Rights, religion, and community: Approaches to violence against women in the context of...

As concern about gender violence mounts globally, it is increasingly viewed as a serious human rights violation subject to legal intervention. The battered women's movement, centered in Europe and North America, has pressed police and courts to view gender violence as a serious crime and has encouraged women to see themselves as having the right not to be hit. The movement has fought for new laws to punish batterers and to provide protective orders. As the global debate expands, particularly in United Nations (UN) meetings such as the UN Special Session, called Beijing Plus Five, in 2000, the Commission on the Status of Women meetings, and the Human Rights Commission meetings, there are some who are arguing for different kinds of approaches. Religious organizations, bodies such as the Vatican, and some Islamic nations promote a religiously based approach to diminishing violence against women, an approach that may involve redefining the relationship rather than ending the marriage. Some indigenous groups and ethnonational communities insist on developing their own culturally appropriate forms of intervention for gender violence, endeavoring to reintegrate the offender through repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation rather than punishment or therapy.

Religious and indigenous approaches represent two major challenges to a global rights-based approach to violence against women. This is a manifestation of a more general contest between those who advocate secular legal approaches to social justice and those who promote religious or ethnonational ones. This debate is everywhere. The current triumphalist expansion of capitalism, the rule of law, and democracy is countered by pockets of intensifying commitment to religious community and ethnonationalist assertions of legal autonomy. Each develops in opposition to the others: Secular states feed on demonic images of religious fundamentalism and ethnonational violence, while religious states decry the social chaos, divorce, immorality, and violence of secular states. The economic pressure of globalization and its devastating impact on local subsistence economies fuels ethnonational and indigenous movements. Tensions among these competing models of social justice are a striking feature of global society at the beginning of the 21st century. Attempts to diminish violence against women lay bare the tensions among these competing visions of the just society and the technologies available for producing them.

In order to understand the differences among these competing models, I studied three approaches to gender violence-one based on rights, one on religion, and one on community-coexisting in Hilo, a small town in Hawaii. I focused on a feminist batterer intervention program (Alternatives to Violence), a Pentecostal Christian church, and an indigenous Hawaiian form of family problem-solving called ho'oponopono. The first is a state-- funded social service agency, the second a large church, and the third a network of practitioners offering services for drug treatment and other social problems, as well as providing informal help to Native Hawaiian families. The courts refer cases of gender violence to all three, although mostly to the first.

I was intrigued by how differently each group defines the problem of gender violence and its elimination and how differently each envisages ideal gender relationships. The first, based on feminism and a concept of rights, foregrounds women's safety and advocates an egalitarian gender order. Women who are in danger are encouraged to separate from their partners. Husbands and wives are taught to negotiate decisions with the promise of increased trust, love, and sexual pleasure for men who refrain from violence. This approach criminalizes the batterer and encourages the victim to think of herself as having rights not to be beaten regardless of what she does.

The second, growing out of conservative Christian notions of salvation, healing, and the authority of Biblical texts, uses a process called scriptural counseling based on Biblical quotations. This church stresses gender complementarity and firmly resists divorce. The ideal family is under the authority of the husband, who is in turn under the authority of God. The Christian model teaches women to submit to their husbands, to turn away wrath with gentle words, and to pray to dislodge demons that hide in strongholds created by resentment, grudges, and hostility.

The third, ho'oponopono, which descends from an ancient Native Hawaiian family problem-solving process, recently revalorized as part of a broader renaissance in Native Hawaiian values and cultural practices, is based on concepts of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It emphasizes the family and the community's responsibility for conflict. Though the process seeks reunification of a family experiencing conflict, an unrepentant person can be exiled from the family altogether. In this model, ideally, husband and wife should treat each other with mutual respect. The Native Hawaiian process emphasizes the value of every person as a child of God and the importance of treating others in one's family with respect and forgiveness for wrongdoing. The second and the third models are much more similar to each other than either is to the secular feminist rights-based program.

I assumed at first that the competition among the feminist group, the church, and the ho'oponopono practitioners over establishing the best approach to the problem of wife battering was a local phenomenon, characteristic of this particular town. Each approach seemed resolutely homegrown and the contestation a product of local history. But I soon discovered that each was part of a transnational movement. As I traced the formation of each group and the development of its conceptions of gender violence, I realized that each drew on an imported set of ideas about violence and gender, translated into the local context. Global feminism, the worldwide spread of Christian fundamentalism, and the global movement for self-determination and cultural rejuvenation of indigenous people inspired these local groups. The process of appropriation and translation differed, of course. Ho'oponopono, for example, is originally a traditional Hawaiian process, recently infused with ideas from psychiatry and alternative dispute resolution. In contrast, the founders of the church and the feminist program came from the mainland United States and worked with local people to develop a locally rooted institution.

As I examined this local struggle, impressed by the differences among these groups in their ideas about marriage, family, and violence as well as law and religion, I noticed a surprising similarity in their technologies of personal transformation. All emphasized making choices and holding people accountable, knowing and controlling feelings, and building self-esteem for those who batter as well as for their victims. In all three settings, men and women were told they could make their own choices about how they feel, how they view situations, and how they respond to them. They were encouraged to be responsible for their choices. Clients were given names for feelings and encouraged to recognize these feelings as a way of managing them. They were encouraged to develop self-esteem. Clients were taught to think of themselves as worthwhile because of some identity-as a Christian, a native person, or a man or a woman-rather than in terms of more conventional understandings of achievement, class, status, or power. There are differences: Self-esteem because God created all humans and finds them worthy is different from self-- esteem because one is Native Hawaiian or because one is a woman with rights. But, despite their wide ideological divergence, all approaches focused on the entrepreneurial creation of the self. At the heart of the competition among rights, religion, and community was a shared practice of self-creation: a technology associated with the creation of the modern subject (see Rose 1989; Collier et al. 1995; Foucault 1980 a & b).

As these groups adopted similar technologies of the self, they allowed the subtle colonization of alternative spaces based on religious faith and a distinct ethnic identity.' Divergent understandings of the self and its relationship to the world became infused by similar technologies of self-management. Even though these groups promoted different visions of the self-as loved by God or as embodying indigeniety, for example-they celebrated the person who is responsible for making himself/herself and knowing and mastering his/her feelings. Even feminist groups asserting structural understandings of gender/race/class inequality as the reason for battering turned to more psychotherapeutic techniques.

The convergence on techniques of forming the modern self is particularly ironic, since the initial impetus for each of these efforts was a radical critique of modernity. The feminists argued against a modernist patriarchy; the church against a secular, materialist world from which it felt profoundly alienated by the expectation of an imminent Second Coming; the Native Hawaiians against an assimilationist modernity that suppresses indigenous cultural and spiritual life. Why then did such disparate approaches converge on similar technologies of the self?

I think that, in establishing a program and gathering clients, each was driven in a different way to adopt self-management as a solution to the problem of gender violence. The need for financial support-for clients or members-led these organizations to professionalize their leadership, tone down their rhetoric, and develop reform programs that seemed reasonable to their leaders and funders. As they sought to protect women from male violence, leaders and funders alike turned to psychotherapeutic techniques of self-management as familiar strategies for accomplishing this goal. They imported apparently successful ideas and practices from other parts of their transnational networks. The market was a major force. As I traced the changes in the discourses and practices of these three approaches to gender violence over a period of 20 years, I noted the centrality of the struggle for funding and clients in pushing for change. The need to preserve referral sources, to maintain a client base or a dues-- paying membership, and to retain funding encouraged practitioners to incorporate new ideas into their practices and to be responsive to global ideologies and techniques. Practitioners found it easier to adopt the technologies that conform to prevailing notions of psychotherapy and the construction of the self than to maintain an oppositional stance. The feminist program, dependent on the courts for referrals and funding, was most vulnerable to these pressures.

By adopting these technologies, all three approaches contributed to the absorption of marginal populations into the project of modernity even as they simultaneously, and importantly, contributed to the protection of women. Those who attended the feminist programs for men and women were largely people living on the fringes of the town's economy. These are not the only people who batter, but they are the ones who end up in batterer intervention programs. Evidence from program intake forms for 1,574 people served between 1990 and 1998, two-thirds men and one-third women, indicates that about three-quarters of the men (77%) and women (70%) earned under $11,000. Over half earn under $8,000 a year, a low income even in a place where housing costs for substandard housing are low and hunting and fishing routinely supplement incomes. Only 6% earned above $25,000 a year. In contrast, the 1990 Census found that only 19% of the town's residents earned under $10,000 in household income, while 53% earned over $25,000, an income level reached by only 4% of the Alternatives to Violence (ATV) women participants. Men and women in the men's violence control program and women's support groups frequently talked about welfare, survival by fishing, hunting, and odd construction jobs, and the pressures of poverty. Their discussions suggested that many did not have steady jobs.

These clients are also substantially less educated than town residents, with the men even less educated than the women. Half are high school graduates (46%) and one-quarter started college (25%), but only 3% have a college degree. In contrast, 29% of Hilo's population has an associate's, bachelor's, or higher degree, while only 5% of the ATV population does. Thus, the men sent to the violence control program, as well as the women they batter, are significantly poorer and less educated than the town overall. Many are on welfare or are living with partners who are on welfare; many camp in forests or on beaches; many are embittered by a colonial past and present poverty; and many suffer from emotional scars of childhood physical and sexual abuse. Two-thirds of both the male and female participants in the feminist program said that they had either witnessed or experienced violence as children. Almost half the men in the feminist batterer program have been arrested for something in addition to battering. Although I do not have comparable statistical data from those who go to ho'oponopono or the church, many are in similar social and economic positions. The church appeals to a range of people from middle class to working class, but puts an emphasis on incorporating those with economic difficulties and personal problems. Based on the stories they tell about their lives, it appears that many of those in all three settings are afflicted with unmanageable rage; have recurring difficulties with alcohol and drugs; and face educational deficits. They are also people who have trouble controlling their violence.

