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Etiony Aldarondo, Ph.D.
Etiony Aldarondo is a clinical psychologist with over 30 years of experience in domestic violence research and advocacy, mental health services, community partnerships, and higher education administration. His academic trajectory includes appointments in the Family Violence Research Program at the University of New Hampshire, Harvard Medical School’s Cambridge Hospital, The Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, Boston College, the University of Miami (UM), and Albizu University. The recipient of various recognitions for educational excellence and community involvement, Dr. Aldarondo’s scholarship focuses on positive development of ethnic minority and immigrant youth, domestic violence, and social justice-oriented clinical practices. His publications include the books Advancing Social Justice through Clinical Practice (Routledge), Programs for men who batter: Intervention and prevention strategies in a diverse society (Civic Research Institute with Fernando Mederos, Ed.D.), and Neurosciences, Health and Community Well-Being (San Luís, Nueva Editorial Universitaria with Dr. Enrique Saforcada and Mauro Muñoz). Dr. Aldarondo has a long history of involvement with grassroots advocacy organizations. He was Founding Executive Director of the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence as well as Founding Director of the Community and Educational Well-Being Research Center at UM. He is Past Executive Director of The Council on Contemporary Families and is on the board of directors for The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence.
Rosanna Bellini, Postdoctoral Scholar
I’m currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Information Science and Computer Science at Cornell University, based in New York City, located at the Cornell Tech Campus. I design, develop and deploy socio-technical systems in the context of intimate partner violence with specialist services, charities and NGOs. I’ve also been working on principles for justice-orientated design; the use of data-in-place for facilitating conversations around occupational bullying and harassment; and trauma-informed computing. More broadly, I am interested in exploring how harms to vulnerable or at-risk populations are facilitated through digital technologies, and what strategies we might use to mitigate these. This has also resulted in musings around the role that existing qualitative data and data-intensive systems have to play in facilitating more caring approaches to societal inequalities.
Walter DeKeserdy
Walter S. DeKeseredy is Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. He is also Adjunct Professor in Monash University’s Gender and Family Violence Prevention Center. DeKeseredy has published 27 books, over 130 scientific journal articles and close to 100 scholarly book chapters on violence against women and other social problems.
In 2008, the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma gave him the Linda Saltzman Memorial Intimate Partner Violence Researcher Award. He also jointly received the 2004 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s (ASC) Division on Women and Crime and the 2007 inaugural UOIT Research Excellence Award. In 1995, he received the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award from the ASC’s Division on Critical Criminology (DCC) and in 2008 the DCC gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, he received the Critical Criminal Justice Scholar Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ (ACJS) Section on Critical Criminal Justice and in 2015, he received the Career Achievement Award from the ASC’s Division on Victimology. In 2017, he received the Impact Award from the ACJS’s section on Victimology and the Robert Jerrin Book Award from the ASC’s Division on Victimology.
Emiliano Diaz de Leon
Men’s Engagement Specialist, Texas Association Against Sexual Assault (TAASA). After more than a decade of experience working for several domestic and sexual violence centers across Texas, Emiliano joined the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault in 2008 and provides training and technical assistance on the prevention of domestic/sexual violence to organizations and institutions around the state and country. Emiliano founded and coordinates the state-wide prevention initiative Texas Men S.P.E.A.K. (Supporting Prevention Education Advocacy & Knowledge) and presently serves on the board of MenHealing.
Carolina Frane
Caroleena Frane, LAC, LPC, ADS, is a Licensed Addiction Counselor, a Licensed Professional Counselor, and Acudetox Specialist. Ms. Frane is the current Domestic Violence Offender Management Board (Domestic Violence Offender Management Board) Standards Coordinator. She is a DVOMB approved trainer, and conducts all required Domestic Violence Offender Management Board CORE trainings for new and ongoing Providers. Ms. Frane also trains out of the state of Colorado and internationally, on the Domestic Violence Risk and Needs Assessment (DVRNA), and other domestic violence related topics. She most recently has co-published Domestic Violence Treatment in Colorado: An Overview of an Evidenced-Based Approach, in the journal of Partner Abuse. Ms. Frane has worked in a variety of settings including large mental health center settings and private practice. She has extensive experience evaluating and treating adult domestic violence offenders.
