interventive interviewing as a way to enable self-healing in clients. As the interviewer I will ask questions that have the potential to open up new possibilities for looking at an episode within the TO intervention in an alternative way and therefore serve to further the dialogue with the men about their experience. There are six categories for reflexive questions, three of which are pertinent to this study, keeping in mind that the researcher is not a therapist. These are future-oriented, observer-perspective, and the introduction of hypotheses and process-interruption questions. (Tomm, 1987) One adaptation that I will make is that I will be incorporating Jenkins’ principles of ‘invitation to responsibility’ within the questions.

The third guiding principle, and a further adaptation of the reflexive questions, is the use of adapted appreciative inquiry methodology in order to work with strengths and positives that already exist within the participants and maintain an optimistic and encouraging tone throughout the whole process. By integrating the 4-D model (discovery, dream, design and destiny) as a structure for the questioning the interview process will serve in guiding the interview, as well as creating an outlook that points forward for the men. (Preskill and Coghlan, 2003)

The interviews will take place before and after the 12 week intervention. The interview before the intervention will be conducted in order to discuss their attitudes and beliefs towards their participation in the TO intervention, the research and in the Breathing Space program. The first interviews will be brief and structured.

The analysis of the interview will utilize methods including conversation analysis (CA) in order to determine the effect the intervention has had on the participants. CA offers a methodology that allows for a deep exploration of the participants’ interview answers and includes examining how the data was produced and what this means in terms of its interpretation (Drew, Raymond and Weinberg, 2006). Similarly, it takes into account that the utterances fall in a set of questions and answers and that this is important in determining the meaning of the participants’ responses. At the same time hermeneutic phenomenological reflection (HPR) or Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) will be used to construct ‘structures of experience’ (Van Manen, 1990, p79); that is, to place the conversations within certain thematic contexts by analyzing the participants’ responses and statements sentence by sentence to determine themes that can be allocated a certain degree of significance in regards to having achieved the aims of the TO intervention. (Van Manen, 1990, pp 87-97) In the words of Smith and Osborn, (Smith and Osborn 2003, in Drew, Raymond and Weinberg, 2006, p 39) IPA can serve ‘…to explore in detail how participants are making sense of their personal and social world.’

Furthermore, HPR provides categories in which meanings exist, such as spatiality, corporeality, temporality and relationality or communality; these serve as guides for analysis and reflection; areas from which their experiences will be drawn during the inquiry into the participants’ experience of TO. (Van Manen, 1990, p 101) This research will be particularly interested in the corporeality of the men’s experience as the TO work will consist of actions and enactments from which the men will gain insight, some of this insight will perhaps be placed within their physical experience of the exercises they participate in during the TO intervention.

A total of 30 men will be interviewed and all the interventions will be videotaped for use during the interview process.

In addition, the therapists working at the Breathing Space program will also be interviewed to see the extent to which they have noticed the men being engaged and affected by the TO work.

2. The creation of Forum Theatre for DV community professionals

The second component of the research will be the creation of a series of Forum Theatre (FT) pieces that draw on the responses and experiences the men have provided in relation to their use of violence.

This will use the TO methodology of Image Theatre (short frozen images) and Forum Theatre (FT) and will take the shape of a workshop. The number of workshops will depend on how many DV professionals can be brought together at one time.

The Forum pieces, two to three minutes of a certain scene, will be enacted for the professionals and their suggestions and inputs will be elicited. The Forum theatre pieces will be performed by actors. The idea behind FT is that there is no resolution of a conflict in the play: the play reaches a moment when the conflict becomes acute and then the ‘joker’ or director of the play (in this case this researcher) will stop the action and elicit participation from the audience to resolve the conflict.

The other TO methodology that will be used in this part of the research are Cops-in-the Head (Cops) and Rainbow of Desire (Rainbow). Both of these tools constitute the more therapeutic tools within what is referred to as the TO ‘arsenal’.

Each of the characters in the short forum scene, their thoughts, fears, desires and inner dialogues will be investigated in great detail using these tools.

The aim of this section of the research is to give professionals in the DV area some insight into the use of TO and its huge potential in creating deeper dialogue between people and looking at the existing power struggles in a very safe way. They will get physical experience of the TO methodology and contribute to solutions or alternatives to the conflicts within each of the Forum pieces.

At the same time, there will be a deeper understanding of the whole experience from the men’s point of view with the aim of examining the more systemic and structural oppressions that they are subjected to while looking at how they are brought closer to accepting responsibility.

3. Evaluation of experts experience of TO intervention

Using interviews after and observations during the Forum intervention, this section of the research aims to evaluate TO through the experience of the work by experts and professionals in the field of DV.

While most of the methodology mentioned in section 1 will be once again implemented in this section of the research, there will be a further component of observations made during the interventions. This is to document attitudes brought into the intervention by the professionals.

4. Overarching feminist methodology

This entire research thesis falls in the realm of a feminist inquiry. Exploring the effectiveness of TO with the aim of increasing its use in interventions dealing with violence against women is the principal aim of this research. At the same time all of the inquiry will be aiming at creating action and transforming social structures starting with the transformation of relationships between men and women.

Similarly, the researcher will use a number of other tools often associated with feminist inquiry such a keeping journals of observations during the intervention which include observation about changes in the researcher’s own attitudes and beliefs about the issue and the methodology.

Self-evaluation and interviews (Reinharz, S., 1992) are commonplace research tools in feminist research as is the transformative motivation underpinning the research objectives. In this case I am interested in the power structures examined within the methodology of TO.

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[1] In his article ‘Ideas for Development: Reflecting Forwards’ , Robert Chambers uses the term “pedagogy for the non-oppressed” which contributed partly to this idea of using TO as a mirror/tool for the oppressor.

[2] Spect-actor is a spectator who can also participate in the acting space and contribute an action to the scene.

Filed under: Methodology by Erika