Thus, those who end up in such self-management programs have failed to constitute themselves according to the demands of modernity. They are in some ways living outside the disciplinary confines of modern society. The technologies they are taught seek to protect women from male violence but also to produce better workers and citizens. These technologies are resisted, of course. This is a major redefinition of masculinity for many perpetrators and is energetically challenged. Men brag about their sexual prowess, their desirability to women, and their overall attractiveness and joke about controlling women and continuing to batter them. Women sometimes turn down the offer of a rights-- based self, protected by the law, because they hope that their partners will change on their own or because they are afraid to go forward with the prosecution and do not expect that the courts will protect them. This is not a smooth and uncontested domain of personal transformation for its practitioners or for its subjects.

As Stychin points out, the allocation of rights is one way of creating national identities, of forming a national imaginary based on who belongs and who does not (1998: 35-38). For example, he argues that the U.S. Supreme Court decision that prohibited gay rights' activists from marching in the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Boston excluded gays from being part of the authentic expression of the nation by using the principle of free speech. The criminalization of gender violence similarly uses rights to define who belongs by punishing those who batter and by conferring rights on their victims. This new allocation of rights to women not to be hit is routinely resisted by men who say they were simply acting as they always had. Many fail to appear in court or for the batterer intervention program, or drop out quickly. And many try to persuade their partners to drop the charges, thus resisting the legal regime that defines them as criminals. Legal practitioners may also resist this use of rights to criminalize batterers by failing to impose sentences, failing to punish those who do not participate in mandated programs, and allowing perpetrators to select treatment programs that will not track their participation and report back to the court.

This analysis complements and expands Nicholas Rose's work on the formation of the soul in modern society. He argues that new systems of governance have emerged in the postwar period that seek to control individual behavior through governance of the soul (Rose 1989; 1999). Individuals come to see themselves as choice-making consumers, defining themselves through the way they acquire commodities and choose spouses, children, and work (Miller & Rose 1990). Social ordering occurs through processes of choice and self-definition, while those who slip outside the bounds of appropriate behavior typically find themselves in a program or institution that encourages them to learn to manage themselves and their feelings. In the liberal democracies of the postwar period, citizens are to regulate themselves, to become active participants in the process rather than objects of domination. Thus, citizen subjects are educated and solicited into an alliance between personal objectives and institutional goals, creating government at a distance. Rose dates the formation of this self-managing system of governance to the 1950s but sees a major expansion during the current era of neoliberalism and the critique of the welfare state (Rose 1989: 226-27).

Although I agree with Rose that an increasing emphasis on governing the soul is characteristic of modern society, I see the transformation not as evolutionary but as the product of social mobilization and political struggle. It is formed through particular movements that establish institutions, attract clients, and achieve recognition. The changes are not simply discursive but are also institutional and practical. People adopt new ways of talking about how to change behavior in order to secure funding to carry on a program or to attract contributing members. Moreover, such a transition encounters forms of resistance, often inchoate and focused on refusal to participate or failure to comply with the new expectations.

In sum, the local struggles among gender violence initiatives in the small town of Hilo, Hawaii, are an instance of a more general transnational competition among rights, religion, and community. Despite these radically different ideologies, groups in Hilo adopt similar technologies of personal transformation based on the ideal of a self that can choose not to be violent and can understand his/her own feelings. These changes tailor the individual to fit into the modern nation and economy.

Despite the ideological contestation among rights, religion, and community in global society, there may be a growing similarity in technologies for producing the self. It is in the technologies of self-creation rather than in the ideologies of marriage, gender, and family that it is possible to see the homogenizing face of globalization. Modernity allows a space for difference on the basis of religion and ethnicity, but this is a colonized space, constructed by a liberalism that acknowledges the possibility of variation based on culture and religion yet promotes a hegemonic modernist definition of the person and personal change. The globalization of modernity means the absorption of such technologies, even in pockets that claim to be ordered by religion or communal values. As this article shows, absorption is a gradual process that can take years. Nor does it occur without resistance by those who value the distinctiveness of their group and its critique of existing practice. Some of the activists in the feminist program bemoaned the loss of their confrontational approach to batterers as they adjusted their program to be more welcoming to the men. Even the church, which is not dependent on government funding, must attract members in a world that does not always accept ecstatic religious experience. Some pastors regret the way the church must tone itself down to attract new members. Practitioners of ho'oponopono debate dropping the Hawaiian language and spirituality from their process in order to use it in more public and private contexts.

I have traced this colonization of difference by technologies of the self only in one town. I have not examined to what extent similar processes are occurring globally. It is likely that the pressures of institutionalization, funding, and the market will affect the global diversity of social reform programs in similar ways, and, by subtly colonizing apparently culturally diverse projects and organizations, will further the project of creating a more homogeneous modern self.

Gender Violence in Windward Hawai'i

Hilo is a small port city of about 45,000, serving a sprawling agricultural region and providing a hub for governmental, educational, medical, and retail services, as well as some tourism. Although the town has a university campus, a hospital, and the county government and courts, it is also home to a large population of poor people, both homeless and unemployed town dwellers and people surviving in remote agricultural areas by hunting, fishing, and farming illegal as well as legal crops. The dominant ethnic groups in the town are descendants of Japanese, European, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Puerto Rican, South Pacific Islander, Mexican, and Native Hawaiian ancestors. Extensive intermarriage means that most people have mixed ancestries and that identities are the product of social processes and self-identification as well as imposition. The large majority of native-born residents view themselves as "local," a culturally mixed identity that is associated with speaking the English creole called pidgin. The region experienced colonial processes in the 19th century that have marginalized and impoverished many of the Native Hawaiian residents of the area (see Merry 2000). The intensive missionary work of the 19th century left a strong legacy of Protestant Christianity, particularly among the Native Hawaiian population.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the entire windward coast of the island of Hawaii, where Hilo is located, was converted to sugar plantations manned by sugar workers from Europe and Asia. The children and grandchildren of these plantation workers are now prominent in education, government, and the judiciary. The plantations are now disappearing, replaced by massive unemployment and a new economy of tourism. This is a postindustrial, postplantation society. There is now a significant population engaged in the production of marijuana on fertile and well-watered soils. There was always a population on the fringes of the plantation economy: families living on the beaches, people who survive by hunting, fishing, and occasional construction jobs, along with welfare, and people who supplement their incomes by growing marijuana. Many rural and some urban residents share a culture of guns, drugs, fishing, and hunting; for some portion wife beating is a natural way of life.

The number of cases of violence against women in the courts in Hilo has expanded dramatically over the past 25 years, particularly during the early 1990s. Although the population of the county surrounding this town has doubled over the past 25 years, the number of calls to the police for help has grown eight times, the number of requests for protective orders has jumped from one or two a year to 710 in 1998, and the number of arrests for abuse of a family or household member has gone from zero to more than 1,200 reports to the police and 855 cases in the courts in 1998. In East (windward) Hawai'i, there were 499 temporary restraining orders in 1994, but by mid-2000 an estimated annual total of 556. Criminal spouse abuse cases were also at record-high levels in mid-2000, with an estimated 548 for East Hawai'i, based on the numbers from the first half of the year. The dramatic increase in the number of court cases of wife beating probably reflects an increase in battering, but it also shows a major increase in help-seeking from the law. In most cases, the victim has taken the initiative to call the police for help or to ask the Family Court for a restraining order. If there is an arrest, the victim must usually provide evidence for the prosecution. Thus, this burgeoning caseload indicates a new understanding of the meaning of gender violence as a crime and a willingness by victims to complain to the police and to seek restraining orders.

This research covers changes in the feminist violence control program between 1991 and 2000 and the simultaneous shifts in the church approach and the Native Hawaiian program. It is based on ethnographic observations of the feminist programs for men and for women as well as ho'oponopono and church services. I also conducted extensive interviews with practitioners in each process as well as with referral sources, such as the probation department and courts. Additionally, I observed both civil and criminal court proceedings, the violence control program, the probation office and prosecutor's office, and interviewed perpetrators and victims.2

Violence control programs are the cornerstones of the local judiciary's approach to male violence.3 All convicted batterers and many of those subject to restraining orders, particularly for contact restraining orders,4 are mandated by the court to attend a violence control program. In the early 1990s, 43% of restraining order defendants were referred, and of those requesting contact restraining orders, fully 61% were referred to violence control programs.5 Judges sometimes require women to attend the women's support group. There were approximately 500 women and 1,000 men referred to the local program, called Alternatives to Violence (ATV), between 1990 and 1998 from an urban and rural region of about 70,000 people, an unknown number of which were repeaters. Judges and probation officers occasionally refer convicted abusers or those subject to restraining orders to ho'oponopono or to pastoral counseling, but with considerable hesitation because of concern that these programs will not hold the men accountable and will not report back to the court if they fail to appear. The first referral to ho'oponopono was in 1990, to a program run by the Hawaiian organization Alu Like. In 1994, one probation officer estimated that for every 100 people referred to the feminist program, one was sent to ho'oponopono. He thought that two or three a year were referred to a church program, although in my observations of restraining order hearings in family court, the request to choose counseling by a pastor instead of participating in ATV was more common, arising perhaps once every week or two. Those who had attorneys-a relatively small number-were particularly likely to request a pastoral alternative to ATV. The number of referrals to programs other than ATV increased in the late 1990s. Many defendants request ho'oponopono or church counseling, and defense attorneys often encourage them to do so. These three approaches represent the major alternatives in Hilo. There are also private counselors, but these are generally too expensive for the men who become involved in the criminal justice system with battering convictions. Those who can afford attorneys and private counseling often find ways to avoid all three approaches.