Ms. Frane specializes in Offender Evaluations and Treatment of individuals involved in the criminal justice system, to include evaluations in the areas of: mental health, substance use, domestic violence, anger management, and dual diagnosis. All evaluations have at the core, the Risk, Need and Responsivity Principles to identify comprehensive and individualized evaluation outcomes and treatment plan development. All of her work is centered around how to best provide victim safety, through the management and treatment of people who commit domestic violence.
Chris Huffine
Chris Huffine, Psy.D., licensed psychologist, has worked with abusive men for nearly 30 years. He is the Executive Director of Allies in Change in Portland, Oregon. During his career he has worked with thousands of abusive men and hundreds of female and male victims of abuse. He is considered to be a national expert on working with abusive partners and has provided trainings around the country, including a semi-annual 40-hour training in Portland on the Allies in Change curriculum. He recently published a book for abusive partners called “Becoming Allies . . . With Your Partner, Yourself, and Others: Addressing the Abuse and Control in Your Relationships”.
He is a member of the advisory group to the Oregon state attorney general to monitor standards for batterer intervention programs and of the Oregon Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team. Allies in Change is a 501c3 non-profit based in Portland, OR. It offers nearly thirty weekly groups for abusive partners, including specialized ones for voluntary attendees, women, and one multigender group for LGBTQ+ abusive partners. Of particular note, Allies in Change works with more voluntary abusive partners than any other agency in the country.
Lisa Larance, PhD, MSW, LCSW, LMSW
Lisa Young Larance, PhD, MSW, LCSW, LMSW has more than two decades of practice experience providing trauma-informed individual therapy and co-facilitating support and intervention groups for people who have survived harm and those who have caused harm in their relationships. In addition, Dr. Young Larance has created curricula and implemented programming, both domestically and internationally, serving the needs of diverse violence-involved women. Dr. Young Larance’s research explores topics at the intersection of intimate partner violence, gender, race, sexuality, criminalization, and intervention ¾ with a particular focus on women who have experienced and caused harm in their intimate relationships. To understand, explore, and amplify marginalized women’s (or people’s? or research respondents?) experiences from their perspectives, she employs a range of mixed qualitative methods and analysis.
The mission of Dr. Young Larance’s work is to dismantle systems of oppression while partnering with communities to advance the well-being of the most vulnerable. Her work is published in Affilia: Journal of Women & Social Work, BMJ Open, International Social Work, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Psychology of Violence, and Violence Against Women. Her forthcoming book, Broken: Women’s Stories of Intimate and Institutional Harm and Repair, will be published by the University of California Press in 2023. Dr. Young Larance is currently a research associate with Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research and will join the faculty in 2023.
Eric Mankowski, Ph.D.
I am a community psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at Portland State University. My program of action research is aimed at understanding and transforming gendered violence. In particular, I study how battering intervention programs work as part of the coordinated community response to intimate partner violence. I am currently completing a national study of state regulatory standards for BIPs. At Portland State University, I established the first course ever taught on the psychology of men and masculinities, where I also teach a course on intimate partner violence interventions. I conduct trainings locally, nationally, and internationally on battering intervention for survivor advocates and BIP providers.
I serve on the American Psychological Association’s Working Group on Health Disparities in Boys and Men and on the APA’s Expert Panel on Gun Violence Prediction and Prevention. Locally, I co-chair the Oregon Batterer Intervention Program Advisory Committee and am a member of the Oregon Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team. I have received grant funding for my research from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Nursing Research, and the National Park Service. Publications of this research include an edited volume, “Men, masculinity, wellness, health and social justice: Community based approaches”, as well as numerous articles and book chapters about battering intervention, intimate partner violence, and community-based programs for boys and men.
