
Genesis The Podcast
Genesis the Podcast is a new way to connect with Genesis Women’s Shelter and Support and expand your thinking about domestic violence and related issues that affect women. GTP is also a trusted source of information if you are in an abusive relationship and need safety, shelter or support. Listen every week for fresh content related to domestic violence, to connect with world-renown professionals, participate in exclusive events and training opportunities, and take action against domestic violence.
Genesis The Podcast is hosted by Maria MacMullin, Chief Impact Officer of Genesis Women's Shelter & Support and the Host of the Podcast on Crimes Against Women.
About Genesis Women's Shelter & Support - Located in Dallas, Texas, Genesis provides safety, shelter and support for women who have experienced domestic violence, and raises awareness regarding its cause, prevalence and impact. Learn more at GenesisShelter.org
Genesis The Podcast
Unmasking the Predator's Playbook
What makes someone capable of killing the person they claim to love? Dr. David Adams has spent over four decades searching for answers by interviewing both survivors and perpetrators of intimate partner violence.
As co-founder of Emerge, the world's first counseling program for men who abuse women, Adams takes us behind the facade of abusive relationships to expose the calculated tactics abusers use to trap their victims. The patterns he's uncovered are chilling: 75% of men who eventually murdered their partners began with first-date sex, and the average courtship before moving in together was just three months. These aren't coincidences but deliberate strategies of control.
Adams walks us through the four phases of abusive relationships—from the deceptive "honeymoon phase" of excessive attention and romance through escalating control, normalized violence, and ultimately deadly threats. Perhaps most disturbing is his revelation that many killers found "comfort" in knowing murder was an option if their partner tried to leave.
Drawing from both professional expertise and personal tragedy (Adams lost his mother to domestic violence at age 17), this conversation offers rare insight into the minds of abusers while providing practical knowledge that could save lives. Whether you work in law enforcement, victim services, or simply want to understand the warning signs of dangerous relationships, this episode provides crucial information about how to recognize entrapment strategies before they turn deadly.
Earlier this year, we met with presenters at the 2025 Conference on Crimes Against Women in Dallas, texas. In this episode, my guest, david Adams, joins the show to discuss the grooming tactics of intimate partner abusers. I'm Maria McMullin and this is Genesis, the podcast. David Adams is co-founder as well as director of research and development at Emerge, the first counseling program in the world for men who abuse women. Dr Adams has led groups for abusers for over 44 years and parenting education groups for 20 years. He is an international expert on abusers and abuser interventions and has conducted trainings of social service and criminal justice professionals in over 48 states and 26 nations. Dr Adams has published numerous articles and book chapters on domestic violence. His book why Do they Kill Men who Murder their Intimate Partners was published in 2007. He is also co-chair of the Criminal Justice Committee of the Massachusetts Council on Domestic Violence and also served as director of the National Danger Assessment Training Project. Additionally, mr Adams is a frequent expert witness on court cases involving allegations of domestic violence. David, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Good to be with you, and especially good to be with you at the 2025 Conference on Crimes Against Women in Dallas, texas. We're going to talk about the information you presented in your session this week at the conference. You co-founded a company called Emerge in 1977, and that is the time when the battered women's movement was really gearing up in the United States. Tell us about Emerge, your programs and why you founded this program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, and so Emerge was the first program in the nation for abusers, and the people that founded Emerge were 10 men. What we had in common was that we were friends of women who had started the first domestic violence programs in the Boston area, and so they had been getting calls on their hotlines from men and asking for help, and the women didn't really feel it was their mission to help the abusers, and so they asked us, as a group of men that they knew and more or less trusted, whether we'd be interested in taking this on, and so we did, and really very little was written about domestic violence back then, and so the best way to learn was to talk to victims of domestic violence, and so we just started inviting victims, and we didn't have an office, we were just meeting in our homes at that point, so we invited women to come and tell their stories.
Speaker 2:And one of the women who was a professional woman. She had convinced her estranged husband to send her an audio tape. She had convinced her estranged husband to send her an audio tape, and we sat around one night listening to this 90-minute audio tape in which he was kind of like apologizing to her and I think he kind of wanted to get back in the relationship. But it was interesting because his apologies were sort of followed or accompanied by excuses, even like kind of romanticizations of what he had done. And so it was kind of eye-opening for us to see, because we were kind of naive, we thought we were just explaining to the men that what they were doing was wrong, and instead we kind of realized that there's a lot of denial, a lot of immunization. That was really our starting point was to sort of figure out an approach, developing groups for abusers.