Rights: The Alternatives to Violence Program

Feminist Beginnings

Rights are fundamental to the feminist violence control program in Hilo. It originated from mainland U.S. feminism of the 1970s and the work of battered women in Duluth, Minnesota, who developed an approach to battering embodied in a diagram called the power/control wheel. The feminist movement of the 1970s was concerned with power differentials between men and women and targeted the problems of rape and domestic violence by men against women as critical to maintaining women's subordination. Early in the battered women's movement, activists turned to the law as a strategy for eliminating violence, advocating tougher laws and more active policing, prosecution, and punishment (Schechter 1982). Using the notion of the personal as political, feminists struggled to extract this form of violence from its protected space in the family and open it to public scrutiny as a crime warranting the intervention of the state (see Schneider 1994). Before this, wife battering was often seen as a social problem for which the law was inadequate and inappropriate (Field & Field 1973). In the 1970s, some states, such as Hawai'i, passed laws specifically targeting violence against spouses. The first domestic violence restraining order was created in Pennsylvania in 1976, and a similar law was passed in Massachusetts in 1978 (Ptacek 1999: 48-50). At the same time, feminist activists began to experiment with retraining batterers (Ptacek 1988; Yllo & Bograd 1988).

Since the 1980s, under pressure from demands for a more activist police force and mandatory arrest policies, there has been a vast increase in the number of cases of domestic violence in courts in many parts of the United States, such as a 60-fold per capita increase in California between 1981 and 1995.(6) The number of restraining orders issued in Massachusetts nearly tripled between 1985 and 1993, then began to level off (Ptacek 1999: 62). Hawai'i experienced a similar boom in cases, as discussed earlier. Yet, offenders are sentenced to prison rarely, and then for only short periods of time. Instead, batterers are commonly required to attend some form of treatment, of which the dominant model is the feminist power/control model developed in Duluth, Minnesota, by women who experienced battering (Hanna 1998).7 Global feminism has continued to emphasize the issue of violence against women, both domestic battering and in forms such as the trafficking of women and rape during armed conflict.

The activists in Hilo adopted the Duluth model, an "educational and counseling approach that focused on the use of violence by a batterer to establish power and control over his partner" (Pence & Paymar 1993: 29). The Duluth model focuses on the linkage between patriarchy and violence. Violence is seen as a form of control that takes a gendered form because men are "socialized to be dominant and women to be subordinate" (Pence & Paymar 1993: 5). In batterer intervention classes, the facilitator often draws a pyramid and talks about how those at the bottom of the pyramid are obliged to give up their identities for those on the top, emphasizing the parallels between gender domination and the oppressions of slavery, colonialism, classism, racism, and control in the workplace (Pence & Paymar 1993: 49). The Duluth model tries to hold each person accountable for the choices he/she makes (Pence & Paymar 1993: 4). The Duluth model has become the predominant form of batterer's treatment in the United States and has expanded globally to places such as New Zealand, the Caribbean, Germany, and Israel (Hanna 1997; Healy et al. 1998; see Merry 1998). Thus, the Hilo approach was imported from the mainland and is now circulating globally.

During its first decade (1986 to 1996), the Alternatives to Violence program in Hilo closely followed the feminist approach developed in Duluth. Participants were separated on the basis of gender. The men's group provided training in violence control; the women's group offered support and encouragement to assert rights. Because the program viewed gender violence as a prop for patriarchy, it made sense to provide separate treatment for men and women regardless of their own violent behavior. The program for men consisted of eight months of weekly, two-hour meetings of groups of 10 to 15 men, led by a pair of facilitators who model respectful, egalitarian, and give-and-take interactions between a man and a woman. The time has now been reduced to six months. The program for women consists of ten weeks of two-- hour meetings of a support group, but women are rarely required to attend under threat of criminal penalties. My research assistants and I observed at least 50 men's sessions and 40 support groups for women over the decade of the 1990s and spent a good deal of time talking to program staff, facilitators, judges, and participants.

Following the Duluth model, ATV group meetings are designed to help men change their beliefs and values about gender relationships. They are encouraged to consider their partners as equals and to make decisions by negotiation. Since the program sees violence as learned behavior, it focuses on the values and beliefs that allow men to accept their own violence. There is an explicit attempt to change these values. In group meetings, men are also encouraged to use "positive self-talk"-to think positive thoughts about themselves-as a technique for diminishing their desire to strike out. They are told the problem is not their anger but their violence. They are taught to recognize the bodily signs of anger and techniques to "cool down" when they are getting angry. They learn a new vocabulary: Instead of "old ladies" or "cunts," they are to call their spouses "partners." "Just a slap" is termed "physical abuse," and "battering" includes physical battering, sexual battering, psychological battering, and destruction of property and pets. In addition to this new vocabulary, they are also taught the importance of taking responsibility for themselves in work situations, of being punctual and reliable, and the importance of avoiding rage in interactions with employers, fellow drivers, and friends. Again, following the Duluth model, men are required to attend under penalty of criminal sanctions. To complete the program, they are required to participate and to take oral tests on each segment of the class. Failure means a man must start again. The program is resolutely secular and makes no reference to religion.

The Early Years of ATV

The first women's shelter in Hilo, the brainchild of a feminist activist from New York City, was started by a self-described former welfare mother and high school dropout (interview 1992). In 1976, she and local activists set up a women's center, which was immediately deluged with calls for help from battered women (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 12 Feb. 1979). The group acquired a rambling house in a residential neighborhood and opened a shelter in 1978. It was run by a feminist collective that put a strong emphasis on egalitarian decisionmaking and feminist cooperative organizing, resisting hierarchy and placing formerly battered women in leadership positions (Rodriguez 1988). The Executive Director said she was the only white woman on the staff, and that many women of color always worked there (Honolulu Star-- Bulletin, 12 Feb. 1979). For the Executive Director, as for the feminist movement of the 1970s, the shelter was part of a political movement, not a service. She trained women in political awareness and insisted that those who came to the shelter register to vote. She worked energetically against racism, which she saw as a fundamental social problem, even more basic than classism and sexism. Her basic message was that women do not deserve to be hit no matter what they do and that men must be held accountable for their violence. These were radical ideas for most of the women coming to the shelter, who often felt responsible for provoking the violence.

Despite the demand for help from battered women, the struggle to find funding was substantial and ongoing (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 12 Feb. 1979). A Native Hawaiian organization, Alu Like, provided some of the initial funding. In 1983 the county bought the building for the shelter with Community Development Block Grant funds. There was considerable opposition in the town, stirred up by the editor of the town newspaper, primarily from men who accused the shelter of being anti-male and who thought it encouraged women to leave their husbands (Hawaii Tribune-Herald, 18 Dec. 1983; 15 Jan. 1984). One angry husband tried to set the shelter on fire in 1983 (Hawaii Tribune-- Herald, 2 Dec. 1983, 1). Nevertheless, the shelter survived and, by the early 1990s, served about 200 women and their children every year, 30 or 40 coming more than once a year (1992 interview, Executive Director).

Women in the shelter began to ask for counseling for the men so that they would stop hitting them. The Executive Director said, "I was really resistant to doing men's services. I felt the whole world was men's services." But in 1986, the Family Crisis Shelter imported the newly developed Duluth model as the basis for a program called Alternatives to Violence (ATV), which included a batterer intervention program and a women's support group. The Director discovered that funds were more readily available for retraining men than for providing shelter services for women and children.8 The judiciary funded the ATV programs for batterers and paid staff to assist victims filing restraining order (TRO) petitions. ATV funding between 1992 and 1994 was relatively high, with approximately $700,000 for about 20 employees, almost all with Judiciary Department contracts, with a small amount of support from United Way (Chandler & Yu 1994: 102-06).

Between 1986 and 1994, the Alternatives to Violence program adopted a strongly feminist perspective on gender violence. During this period, the staff was mostly formerly battered women without professional degrees. They saw the program as a movement to transform society through empowering women. When I first visited ATV in 1991, my research assistants and I were ushered into a plain room furnished with a sofa, folding metal chairs, and a large blackboard, where we met several enthusiastic women, who described their innovative approach. They had a great deal of energy, a strong sense of mission, and a commitment to feminism. They made clear to us that their concern was the safety of women rather than the reform of men. They believed that batterers should be offered education, but had limited hopes of changing them. The Executive Director said that the statistics for success were awful. The staff thought that the main benefit of the program was that while the men were attending the groups they were monitored by safety checks with their partners. One very supportive judge agreed that monitoring was the major benefit of the program.

The staff disdained record keeping and bureaucracy. When I asked to see the anonymous intake forms, the Director gestured vaguely at boxes stacked in the corners. There was no effort to track participation or to measure recidivism, as far as I could tell. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the judiciary enthusiastically supported the program and referred all the battering cases to it. It was the only non-prison option for batterers in town. In the years 1992-93, the program reported serving 647 clients referred by the judiciary (Chandler & Yu 1994: 124). The high point of funding was 1994. By 2000, the program was still supported by the judiciary and United Way, but was experiencing financial shortfalls. As early as 1993, the judiciary was asking questions about its effectiveness. In 1993, it funded a research study to investigate the effectiveness of the men's programs statewide (Chandler & Yu 1994). This study found that program statistics were generally sparse, reflecting the press of work and lack of staffing. The difficulty of gathering recidivism data from police reports was insurmountable (Chandler & Yu 1994: 17). In the only program where some tracking of cases was possible, it ap peared that there were fewer rearrests of ATV graduates than of those not attending ATV (Chandler & Yu 1994: 2).