Amanda McCormick, Curriculum Development Consultant
Amanda McCormick was involved in setting up one of the first programs for men who batter (and partner support service) in the UK in 1995 in a collaboration between The Manchester Domestic Violence Helpline and the Probation Service. She worked initially as a shelter worker and then through developing the men’s program (based on Creating a Process of Change for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Curriculum and Coordinated Community Response) moved on to develop IPV training and curricula, and conduct Community Safety Audits in the U.S. with Praxis International, St Paul, MN (1998-2012).
She has been involved in recent years with the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, Duluth, MN in facilitating groups for men who abuse women; evaluating how facilitators (in a range of communities) implement the Duluth Curriculum; and updating the facilitator training. To this challenge, she has brought many aspects of her personal experience as a survivor, a member of the GLBTQI+ community, a person raised on a militarized border with a colonial history, and a long professional career in the field of Gender Based Violence.
Chris Murphy
I am a psychology professor and licensed clinical psychologist. I directed a community based BIP for 25 years where we trained graduate students to do this work and conducted research on psychological characteristics of IPV offenders, intervention strategies, and the process of change. Currently I collaborate with Maryland BIPs and serve as co-chair of our state Abuse Intervention Collaborative.
Jeremy Nevilles-Sorell
Jeremy NeVilles-Sorell has worked in the field of domestic violence since 1994 on issues affecting children who have experienced domestic violence, supervised visitation, batterer’s intervention, and providing training and education. He worked a program coordinator at the Duluth Family Visitation Center serving families with a history of domestic violence also as the Children’s Program Coordinator at Women’s Transitional Housing Coalition in Duluth, Minnesota, providing activities and groups for children who have witnessed violence. He started working with Mending the Sacred Hoop Technical Assistance Project in 1998, a national program to assist American Indian Tribes and Alaskan Native Villages to develop responses to violence against Indian women. With MSH he held various titles from team leader, program coordinator, co-director, and Training and Resources Director. In 2015 he began working with Wica Agli and in March of 2019 assumed the position of Director of the National Native Coalition of Men’s Programs.
Lisa Nitsch, MSW
As Director of Training and Education, Lisa Nitsch is responsible for House of Ruth Maryland’s intervention services for abusive partners and the Training Institute, which coordinates professional development for staff, external community education, and professional technical assistance. She has been with House of Ruth Maryland since 1998 and has advanced through a variety of positions, including overseeing the agency’s Clinical Services for survivors and their children, the Teen Initiative, and the Developmental Childcare Center.
Lisa is an appointed member of the Maryland Governor’s Family Violence Council and is on the Board of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. She served as Vice President of the national organization, Women in Fatherhood, and as Co-Chair of Maryland’s Abuse Intervention Collaborative. She has been on training teams for notable organizations such as Futures Without Violence, Battered Women’s Justice Project, Women of Color Network, Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, and the National District Attorneys Association. She has served as an advisor to the United States White House, the National Institutes of Health, the United States Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, and the United States Department of Health & Human Services’ Administration for Children & Families. Lisa is most proud of being recognized as a field leader in Ed Gondolf’s 2015 book, “Gender-Based Perspectives on Batterer Programs”, her 2013 award from the Center for Urban Families for her “years of dedication in serving Baltimore City’s most vulnerable citizens”, and the Special Day of Honor designated for her by Mayor Nagin in 2007, for “promoting positive outcomes and providing support to the fathers of New Orleans” following the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Her current, but ever-changing, interests include developing programs for abusive partners within disinvested communities that address the dual experience of both holding privilege and being oppressed, increasing access to learning tools for service providers, and exploring community-based accountability models for abusive partners beyond the criminal legal system.
Lisa’s roots run deep in her hometown of Baltimore City, Maryland, where she proudly works and lives with her remarkably patient husband, incredible nieces, and gentle pit bull.
