Winter Greetings from New England!

Thanks to all of you who have expressed your interest in Emerge as well as for your support for this newsletter. We hope for many successful newsletters to come, and also hope to share information that is interesting and relevant.

As stated in the message at the top of every newsletter, each of your e-mail addresses was collected during one of three occasions:

• You spoke with us when Emerge was attempting to gather contact information for batterer intervention programs throughout the nation
• You attended the BISCMI batterer intervention conference in November 2005
• You attended an Emerge training, or expressed interest in being included in our mailing list

One of the features of the program we are using is the capability to develop "interest categories" for specific campaigns. Unless you have indicated your interests, we have your e-mail address listed as "general interest". In the future, we may use these interest categories to send out specific educational information, or possibly specific details about trainings that are unique to each category. We have been updating and adding to these categories in preparation for this newsletter, so you may want to check the list to see if there are new interest categories you would like to add to your profile.

So with this in mind, we would like to encourage all of you to indicate your specific interests by clicking on the "Update Profile / Email Address" link at the bottom of the newsletter. You can also go to our website and type your e-mail address into the "Sign Up for Our Email Newsletter" box at the bottom of our homepage.

We hope to also include specific surveys for each interest group (see our first survey in the last article, below). Our website will be updated at some point in the near future, and we will work to include all of our past newsletters as well as information and results from our surveys.

We are also interested in submissions from our readers. If you have a particular topic or experience you would like to share with others, please submit it to us and we will consider publishing it in a future e-mail. All submissions may be edited for length and content, and some may only be published in specific interest group newsletters.

If you want to forward this newsletter to a friend, please use the "Forward" button at the bottom of this e-mail. That way people you forward to will receive the opportunity to subscribe as well. Using the forward button on your e-mail (instead of the button below) will send the message without the specific subscribe opportunity at the top.

During the past year, Emerge expanded its innovative parenting education program that is specifically geared for men with histories of domestic violence. Annually, we provide four annual groups in English and two in Spanish. Many of the men who attend are concurrently attending, or have already completed, the abuser education program at Emerge. Each group runs for twelve sessions. The curriculum that we use is called the Caring Dads Curriculum that was developed by the Changing Ways batterer intervention program in London Ontario.

Two overall goals of the responsible fatherhood program are

1. To help men with histories of domestic abuse to identify responsible and safe ways of re-connecting and/or re-building trust with their children, and
2. To become more positive and caring role models for their children.

One important exercise in the group is to show and discuss pictures that children have drawn of their abusive fathers. This exercise helps men to recognize, in very graphic and visceral ways, the fear and internal conflict that children who have been exposed to domestic violence often experience. The second part of this exercise is to have each man draw a picture of himself as he thinks one of his children might see him, given his abuse of the child’s mother. The final step is for the men to explain their drawings to others in the group.

This particular lesson plan, called the Empathy Exercise, was developed by the Fathering After Violence Program (FAV) coordinated by the Family Violence Prevention Fund. Emerge collaborated with FAV to develop parenting awareness curriculum that can be integrated into a batterer intervention program. While not intended as a parenting education curriculum, the FAV curriculum is intended to help men recognize the effects of their abuse on children, to see fathering as a lifetime commitment, and to identify safe and responsible ways to re-build trust with their children.

(Drawing above is from a father who attended the Emerge Responsible Fatherhood program, illustrating the exercise described above)

As this newsletter and our website develop, we would like to use this as a forum to collect information on approaches to batterer intervention, so that we can create articles that can address topics that others find interesting. We would also like to work to create a forum for batterer intervention group leaders and others to share their ideas.

This issue of our newsletter is the first to work to gather such information from each of you. We hope to eventually have these surveys and results available on our website, but until that time, we will be posting some of the results of this and future surveys in this newsletter.

We thought we would start these surveys with the broad topic of "approaches to batterer intervention." In this, we are asking questions about your individual philosophies and beliefs behind working with abusers.

Each of our trainings and group sessions address some of the concepts that are asked about in this survey. For more specific information on Emerge's approach, contact our office via e-mail or phone.

Each survey has the ability to log 1000 responses, so please feel free to forward this newsletter to others using the "Forward" button at the bottom of this e-mail. We apologize in advance that after completing the survey, you will be redirected to the SurveyMonkey website, which is hosting this and other surveys we will be offering.