During the salad days in 1991 and 1992, ATV offered very different programs for men and for women. The women's support group was organized around the trope of the family, with the law portrayed as a source of help and support, while the men's program adopted the trope of the school and the prison, requiring attendance, demanding homework, and threatening jail for failure to attend. Men were required to pay on a sliding scale, depending on income, between $1 and $10 a session, and if they missed a class, had to make it up and pay $20. This was a major burden that sometimes drove them out of the program. Men were required to come on time and stay until the end of each meeting, a technique designed to hold men accountable. They often joked, "How long are you going to keep us tonight?" They complained constantly that the women did not have to pay to attend support groups, as they did. They also complained that the women could miss a class and make it up without paying extra, but they could not. The facilitators frequently reminded the men, "You may not like that you are here and the women are not, but that is the law, that is the way it is." Men experienced the groups as coercive, frequently talking about the risk of jail for failure to attend or for using violence against their partners. The facilitators encouraged this perspective, frequently observing that the men were there because they had committed a crime and the court required them to attend. Failure to participate meant repeating the program. The men were aware that ATV made reports to judges and the Child Protective Services. The law was always present in the room as a threat. One man, complaining about a facilitator's confrontation after a negative safety check, described himself as sitting in the room behind bars. Since the group sits in a circle facing the two facilitators, his statement revealed a reimagining of the space as a prison. The 30 men I interviewed said they thought that if they did not attend, they would go to jail. Despite these threats, however, men were rarely, if ever, sent to jail for failure to participate. It was only a new incidence of violence that held much risk of jail, and even that was not great. It was much more common to send a new referral to ATV than prison if a man failed to attend.

Confronting men for their violent actions, revealed by the regular safety checks with their partners, was a central part of the program. If a woman agreed, in a group meeting a facilitator would confront her partner about his violent behavior. In one case, a woman accused her husband of raping her. The husband was so furious when the facilitator raised this accusation that he jumped up and said, "Nobody says that about me." The rest of the men in the group supported him. Confrontations were usually very tense, but staff felt that both the monitoring and the confrontations were important. In these early years, the goal of the program was not only to prevent physical assault but also to replace male domination with a more egalitarian gender order. Violence mattered because it supported patriarchy.

The later Years: Psychotherapeutic Feminism

In the mid 1990s, the ATV program changed substantially for a variety of reasons, which eroded its privileged status within the judiciary, its major funding source. It had expanded into a large and complex organization with two shelters and two batterer intervention programs and an annual budget of well over one million dollars. The Executive Director continued to hire staff without professional degrees for the shelters, which some members of the board and staff thought was a mistake, claiming that some of these people were incompetent. The early egalitarian feminist organization was gradually replaced by a more hierarchical structure. A series of incidents in the early 1990s, involving accusations of civil rights violations by some staff and findings of "fiscal improprieties" and charges of theft against the Executive Director, led to her resignation in 1993 and to her replacement by a professional Executive Director, with a Master's degree (Hawaii Tribune-Herald, 26 Mar. 1995, 1). Several of the experienced facilitators and the original ATV Director also left, some setting up competing programs, with the claim that the new ATV was no longer feminist. By that time, there were about six alternative batterer intervention programs in town, as well as private therapists offering anger management programs. Although ATV still received judiciary funding, it was no longer the only option for batterer intervention, and lawyers were becoming skilled in helping their clients avoid ATV. The shift from feminist activism to service delivery is common for domestic violence programs (see Schechter 1982). One staff member who worked for the organization during the 1990s said that they had changed from a movement to an administration. Others observed that it was no longer as feminist as it once had been. The original director often confronted the police, but later directors were not so oppositional.

The program also moved away from its commitment to treat men and women differently. In 1997, ATV initiated two new programs for women, both of which were designed to provide anger management and violence control instruction in all-women groups. By 2000, ATV was running a parallel curriculum in the men's programs and the women's programs so that both partners would simultaneously hear the same ideas about intimidation, sexual abuse, and the management of violence. Many of the women in the violence control program were required to attend by Child Protective Services as a condition of getting their children back. This program focused on learning the cues of anger and finding ways of calming down, as well as developing a sense of rights. These two programs were popular among women. Some women were mandated to attend and others chose to attend after spending time in the less structured support group that did not offer much instruction but did provide the chance to hear other women's stories and tell one's own.

Since 1997, the staff has largely ceased to confront men publicly in group meetings about new incidents of violence against their partners. Instead, confrontations about violence reported by their partners are done privately before the meetings. Staff members acknowledge that they had been confrontational formerly and had elicited a lot of hostility. During "check-ins" at the beginning of the meeting, staff members no longer point out when the men are using male privilege or control tactics. Now, they just let the men talk. Taking longer for check-ins and giving men time to talk helps them support each other and work with the others in the group. They are also now more tolerant of men's resistance. In one session in 1998, for example, the men were joking with each other about dominating their wives, but the facilitators ignored it. In the past they would have told them that was wrong. Also, when the men say they do not attempt to isolate their partners, the facilitators accept this, whereas in the past, they would have confronted each man, saying, "I know you do this." They allow men to deny their use of power and control tactics on the assumption that, as they listen to others, they will come to recognize the behavior in themselves.

In 1998, the program for men was substantially redirected toward a new model, called Healthy Realization. It was first introduced to the staff by a psychotherapist from Honolulu, who provided a day of training at a staff retreat. This is a more supportive approach to batterer retraining, which encourages men to build self-esteem. It draws heavily on conceptions of being mentally healthy and focuses on improving a person's level of psychological functioning. Men are no longer challenged and told they are criminals but are asked how they feel and what they think is good about themselves. Facilitators try to emphasize positive features. Discussions are less didactic. Participants are far less often required to fill out anger and control logs, a teaching technique that asks men to write down incidents in which they have been angry and examine why they behaved that way, what their underlying beliefs were, and how they could have acted differently. Facilitators report that the men dislike this task. Instead, they encourage the men to think about themselves in positive ways while they teach them to recognize and avoid their violence. In 2000, for example, at a group's initial meeting, the men were invited to introduce themselves, indicate their level of psychological functioning on a psychological continuum that ranged from "tormented" to "OK with stress" to "contentment" to "deeply peaceful," and say something about themselves that makes them proud. Thus, the program tries to help men build self-esteem and to teach them to understand and recognize their feelings. There is still discussion of male privilege and the value of egalitarian gender relations. At check-in, men as well as women are asked to identify their level of anger in the past week on a scale from 1 to 10 and to describe the bodily cues for that level of anger. In both the men's program and the women's anger management program, long lists of emotion words are distributed, and participants discuss the range of feelings these words describe. Discussions of anger and violent encounters run far beyond the sphere of intimate relationships, often turning to how the person managed a difficult encounter at work, in a store, or while driving. Facilitators emphasize to participants that, regardless of their level of anger, what they do about it is a matter of choice; they can choose to take time to cool down or to walk away from the situation, rather than to be violent. They are constantly reminded of the extent to which they may not be able to choose the situations they are in, but that they can choose what they will do about them.

Many of the staff members feel that the program is more flexible now and less hostile to the men. Men who attended in the early years often hated it, complaining to probation officers and judges about how much they disliked it, and occasionally choosing a few days in jail over attending. A Native Hawaiian man who participated in the program in 1991 and now works as a facilitator said that out of the 22 who began his class only four finished, and although he was one of the four, he hated the experience. He likes the new format much better. He thinks that substantially reducing attention to violence control logs is also a good idea. These logs ask men to write out detailed descriptions of their violence, their beliefs, and what they could have done differently. The logs were often completed as homework and were used as the basis for group discussions. But they were hard for many men to do; the linear quality of the form they had to fill out and the demand that boxes be filled in from left to right and top to bottom were alienating for those who thought in more circular or fluid terms.

Charting the Change

In the earlier regime, men were taught in order to protect the women, not because there was any real hope of changing them. Now, the interventions offered to men and women are more similar; men are given more support and concern about self-esteem and women are offered skills in emotional literacy and anger management. The program no longer divides victim and offender entirely along gendered lines. It still retains much of the Duluth model's curriculum, and discussions continue to center on the power/control wheel and the linkage among anger, male privilege, and violence. Now, however, in the more freewheeling discussions men are able to grapple with other important issues, such as whether it is a good idea to "take out" a man who sexually abuses your daughter. In a discussion about this question in the summer of 2000, many of the men felt it was important to retaliate for the sake of the daughter, while the facilitators argued that this would not help her. This was a hard sell, and few were convinced.

Since the late 1990s, ATV has shifted from seeing gender violence largely as the result of oppression to viewing it as a characteristic of individual psychological functioning. In place of a theory that battering is the product of patriarchy, the program sees battering as the result of low self-esteem and an inability to understand feelings in a society that allows men to express their self-doubt violently. The new approach is part of a broader psychotherapeutic theory of human behavior, widespread on the U.S. mainland as well as globally. Program strategies focus on building men's self-esteem and looking for their strengths as well as communicating that battering is wrong and that men and women are equal. The analysis of structures of domination has become far less prominent. The Duluth model and the power/ control wheel are still there, supplemented by more therapeutic techniques. That women have the right not to be hit regardless of their behavior remains an important part of the discourse, but the agency now recognizes that women, too, have anger issues. Women are more likely to talk about empowerment, courage, and being a survivor than having rights. As one staff member put it, "We have shifted from radical feminism to conservative feminism." In a postfeminist world this is a postfeminist violence control program.