JAC Patrissi
JAC Patrissi is the founder and principal of Growing a New Heart, a social justice consortium of leaders in the healing arts and racial equity.
Following graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1989, JAC began a Watson fellowship to examine the impact of colonial white supremacy and misogyny on women and children and the stories they tell, and how those stories impact their relationship to power and spiritual wellbeing. JAC worked with and learned from indigenous peoples and sexually trafficked women and children in over forty countries before returning to the United States to join others who work towards transformative peacemaking. Settling in New England, JAC led community-based statewide and regional initiatives and federal demonstration projects for the Office for Victims of Crime and the National Crime Victims Center. JAC founded the largest Intimate Partner Abuse Education Program in Western Massachusetts. In 2006, The state of Vermont established a Patrissi Award for her work in “changing the culture of Vermont to be safer and more responsive to the needs and rights of victims of crime.” It is presented to Vermont colleagues periodically as a lifetime achievement award.
Additionally, JAC is a trained body-centered trauma clinician, who created and facilitates the international Happy and Hard to Fool and Storytelling for Change retreat series offered internationally and featured at the Omega Institute.
JAC is an experienced educator in the tradition of Popular Education. She is a trained mediator, communications, and project design consultant, who has led a wide range of social justice interventions, including projects and policy interventions for transformative/restorative justice as well as those situated within the systems of control including multiyear projects centers for sex offender management, as well as the United States Marine Corps’ and court based, clinical and health care responses to sexual and domestic violence.
JAC is the author of three books on discerning destructive relationships through Penguin/Berkley) including culturally specific versions in Japanese and Polish). She has authored peer reviewed bulletins on working with the faith community and building a victim assistance academy as well as articles on restorative and parallel justice. JAC is co-founder of the Massachusetts innovative Ten to Ten helpline for people who use the tools of control and violence in their intimate partnerships.
Michael Paymar, MPA
Michael Paymar is the executive director of Education for Critical Thinking an organization committed to ending gender-based violence and increasing women in law enforcement. He worked at the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) and the Battered Women’s Justice Project (BWJP) for over thirty years.
In 2014 in Geneva Switzerland, Michael accepted the Gold Policy Award (celebrating the best global-policy on ending violence against women and girls) presented by the World Futures Council, United Nations Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The award was in recognition of the Duluth Model, its founder the late Ellen Pence, organizers at the DAIP, leaders of the criminal justice system, law enforcement, battered women’s programs and human service providers that contributed to the success of the model.
Michael has conducted training on the implementation of the Coordinated Community Response (CCR) for effective interventions in domestic violence cases in Montenegro, Tajikistan, Republic of Georgia, Morocco, Slovenia, Hungary, China, Scotland, Israel, Sweden, Ireland, Japan, Iceland, Canada, Switzerland, and throughout the United States including Guam and Puerto Rico.
Michael and Ellen Pence co-authored the book Education Groups for Men who Batter: The Duluth Model, the curriculum Creating a Process of Change for Men Who Batter; one of the most widely used treatment programs for IPV offenders. They also wrote and produced the award-winning documentary With Impunity: Men and Gender Violence.
Michael is the author of the book Violent No More: Helping Men End Domestic Abuse—now in its 3rd edition. This self-help book and the accompanying workbook is widely used in offender groups, by counselors who work with IPV offenders, abusive men who want to change, and women seeking to understand the dynamics of battering.
Michael served on the Duluth City Council for eight years and in the Minnesota House of Representatives for 18 years. In the Legislature, Michael chaired the Public Safety Committee which had financial oversight over the Department of Public Safety, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Department of Corrections, Department of Human Rights and crime victim programs. He was a leader in combating sex-trafficking, funding crime victim programs, prison reform, human rights and gun violence prevention.
Michael earned a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Hamline University and a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the College of St. Scholastica.