Speaker 1:I found it really interesting that you said men were calling abuse hotlines asking for help because they were abusers.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, I mean, some of them were asking if they could be in contact with their partners, desperate to get back in their relationship, and so they were just sort of grasping at straws. Some of them Well, I mean, you know, some of the victims may have been asking them to get help.
Speaker 1:That's a good point. So what are the programs that you offer at Emerge?
Speaker 2:Primary thing is still the groups for abusers. We have a 40-week program for abusers in different languages. I started a parenting program called the Responsible Fatherhood Program in 2002, which was basically offered to the men who were already attending Emerge to be in a separate parenting group so that we could kind of increase their awareness about their children and how their children are impacted and hopefully give them an additional motivation to want to become not just better partners but better parents to set a more positive example for their kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. We're here to talk more about what leads up to the point where you need a better intervention program, right? And so let's talk a little bit about all the things that lead to men coming to one of these programs that emerge grooming tactics. Help us understand what that means and some examples of grooming.
Speaker 2:So, as a part of our program, we engage the men in an exercise called a relationship history, and essentially it's 17 questions that we ask them about each intimate relationship they've had. And how did you meet is one of those questions, which is an interesting question. What were you attracted to in your partner? How did the relationship begin? When did you first start having sex? Or her biggest complaints about you. And so, in effect, we end up with kind of a trove of really interesting information about abusers and the tactics that they have used in their relationships.
Speaker 2:You know, for instance, one of the things I talked about in my presentation yesterday was rescuing, the whole notion of rescuing. It seems to be a common scenario, where one example would be meeting her on the street, helping her to start her car. Another example would be somebody who is homeless, or she's been kicked out of her parents' home because she's a pregnant teen, and he's offering her to live with him. You know, one of the killers I interviewed for my book, because my topic was about not just people who participate in our program, but also men who end up killing their partners, and so one of the killers that I interviewed for my book had met her on a bus. She was a teenager who he struck up a conversation with her, you know, sitting next to her on the bus, with her, you know, sitting next to her on the bus, and she revealed that her parents had kicked her out of the home because she was pregnant and he offered for her to move in with him, which she did two days later and she was dead within 18 months. And so the significance, I think, of the kind of the whole notion of rescuing is it sets up this dynamic where they feel somehow that she's beholding to them. It's largely a figment of their imagination. By the way, from the victim's perspective, she's not being rescued. She may think she's rescuing him. You know, in some cases it's sort of like a situation where both people have come from a bad upbringing and kind of bonded with each other around that common experience and I think there's this sort of sense of almost being soulmates, you know, and understanding each other.
Speaker 2:You know the first date sex I talk about first date sex as one of the themes which you know is kind of a bad way to begin a relationship, because I think it kind of confuses sex with intimacy. I think it short changes the whole process of establishing boundaries. For instance, I think that the boundaries of having private time when you're dating somebody, the boundary of having your own friends, the boundary of having privacy, of having secrets all of those things kind of get violated. I think when you jumpstart a relationship by having sex and from a victim's perspective, at the beginning it may seem romantic what we call love bombing. You know that abusers engage in, but what I learned from talking to victims of attempted homicide was that quite often there's kind of a turning point with the beginning of sex and many of the victims would say that before we had sex he was so sweet, he was so thoughtful, you know, he was so romantic. And then as soon as we started having sex, it's like he owned me. He started having all of these jealous thoughts and accusations.
Speaker 2:One of the things I talk about in my presentation is kind of like key turning points in the relationship between a victim and her abuser, from the so-called honeymoon stage Now, with killers, batterers in general are more likely than non-batterers to have first-date sex. The research that I've seen is that 35% of the general public begins a relationship with first or second date sex. What I've seen with abusers participating in our program is about 46%, and so there's a significant difference. That begin their relationships with first date sex. Now, when I look at killers, specifically those who go on to kill their partners, it is 75%.
Speaker 1:Wow, it jumps that much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then the other thing that's unique about the killers is short courtships. The average courtship for a man who kills his partner is just under three months, and when I say courtship I mean from the time he meets her to the time he starts living with her. The average is three months, and so that kind of speeded up process for the abuser. Part of it is that he doesn't want to give her the time to learn about his past. And there's plenty to learn.
Speaker 1:Kind of like trapping someone.
Speaker 2:Yes, my presentation is called Grooming and Entrapment Strategies.