There is no way of knowing whether this new approach is more effective, given the absence of data. Clients and some of the staff like it better, although others worry about straying away from feminism, and some have resigned in protest. The change seems driven by program survival concerns as much as by trying to improve the program. ATV must reapply to the judiciary for funding every two years and must justify its work in terms of caseloads and its ability to hold men accountable for their violence. In the early 1990s, judges referred all battering cases to ATV, but by 2000 some judges simply required attendance at a batterer treatment program and allowed the probation officer to determine which one. Most probation officers and Family Court judges still see ATV as the best program, both for its curriculum and for its willingness to hold men accountable by reporting their attendance and participation back to the courts, but the ATV staff worries about losing cases to private counselors or other programs. By 2000, judges on the bench were more skeptical, and some judiciary staff began to raise questions about the program's effectiveness.

By 1994, ATV had begun to collect information on recidivism. Based on reports of rearrests for the same offense supplied by the prosecutor's office, between 1994 and 1997 only 22% of those who graduated from ATV reoffended within a year. However, data for the years 1997-1998 show that only 22% of those referred to the program graduated. Half of those referred were terminated because they failed to show up at all (40% of those terminated), had too many absences (40%), or failed to restart (20%). More than a quarter of those referred (28%) received approval to go elsewhere. Eliminating those who appeared more than once or whose drop-outs were approved probably raises the graduation rate to 45%, although the statistics are a little ambiguous. Clearly, losing clients is a major problem. Shifting to a user-- friendlier model of batterer intervention is one response to the client-retention problem. Dependence on judiciary funding as well as the growing competition from pastoral and family therapist alternatives puts added pressure on the program to retain its clients.

This examination of changes in the ideology and practices of this batterer intervention program reveals the importance of ideas imported from the U.S. mainland and, more broadly, those such as the Duluth model and psychotherapeutic approaches to change. Because it was pressured to change, ATV has lost some of its critical edge. Now, its strategies increasingly focus on feelings: on feeling good about oneself, on deciding how to act, and on learning how to get along. Patriarchy has moved to the background and has been replaced by theories about how children need to be protected from the violence of their mothers as well as their fathers so that they do not grow up to be violent adults. This change reflects a national tendency to think about gender violence more in terms of individual functioning and the potential impact on children and less in terms of patriarchy, a tendency that is now internationalizing. Although the program faced very particular pressures through its history of lawsuits and resignations, its transformation is typical of many battered women's programs. Women in Hilo may find that men who have completed the new program are less violent; techniques of the self, which stress self-control, punctuality, and reliability, may also transform men who have difficulty controlling their anger and who are, at best, marginal workers into useful employees for the new service and tourism economy.

Religion: The New Hope Christian Fellowship

Pentecostal Beginnings

Religion is one of the major alternatives to the feminist, rights-based approach to gender violence. The New Hope Christian Fellowship in Hilo belongs to the Foursquare Gospel Church, one of the rapidly growing churches in the burgeoning Christian Pentecostal movement. New Hope is part of a global Pentecostal movement that has expanded enormously since its origins in the early 20th century. Pentecostalism emphasizes direct experience of the Spirit through ecstatic forms such as speaking in tongues, trance, vision, healing, dreams, and dance and offers the millennial hope of a Second Coming and new age (Cox 1995: 82). Spiritual and physical healing is very important. Cox attributes Pentecostalism's success to its promise of racial equality and a deeper form of religious experience. It has prospered by criticizing the materialism of modern society and suggesting an alternative, a message that appeals to the poor and disenfranchised, those who could imagine a radically new order only through the actions of a loving God. Pentecostals resist organization and spurn the Protestant denominations, claiming a spiritual space outside conventional society (Blumhofer 1993b: 12-14, 88, 160).

Although the Pentecostal church was started by the poor at the beginning of the 20th century, by mid-century, Pentecostalism was also becoming popular among people of all classes disenchanted with materialistic consumer culture (Cox 1995: 106). By the end of the 20th century, Pentecostalism was the most rapidly expanding religious movement of the time, sweeping through Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, as well as the United States (Cox 1995: 120). It continued to appeal largely to the poor rather than the affluent (1995: 119).9 Thus, what happened in Hilo is only a tiny piece of this global explosion in Pentecostal religious faith. This expansion was fueled by a combination of folk and rock music, personal testimonies, informal and accessible sermons, and an emphasis on religious experiences (Cox 1995: 107).

The Foursquare Gospel Church was started by a Canadian-- born evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, whom Cox identifies as the most prominent Pentecostal preacher in the 1930s (Blumhofer 1993a; Cox 1995: 124). As McPherson's doctrine emerged after 1922, it was based on the four beliefs in Christ as Savior, Healer, Baptizer, and Coming King (Blumhofer 1993a: 215). McPherson described the church she founded in Los Angeles in 1923 as dedicated to preaching a four-square gospel: "Jesus, the Only Saviour; Jesus the Great Physician; Jesus, Baptiser with the Holy Spirit; Jesus, the Coming Bridegroom, Lord, and King" (quoted in Blumhofer 1993a: 191; see www.four square.org). She emphasized Scripture, divine healing, baptism in the spirit, and the imminent personal, premillennial return of Christ.

This movement was immensely popular in Los Angeles and across the country during the 1920s. It joined familiar aspects of Biblical Christianity and revival meetings with a modern flair for dramatic performances and the use of new technologies, such as radio. The essence of its appeal was McPherson's emphasis on experience rather than the particulars of doctrine, an approach characteristic of Pentecostal Christianity (Blumhofer 1993b: 222; Cox 1995). Music and singing were fundamental to her services and consisted mostly of familiar gospel tunes. In her biographer's view, she was successful because she tapped into the reservoir of popular piety in Protestant Christianity that crossed denominational lines (Blumhofer 1993a: 231). After McPherson's death in 1944, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel continued to grow and expand. In 2001, the denomination reported 26,139 churches and meeting places worldwide and 3.3 million members in 107 countries (www.foursquare.org/about/ 4/18/01). The school founded in Los Angeles in the 1920s is now the Life Bible College, with a substantial campus, which I visited in 1998.

A Hawai'i-born pastor, Wayne Cordeiro, who trained in Oregon, started the New Hope Christian Fellowship in Hilo. He began a small congregation in 1984, which met in a community center. By 1992, nearly 1,700 people attended services every Sunday in a beautiful new church on a 20-acre lot (Cordeiro 1998: 225). In 1998, there were perhaps 2,000 members and three Sunday services. Like other Pentecostal churches, it is full of young families and has about an equal proportion of men and women. It targets 25- to 45-year-olds and incorporates all ethnic groups, particularly people of Filipino, Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, and other European ancestries. In 1995 Cordeiro left Hilo to found a Foursquare Church in Honolulu, which quickly grew to a congregation of more than 5,000 people in its first three years.10

Cordeiro's Church straddles the divide in fundamentalist Christianity between churches that emphasize signs and wonders-spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues and prophecies and ritual healing-and those that do not. Cordeiro's position is that New Hope can overcome this division between Pentecostal, or Charismatic, groups and Conservative groups that emphasize healing, wisdom, and faith, and make both welcome (Cordeiro 1998: 59-61). Thus, the Hilo New Hope Church is part of a global movement inspired by religious currents from the United States. It has local adaptations, such as references to the congregation as the `ohana and an emphasis on local, sometimes Filipino-speaking, pastors. Like other Pentecostal churches, it has moved away from its radically separatist beginnings (Blumhofer 1993b). It has also changed its approach to healing from ecstatic religious experience to more mainstream psychological theories of personal growth and change.

Healing Gender Violence

There is relatively little interest in gender violence in conservative Christian churches, according to Jackie Hudson, a Christian family therapist who spoke at a Hawai'i-wide conference of evangelical Christian churches in February 2000. These churches deny that the problem is important, argue that the family is a private domain, and blame the woman for provoking the violence. Indeed, out of 3,000 attendees at the Hawai'i conference, only 10 came to the two discussions on family abuse that she hosted. The 2001 conference had no discussion about gender violence. Hudson noted that, in the absence of church attention to the problem, secular feminists have stepped in and done a good job, but most of the churches are very opposed to the feminists-who are sometimes thought to be lesbians and therefore socially threatening. Hudson runs the only Christian family abuse center in the country. It offers Biblically framed women's support groups and batterer programs that use the Duluth power/control wheel.

New Hope does not put a major emphasis on gender violence, but it has expressed more interest than many similar churches. In 1994, New Hope Hilo was regularly providing counseling for men sent by the court and was working with the county to set up an anger management program, with court referrals. Before Cordeiro left New Hope Hilo, he produced a small booklet on anger management, which encouraged Church members to manage their anger and to make a "no-hurt" contract with one another in marriages to be sure no one gets hurt verbally or physically (n.d.).11 In 1996 the church hosted a high-visibility conference on domestic violence featuring mainland, Honolulu, and Hilo experts, sponsored by the mayor, prosecutor, courts, police, Family Crisis Shelter, and several other local organizations and social service providers. However, in about 1998, a new pastor took over who did not share this interest. By 2000, New Hope offered only pastoral counseling for marital problems, including battering.