Rachelle Scheele
Rachelle Scheele turned her lived experience of abuse into a Survivor-run organization, Survivor Collective Alliance Reaching Society (SCARS). Since its founding in 2015, SCARS has built a community of Survivors who support each other and have found healing through doing. This healing begins by providing peer support to fellow Survivors. They grow from fearing to tell their stories to learning to openly share their own experiences. This can lead to speaking at Survivor Impact Panels. All of these experiences promote further healing by helping Survivors to better understand the abuse they experienced and help the perpetrators to understand the impact of their abuse.
Rachelle graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Urban and Public Affairs (2020) from Portland State University where she actively learned about community organizing to collaborate with other organizations and grow SCARS. Her favorite quote is, “If one cow comes to the barn, you feed it.”
Rich Tolman
Richard M. Tolman is the Sheldon D. Rose Collegiate Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan and an American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare Fellow. Rich’s work focuses on prevention and intervention to end gender-based violence (GBV). He began this work as a practitioner in a battering intervention program in Anchorage Alaska in 1980. Subsequently he worked in BIPs in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan and founded the BIP program at Sarah’s Inn in Oak Park, Illinois. He helped to set BIP standards in both Illinois and Michigan. He was an author of one of the earliest books on battering intervention- Edleson, J. L., & Tolman, R. M. (1992). Intervention for men who batter: An ecological approach. Sage Publications, Inc.
His other contributions to the domestic violence literature include the development of a widely used measure of psychological maltreatment of women, demonstrating the accuracy of survivors’ predictions of future abuse, research on how intimate partner violence impacts low-income women’s economic, physical and psychological well-being, and adolescent intimate partner violence. Dr. Tolman founded and co-led a research team that conducted a series of studies on men’s involvement in prevention of GBV.
His current projects include research on survivors’ perspectives on the effectiveness of battering intervention, the impact of domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, campus sexual assault prevention, the prevention of abuse during pregnancy, and relatedly, on understanding men’s transition to fatherhood.
Nicole Westmarland Ph.D.
Nicole Westmarland Ph.D., is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Durham University Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse (CRiVA) in the UK. She was one of the research leads on Project Mirabal – for which she was awarded the 4th Ed Gondolf COMPASS award in 2019.
Nicole Westmarland’s recent books include ‘Violence Against Women – Criminological Perspectives on Men’s Violences’ (Routledge, 2015) and (with Dr Hannah Bows) ‘Researching Gender, Violence and Abuse’ (Routledge, 2018). She is currently finishing a book with colleagues from the UK, Sweden and Spain about men speaking out against violence against women.
Nicole strongly believes that academic research should be used to create positive ‘real world’ social change and it is this that drives her personal research agenda. Nicole’s recent roles have included Special Advisor to the Joint Committee on Human Rights for their Inquiry into Violence against Women and Girls (2014-15). She held the voluntary position of Chair of Rape Crisis (England and Wales) for five years and has volunteered for over 20 years in local Rape Crisis Centres.
Project Mirabal is a seminal work that has contributed insight and clarity to researchers and practitioners all over the globe. Project Mirabal’s website describes the work as: “a major CRiVA research project which lasted from 2009 to 2015. Professors Liz Kelly (London Metropolitan University), Nicole Westmarland (Durham University), and Charlotte Watts (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Northern Rock Foundation to investigate the extent to which perpetrator programmes reduce violence and increase safety for women and children, and the routes by which they contribute to coordinated community responses to domestic violence…” To see a full report that covers the research addressed by Project Mirabal, click the link below or the graphic above.
Dr. Westmarland’s Newest Article: “‘It’s a Work in Progress’: Men’s Accounts of Gender and Change in their Use of Coercive Control”
Key message: Investments in gender norms underpin men’s use of coercive control; Reductions in men’s coercive control is connected to men’s ability to unpick gender norms; This paper provides empirical evidence for keeping gender norms and expectations central in work with violent men.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tpp/jgbv/pre-prints/content-jgbvd1900004r2