New Hope blends Pentecostal ideas of ritual healing and driving out demonic forces with the burgeoning field of Christian family counseling.12 This is a national movement that blends fundamentalist Christian beliefs and psychotherapy. Most of the books on marriage and family life for sale at New Hope and used in pastoral and marriage counseling courses at the Foursquare college in Los Angeles, the Life Bible College, are written by counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, and doctors who are also conservative Christians. James Dobson is probably the best known of these authors, a conservative critic of feminism and proponent of more conventional gender roles (see Dobson 1975; Yorkey 1993). He talks about the importance of spending time with the family, of mothers staying home, of men serving as protectors and providers of the family, and of Christian prayer in times of trouble. Dobson advocates a "traditional" family (1993: 79-91), the importance of staying married, and the evils of divorce, which weakens the nation (89). In his view, women must be honored and respected and supported for being mothers, and men should be encouraged to protect their families, provide for them, and even die for them; having women in the military is a bad idea, the fault of liberal politicians.

Another prominent Christian writer, Larry Crabb, has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and teaches Biblical counseling (1991: 221). His guide to Biblical counseling was used to teach counseling at Life Bible College, and his books and videos are on sale in New Hope. One of his books discusses the fundamental differences between men and women, rooted in their God-given sexual differences (1991). He believes that the egalitarian arguments that men and women are the same fail to recognize the fundamentally different sexual nature of men and women, which is part of God's design. "Sexual perversions" and homosexuality disrupt this design and require conversion. Both Genesis and the work of Carol Gilligan are used to support his argument that there are fundamental differences in the ways men and women relate to others (1991: 138-40). He cites Colossians 3:18,19: "Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them" (1991: 147-48). Like many other writers in the field of Christian counseling, Crabb emphasizes the necessity of male headship and female submission for a good marriage (1991; see also Wright 1983: 9-12). This is the notion of marriage that underlies the popular Promise Keeper's movement.13 Violence makes no appearance in Crabb's book, except for a brief comment: "Should a husband consistently demonstrate ungodly behavior, his wife's responsibility is to submit to God's purposes without angrily demanding that her husband change" (I Peter 3:1-6). The woman being battered should simply refuse to cooperate (Crabb 1991: 176). Most Christian marriage and family books focus on problems of communication, anger, and sexuality in marriage rather than violence and urge restraint of anger as well as restraint of sexual relations outside marriage (e.g., Dobson 1975; Crabb 1975, 1991; Wright 1974, 1983; Carter & Minirth 1993; Talley 1991; Smalley & Trent 1990; Yorkey 1993; Dalby 1995).

New Hope pastors have adopted this understanding of the family in their sermons and pastoral counseling. As one pastor put it, divorce is violence against the heart of God. Divorce is therefore discouraged because the necessary personal transformation to stay together is always possible, given the power of God to change any man's heart. It is their view that God has given the wife responsibility to take care of the family, and the husband lays down his life for his wife. She should submit to him just like people submit to God because of God's love for them. The man is to make decisions, and though his wife is free to voice her opinions, she is to go along. According to Jackie Hudson, the Pentecostal family violence expert, men sometimes take advantage of this doctrine of headship in a practice she calls spiritual abuse. Despite the apparent patriarchal aspects to headship, some women note that this doctrine also asks men to take responsibility for the family and to love and respect their wives (Cox 1995: 137).

New Hope puts a strong emphasis on the possibilities of personal transformation through the power of God. I attended at least 15 services in the Hilo church, and learning to live a godly life and transforming oneself from a past sinful life were frequent themes of the sermons. As Cordeiro describes this process in his book about building a church, "The Gospel is the power of God to transform lives! It isn't boring! It is powerful. When the Gospel is preached, the Holy Spirit takes down and out drug addicts and turns them into saints! He takes broken marriages and restores them. He takes hopeless lives and breathes new beginnings into them!" (1998: 170).

New Hope shares the view of other Pentecostal churches that healing is a battle between the power of God and Satan. 14 I interviewed several pastoral counselors at New Hope who told me that they often deal with violence in marital relationships and usually use both Christian ideas of demonic influence and psychotherapy to help couples.15 They see anger as the result of demons in a person's body and the devil, residing in the flesh, as the ultimate source of sin. As one pastor put it, "When you walk with the Lord and you do something wrong, you know it's Satan doing it." This does not mean that the person is "possessed," but that there is enemy influence. The belief is that the enemy can put ideas in people's minds. For example, if a person who is abusive suspects his wife of relations with other men, that suspicion is an idea put into the person's head by demons. It is sometimes necessary to expel the demons. This process, called "deliverance," requires prayer, reading Scripture, and renewing the mind, as well as commanding the demons to leave (see Csordas 1994). In extreme cases, exorcism is necessary. Deliverance requires eliminating the stronghold where a demon lives and opening the space to the Holy Spirit to prevent the demons from returning. Bitterness and unforgiveness create strongholds for evil spirits. If a person is not repentant and able to remove these strongholds, even demons that are rebuked and driven away will come back.

In this view, people involved with abuse are especially likely to have strongholds for demons. A person who retains grudges or who has hurts or wounds creates a stronghold, and demons move into these strongholds. In one counselor's words, "When people stuff anger, it gives a stronghold to the enemy." Counseling helps to explore hurts, such as childhood abuse or unexpressed anger, that have created strongholds. Eliminating strongholds requires forgiving those who have done harm to you as well as asking forgiveness of those you have injured. Prayer is a fundamental part of the process, as are stories and passages quoted from the Bible. A woman who is experiencing anger or violence from her husband or partner is admonished to have a meek and quiet spirit and not to provoke her husband, using the Biblical adage that a gentle word turns away wrath. This does not mean she should necessarily stay in an abusive situation. If there is serious violence or she is in danger, she should separate from her husband for a while. Pastors agree that the law has an important role to play at this point. But interviews with former church members indicated that some pastors discourage women from leaving violent partners.

In this model, after separation, the couple should work toward reconciliation rather than divorce. The woman should seek to change herself and pray that her husband will lose his spirit of violence. The couple should use counseling, prayer, and reading Scripture to allow God to heal the marriage. The counselor may meet with the wife and pray for the husband to be saved, for God to soften his heart, and for God to deliver him from the spirit of violence. This means dislodging the demons that encourage violence. The Pentecostal counselor encourages a person to explore hurts in childhood and to forgive and let go of anger and those hurts. Those who have been abused as children may abuse others because childhood abuse creates an enemy stronghold, but a person can choose to respond to this situation in different ways. God has given hope, even to those abused in the past, that they will be able to change. If the person forgives those who have injured him, he or she can eliminate the stronghold. Some people get "saved" and are transformed right away, but others struggle for years. One counselor described a man who made a choice to talk with God and was "set free" by his own prayers and those of his prayer group.

Choice is central to this process. One must choose to forgive and trust God. The choice is open to all. Some people do not make the choice because of demonic strongholds, but if a person fasts and prays, he may eliminate these strongholds. Those with enemy strongholds need to work on forgiveness for the person who injured them, repentance for those they hurt, and the capacity through prayer to take authority over the stronghold. One cannot say, "The enemy made me do this," because, although a person is not necessarily responsible for the stronghold, he is responsible for allowing it to remain. Although violence is motivated by demons, a person is responsible for creating the conditions of anger and bitterness under which demons come. A counselor need never give up because he or she is relying on the enormous power of God, so there is always the possibility of deliverance. Thus, making choices is central to this approach to dealing with violence, as it is in ATV, even though the way of understanding violence is dramatically different.

Although there is no specific battering program in the Hilo New Hope Church, I talked to the leader of a program sponsored by another Foursquare church in Honolulu, which used as a text The Anger Workbook, a book coauthored by a Christian psychotherapist and a Christian psychiatrist (Carter & Minirth 1993).16 Here, the batterer program runs for 12 weeks and serves primarily Christians. It focuses on building self-esteem, making choices, and learning about feelings. Neither the group nor the Workbook offers a gendered analysis of violence. The book defines anger as the intent to preserve personal worth, essential needs, and basic convictions (Carter & Minirth 1993: 8).

In this book, rejection and invalidation are likely to provoke anger, along with feelings of unworthiness, a problem for which faith offers a solution: "Christianity offers great hope to those whose worth is not acknowledged by our fellow human beings. We are taught that God places high value on each person who calls on Him. Even when we fail to live perfectly, that worth is not erased" (Carter & Minirth 1993: 11). Thus, anger is related to low self-esteem.

One way of managing anger is to understand one's emotions and to recognize that there are choices about how to express them (Carter & Minirth 1993: 21). The book celebrates two people who learn to manage their anger by "taking responsibility for their own emotional expressions." In the author's words, "Both had been prisoners of their own anger because they had never learned to understand its meaning and never realized the choices that could be made when it appeared. You, too, will find that, when your emotions become less mysterious and more familiar to you, they will stop controlling you" (1993: 39). In responding to another's controlling behavior, they advocate Proverbs 15:1, "A soft answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger." This does not mean accepting abusive behavior in an enabling fashion, but choosing to behave appropriately despite another's inappropriateness (Carter & Minirith 1993: 72). The leader of this anger management group had not heard of the Duluth model and its power and control wheel. His focus is on helping men feel less angry rather than rethinking patriarchy. His techniques include baptism of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, and prayer for particular people, as well as prayer at the beginning and end of each class.

Another court-recognized program is run by a Native Hawaiian pastor who spun off his own, Hawaiian-focused, New Hope Church from the Hilo New Hope Church and who started a Christian anger management program. He has been offering anger management programs since 1995 and takes referrals from the courts.17 I visited the program twice and discussed it with the pastor and his wife several times. His program combines prayer, singing, and discussions of sin and forgiveness with an analysis of the way Native Hawaiians have been oppressed by colonialism. In one meeting, the pastor pointed out that there are legitimate reasons to be angry about the way Hawaiians have been treated, but that it is wrong to take that anger out on one's loved ones. The pastor thinks gender violence occurs because local men are caught between two cultural worlds: They are culturally one thing, but have to mesh with the larger culture, which is quite another thing. These men face difficult questions about who they are, what masculinity means, and what pride is. This pastor is skeptical about the ATV approach, saying that it tries to do healing through learning pie charts (a reference to the Duluth model's power/control wheel) and is too much like school, with lots of forms to fill out, too many big words, and too much hostility.

Thus, the Pentecostal spiritual war against demons lodged in the flesh has joined with imported psycho therapeutic concepts of self-esteem, learning about feelings, and making choices. In general, anger is understood as the result of strongholds of demons rather than as the product of patriarchy or inequality and oppression. The Native Hawaiian pastor has taken a different path, drawing on ideas from the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Both Pentecostalism and Christian counseling are transnational knowledges now localized into a congregation in Hilo that calls itself the `ohana. The Church encourages its members to feel good about themselves, stressing that everyone has financial difficulties and that one need not have an advanced education to be wise. Every person is worthy in the eyes of God. And every person can change, given enough time and the power of God.

New Hope is both critical of the surrounding society and, in some ways, part of it. Although it offers forms of religious experience such as prophesies and speaking in tongues and ecstatic religious experiences, which might make newcomers uncomfortable, it tones down these features for the Sunday services, which are designed to attract new members. These services, called "seeker Sundays," are more conventional, while the more intense religious experiences are reserved for the smaller Wednesday evening services. New Hope needs contributing members in order to survive and new members to grow. Anger management is only one of a panoply of recovery and twelve-step programs available through the church. Similarly, it joins its focus on demons with a more mainstream psychotherapeutic approach to gender violence. However, there are some pastors and members who treasure the more intense religious experience and expression within the Pentecostal tradition and regret that the church has adopted a blander approach in order to attract members. The origins of Pentecostalism are in withdrawal from modern society and critique of its materialism and secularism, although there recently has been some movement toward institutionalization and assimilation (Blumhofer 1993b).

Not surprisingly, ATV staff members are skeptical about the kind of intervention New Hope can provide for gender violence. They argue that it reinforces gender inequalities, discourages women from leaving their batterers, and does not put women's safety first. Other criticisms are that it does not provide ongoing monitoring of the batterer, nor do the counselors report back to the courts if a man fails to come to counseling. It also does not address the problem of masculine privilege, but supports it. Additionally, there is no feminist analysis of battering and its location in beliefs about male privilege. The Alternatives to Violence staff believe that New Hope does not offer a vision of egalitarian gender relationships but of headship and submission; and an approach, such as New Hope's, that discourages divorce cannot put women's safety first. The pastors at New Hope, however, think ATV is too hard on the men, too critical of them for their ideas about masculinity, and too quick to encourage separation and divorce. They say that the program alienates men just as school does. Moreover, they believe that the timetable ATV offers for change is unrealistic. A person will change when he or she is ready, not in the fixed time of the program. They also doubt that the necessary personal transformation is possible without the spiritual help of God. Although the pastors say they would send a violent man to the courts and that they do not prevent their members from attending ATV, they think the ATV model is too secular and too tolerant of divorce.

New Hope offers a radically different vision of ideal gender relationships and the process of personal transformation from that of ATV, but both approaches have taken imported ideas and tailored them to local conditions. Both are coping with similar pressures to create a program in which men guilty of battering their partners will continue to participate. As they have done so, they have turned to similar technologies of self-fashioning, despite their significant ideological differences. For both models, personal transformation requires making choices, knowing your feelings, and feeling good about yourself. These technologies have moved transnationally within the framework of these organizations.

Community: The Ho'oponopono Process

Indigenous Beginnings to the 1970s

An indigenous Hawaiian problem-solving process seems as if it should be quite distinct. And, indeed, much of its underlying philosophy and understanding of human behavior and the importance of the community is very different from ATV or New Hope. On the other hand, it also has moved toward incorporating more-psychotherapeutic forms of constituting the self, just as ATV and New Hope have done. Ho'oponopono is a Native Hawaiian process for resolving family problems through repentance and forgiveness. It is a deeply spiritual process that has been used for a long time in Hawaiian communities. It cures or prevents physical illness, depression, or anxiety by discovering the cause of the person's trouble, resolving interpersonal problems, and untangling or freeing agents from transgressions by apology and forgiveness (Boggs & Chun 1990: 125-26). Mary Kawena Pukui, a noted scholar of Hawaiian culture and family life, is widely recognized as the source of contemporary knowledge of ho'oponopono. The practice had gone underground under missionary influences, but Pukui unburied it. Pukui was born at the end of the 19th century and was raised in a rural area of the island of Hawaii, where she did ethnographic research as early as 1935, along with extensive archival research and translation of Hawaiian materials (Handy & Pukui 1972; Pukui et al. 1972: viii). The revived interest in ho'oponopono is part of a powerful cultural renaissance of Hawaiian language, culture, and arts, as well as a political movement for Hawaiian sovereignty.

According to Pukui, ho'oponopono means to set to right or to correct, to restore and maintain good relationships among family members, and between the family and supernatural powers. Relationships are "set right" through prayer, discussion, confession, repentance, and mutual restitution and forgiveness (Pukui et al. 1972: 60). This means getting the family together to find out what is wrong, why someone is sick, or why there was a family quarrel, and then using discussion, restitution, repentance, forgiveness, and prayer, always, to set things right (61). An important feature is that after the ho'oponopono, the problem is let go and not discussed further. There should be no lingering grudges or hard feelings to cause future problems (see also Paglinawan 1972: 5).

Historically, there was a close connection between medical healing and spiritual healing (see Gutmanis et al. 1976). Traditionally, a senior member of the family conducted the process, but if that failed to cure the illness or problem, the family could turn to an outside person such as a kahuna la`au lapa`au, a medical person. The healer would often do a ho'oponopono before trying other forms of healing (Gutmanis et al. 1976: 18-19).18 Healing those who are suffering is still important in ho'oponopono (Meyer 1995: 6). In the early 19th century, ho'oponopono described the way a ruler or land superintendent put things in order, and it was also used to describe the land steward's responsibility to the farmers on the land.

In the past, the process was part of the way Hawaiian families maintained good relationships with one another, with the land, and with the `aumakua, or family deities, and the way families eliminated grudges and hostility. When a person was possessed by a wicked spirit, or noho, the family would use exorcism to command the spirit to leave. "Then it was wise to get the `ohana (family clan) together for ho'oponopono to find and correct the wrongs or the bad behavior that allowed the spirit to take possession" (Pukui et al. 1972: 162). Thus, one purpose of ho'oponopono was to locate the disruption in the moral or supernatural order, which was causing someone sickness or misfortune. Pukui and her colleagues note that this set of ideas blends well with Christian ones, and that the spirit can be urged away by a Mormon elder, a Pentecostal minister, or a religious lay worker as well as by a Hawaiian haku (1972: 163).

Ho'oponopono persisted into the 20th century despite pressures to abandon Hawaiian cultural practices (Boggs & Chun 1990: 125).19 Sometimes it merged with Christian practices, such as the Mormon family circle or Pentecostal prophesies and healing: Prayers were offered to Jesus Christ instead of the `aumakua (Boggs & Chun 1990). Rebuking evil spirits took place with ho'oponopono (Boggs & Chun 1990: 124-25), as well as in New Hope and among the Catholic Charismatic healers that Csordas studied (1994). A Native Hawaiian woman born in 1916 remembered the process from her childhood as a way to deal with sickness. Another older woman used the process as a child, probably in the 1940s, when she fought with her cousin: The grandmothers made them apologize to each other and forgive each other. They wanted to be sure this squabble would not affect the relationship between the families.

The process was still widely used in the 1970s. Ito's field research among urban Hawaiians in the 1970s found three uses of the process: family therapy by social workers, healing within Christian churches, and family problem-solving in everyday life (1999: 116-45). The Christian version involved a visioner who had visions at the beginning of the session, a prophesier who interpreted these visions, and a rebuker who admonished the devil and other evil spirits lurking around (128; see also Ito 1985a, 1985b). The Christian version is clearly close to the Pentecostal ideas of Foursquare Christianity. A study in the late 1970s found that two-thirds of a cross section of Native Hawaiians had experienced ho'oponopono as children but that it was better known to older people than younger and to rural than urban (Ma & Palama 1980: 14). Another survey in 1976 of Hawaiian ancestry households reported that more than one-third engaged in practices called ho'oponopono (Boggs & Chun 1990: 122). Clearly, ho'oponopono persisted into the 1970s and 1980s among Native Hawaiians both in their everyday lives and in Christian churches.

The Development of Ho'oponopono in the 1980s and the 1990s

The major impetus behind the revival of ho'oponopono in the 1980s and 1990s was the work of a psychiatrist, a psychologist, several social workers, and Mary Kawena Pukui, as the Culture Committee of the Queen Lili'uokalani Children's Center (QLCC), a social service agency for Native Hawaiian children established by the Queen. This committee met weekly from 1963 until at least 1970 to discuss ways of building bridges between "Western" ideas of mental health and Hawaiian ones (Pukui et al. 1972).20 Although the project was an effort to reinterpret Hawaiian beliefs in psychological terms, it was also a way to validate Hawaiian beliefs rather than to dismiss them. Pukui described the kinds of illnesses and stresses faced by Native Hawaiians and the spiritual ways their victims thought about them, then the psychiatrist, Haertig, interpreted these events in terms of psychiatric theory. These two interpretive frames coexist uneasily in this book, as they do in the New Hope Church where demonic forces and emotional blocks sit side by side. For example, Pukui described noho as the belief in possession by a spirit, possibly that of a dead person, which the psychiatrist, Haertig, interpreted as the result of incomplete "grief work" and an instance of self-- hypnosis in which the victim retains the dead person in his/her unconscious. This identification becomes "visibly operative" as the possessed, or noho, person speaks in the voice of the dead person (Pukui et al. 1972: 159-64). According to Pukui, ho'oponopono was used to find the wrongs or bad behavior that allowed the spirit to take possession of a person. Family members then commanded the spirit to leave (162).

Ho'oponopono is increasingly being used in social service agencies that see the need for culturally sensitive services. In these settings, the leader is no longer a family member but an outsider, usually a social worker, and the process is part of a social service agency. QLCC has continued to use ho'oponopono for social work with Native Hawaiian families. Alu Like, a community-based Native Hawaiian organization, has federal job training and public health funds to provide ho'oponopono to Native Hawaiian adult and teen drug abusers, some of whom are in prison. The process is used both to diagnose problems, since it brings family members together and encourages truth-telling, and to help families deal with problems of drug-addicted members.21 There has been a substantial expansion in the number of people formally trained to do ho'oponopono by social service agencies. Workshops run by QLCC and Alu Like, among others, have taught as many as 160 people statewide. All those I spoke to traced their knowledge of the practice from Pukui's work, published in two volumes, Nana I Ke Kumu (Pukui et al. 1972, 1979).

During the 1980s and 1990s, there were also efforts to develop ho'oponopono as an alternative to the criminal justice system. In the 1980s, the Neighborhood Justice Center in Honolulu suggested ho'oponopono as an alternative to mediation (Shook 1985). However, it is different from mediation, which focuses more on compartmentalizing problems and less on a holistic approach (Meyer & Davis 1994). In 1994, the Native Hawaiian Bar Association (NHBA), concerned with the rising population of incarcerated Native Hawaiians, set up a program to divert some family court cases out of the judicial system (Meyer & Davis 1994: 5). Encouraged by an enthusiastic group of family court judges, the NHBA sponsored the training of a cadre of ho'oponopono practitioners for court and Neighborhood Justice Center referrals by experts taught originally by Pukui. This included attorneys, people from the Neighborhood Justice Center, and from the community. One radical group protesting prison construction in 2000 suggested ho'oponopono as an alternative to incarceration for Native Hawaiians.

Ho'oponopono is now being incorporated into a burgeoning global movement to promote forms of restorative justice, many of which are based on indigenous peoples' judicial mechanisms. For example, New Zealand developed the family group conference in response to complaints by Maori people that the legal system was alienating and did not respond to their values or kinship system and that children were being removed from homes too often (Hassall 1996: 22). It emphasizes the central role of community elders and was mandated for all juvenile offenders in New Zealand in 1989 (Hudson et al. 1996: 4, 13). The family group conference was adopted in parts of Australia in 1993 because of concern about the high rates of youth arrest and detention among Aboriginal peoples (Wundersitz & Hetzel 1996: 134-37) and has been tried in some parts of Canada, primarily for aboriginal communities (Longclaws et al. 1996: 195; see also McGillivray and Comaskey 1999).22 Although the family group conference was developed for juvenile cases, some in New Zealand have argued that its emphasis on restorative justice and the importance of the wider community could provide a more culturally appropriate mechanism in gender violence cases as well, eliciting the support of the wider community in shaming the offender and facilitating his reintegration into the community. This approach may provide better protection than the adversarial system (Carbonatto 1995: 13). The emphasis on healing and reconciliation within ho'oponopono conforms to the core features of restorative justice, as does its location within an indigo enous community. This idea converged with Braithwaite's emphasis on shaming and experiments with sentencing circles in aboriginal communities in Canada (see Roberts & LaPrairie 1996; Crnkovich 1996).

Thus, a process that began as a way of healing the illness of a family member acquired an overlay of psychiatric theory and social work practice in the 1970s and dispute resolution concepts in the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, the process was supported by the Hawaiian cultural renaissance of language and cultural practices.

Confronting Gender Violence Through Ho'oponopono

Ho'oponopono works by gathering the family together to pray and ask the help of the Akua, or Gods, to try to get to the heart of the problem and to move the discussion through recognizing the problem, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It is basically a family process, under the leadership of a family elder or leader. If a person refuses to repent or go along with the group's views, he will be evicted from the family. The leader, or haku, is now more often a person of respect and standing in the community who speaks for the wider good of the family and community. Haku are known by their genealogies and by their genealogies of training. Kwena Pukui is the ancestor of many of the leaders in the field and has trained many who have trained others, but there are other haku who are also widely regarded and have developed their own ways of doing the process. I spoke at length to nine haku as well as observing two ho'oponopono sessions and talking to many people in the judiciary, bar association, and domestic violence movement about the process and its institutionalization both in Hilo and Honolulu. Some of these conversations have continued over the past five years. I make no claims to expertise on this complex process and have only begun to understand it.

The process described by Mary Kawena Pukui follows a series of steps, named with Hawaiian terms (Pukui et al. 1972: 62). Although there is a lot of variation in practice, and some who use the process for non-Hawaiians translate the terms into English (see Shook 1985), this is the basic structure of the process. The following description builds on Pukui's initial description (1972: 60-70), elaborated by Lynette Paglinawan, who worked closely with Pukui (1972: 6-10) and Hui Malama Ola Na O`iwi, the Native Hawaiian Health Care System, which developed a schematic diagram in an effort to systematize and standardize the process. An opening prayer, pule wehe, creates an atmosphere of sincerity and earnestness and asks for help, wisdom, and understanding. Kukulu kumuhana is the statement of the problem. The discussion phase includes mahiki, unraveling the problem through successive layers, like peeling an onion, as each person talks about what has happened and how they felt about it. Problems are discussed one at a time, uncovering for each the hihia, the entanglement of emotions, reactions, and interactions that bind the injurer to the injured. Once the transgression, hala, has been identified, the process moves toward resolution. This consists of mihi-confession, repentance, and full and complete forgiveness-and kala, to release or to let go, to free each other completely. Kala is followed by `oki, to sever the knots and bury the pains. If restitution is necessary, it is arranged. In the past, members of the family were obligated to forgive when a member of the family sought forgiveness, for to withhold forgiveness would mean to suffer consequences from the `aumakua. Failure to forgive is ho`omauhala, holding a grudge. If people become angry or feel out of control, the haku will call a ho`omalu, a period of silence or reflection. The process ends with pani, closing rituals, and a prayer.

Abby Napeahi and Howard Pe'a, two experienced haku, have developed a conception of the mahiki process emphasizing self-- esteem for their work with drug abusers. They provided me with this description:

Be loving and cautious in the process of peeling the onion. The person should recognize how important he/she is and allow her to see the power or mana she has within herself. A person can only discover this as he or she tries it out. As a person tests himself, he finds out how important he is and then feels good about himself. This is what makes ho'oponopono awesome. It allows the person to see the good in him/herself and to focus on his/her power and accomplishments instead of feeling discouraged and focusing only on past failures. One way of saying this is: "Keep the good and throw away the bad. Get rid of the bag of stink-fish."

It is very important not to force anyone to make changes. The changes must be made voluntarily. Ho'oponopono only works when you "clean up your act," when a person is ready for it. The process of ho'oponopono is awesome. This is a very spiritual process. . . . Daily prayers are most important to the ho'oponopono process. It is only through the Akua that an individual can make changes. . . . We were born with all the Godly skills and knowledge to help us feel how important we are and to see all our improvements. We are destined to learn and reap all the blessings He has in store for us. This is our mission.

This process is similar to Pukui's, but focuses less on solving particular problems and more on making the person feel important and good about him/herself. It clearly relies on psychotherapeutic language. When a person feels good about himself, then he will apply his skills and there will be improvement. One of the authors emphasized that this is not a problem-solving process but one that helps build self-esteem so that a person can improve him/herself. It is about bringing out the person's own mana, giving a person courage to face and deal with his or her problems. These practitioners emphasize that this is a soft version of ho'oponopono used for drug abusers and that, in cases of violence, they adopt a more confrontational, harder approach.

I observed two sessions of ho'oponopono, both of which lasted about two hours. Each was run by the same haku, a powerful Native Hawaiian woman who is 80 years old. She worked with Pukui but has developed her own process and is now training others. She reminded the parties of their responsibilities, pointed out their choices, and emphasized their strengths and the positive things they had accomplished. The process was nonjudgmental and supportive. The leader had a remarkable ability to use body cues and general cultural knowledge and experience to make guesses about how the people in the process were feeling and thinking. She followed the same process with me, making insightful observations about how I was feeling. One session opened and closed with a prayer to Jesus Christ; the other, with two teenagers, did not. In a session with two grandparents caring for the children of their drug-addicted adult children, the haku had strong opinions about how people should behave but never criticized what these people did. Instead, she emphasized how families ought to act and praised those actions that followed that pattern.

This haku's philosophy is that everyone has the capacity to make choices and make changes. God has given every person wisdom, intelligence, knowledge, and compassion, and it is up to the person what he or she does with it. Childhood stresses, deprivations, and foster homes are certainly difficult, but regardless of how people grow up, they can make something of themselves. They are all children of God. The haku assists God rather than making changes happen