Speaker 2:Oh, there you go, and so courtship, I think, serves the purpose of really entrapping her, and by the time that she gets to learn about that, about his past domestic violence, it's too late. Now I'm working on a second book about intimate partner homicide, and we are interviewing survivors of attempted homicide as well as family members of murder victims, and so one of the interviews I did just recently the victim met him online, which is a common thing now. They had their first meetup at a bar. She revealed to him that she was going on vacation Caribbean Island the next week, and he invited himself.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so her thought process was well, I've always been just a super buttoned down kind of person. I've always been so a super buttoned down kind of person. I've always been so cautious and so responsible. And she felt, well, this is an opportunity for me to do something different, you know, to be a little bit more adventurous, you know.
Speaker 2:And so the following week they're on vacation, they're at a high-rise hotel, he's out on the balcony having a long conversation with his kids. Which have you brushed your teeth? You know, have you brushed your teeth? Have you put your jammies on? And so she was impressed by that that he seemed to be kind of so involved with his children. She knew he was separated from the mother, but she didn't know the reasons. And then she heard him have a subsequent conversation with his boss, 45-minute conversations. There was something off about him. She asked a police officer friend to look into him, and so what the officer revealed to her was that he had no contact with his children. There was a restraining order. He had not had any contact with the kids was a fabricated conversation. He also had not been employed at this company, this high-tech company, for a year.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:And so that was helpful for her because she began the process of trying to extricate herself from that relationship. It took seven months, and so she knew he was kind of dangerous at that point and so she was trying to let him down, gradually, kind of reduce her amount of contact with him. But eventually she was able to do that to end the relationship, and then, I think a year later, he ended up killing his next partner, and so she dodged a bullet, you know. And so part of what I'm wanting to do in this second book is interviewing survivors and parents and sisters and brothers of those who were killed to understand what were the early warning signs, what are things that in retrospect that you wish you had done as a parent or as a sister.
Speaker 2:One of the sisters I interviewed, she said that she just hated her sister's boyfriend right from the beginning, and she was a younger sister, she was 17 when her sister was 28 and began this relationship, and so she let him have it. He was exploitive, he was just unemployed, he was just everything she hated and she just would blast him. But one of the unintended consequences of that, her sister began to curtail her relationship with her family because she knew that they were just so against him and she became more isolated over time leading up to her death, and so the sister wishes that she had been more, understanding, more. I think the way she put it was more of a refuge, a source of support, rather than sort of placing her sister in this situation where she felt like she was pressuring her to end the relationship. And I think, as a teenager I mean, she was doing something that would be very natural for a teenager, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course, to voice their opinions, but it can certainly backfire if you're in love with someone or you're having a relationship with someone and I come in and say, well, he's no good for you and tell him how I feel about him. It could endear you further to that person.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. You all know, a Genesis is the whole notion of keeping the door open with the victim and not being judgmental.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that's not something that friends and family necessarily understand.
Speaker 1:For sure. I want to ask you about something you call the four phases of a relationship and how these are relevant to abuse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so this is specific to the relationship with men who kill their partners and their victims.
Speaker 2:And so I think I already mentioned really the first phase, which is the honeymoon phase, the short courtship which really kind of could range from two days to six months, having that kind of like honeymoon, lots of sex, not just first date sex.
Speaker 2:But many of the killers and many of the victims of attempted homicide said that he would want sex a lot, basically way more than what would be average five or six or seven or eight times a day, you know, which I came to sort of understand as being an entrapment strategy, keeping her in this sense of false intimacy, you know. I mean at first victims were welcoming of this. Then, kind of the second turning point was really the beginning of violence in the relationship. So the first incident of violence which most victims at that point saw as being an anomaly and they were constantly wanting to get back to what they thought he was like in the honeymoon stage right, thoughtful, sweet person, right. Many of them sort of came to feel responsible for giving him a family. Some of the victims articulated is that I felt like he was just, he had had such a terrible upbringing, if I give him stability, if I could give him a home, forgive him love, he would sort of feel less insecure, less jealous.
Speaker 1:She can fix him yeah.
Speaker 2:Third phase is really kind of the continuation of the violence, and so it becomes normalized and victims are now, for the first time, thinking about ending the relationship, questioning whether they should remain in a relationship. The other thing that's different during the third phase is that there's no longer apologies. There's now more typically ignoring what happened. He's just been abusive. He's saying what's the? Matter. Are you upset about something you know? Kind of crazy making that then in fourth phase transforms into blaming her for what happened by the way, you know, anyway, in the third phase he's kind of ignoring, he's engaging in more violent sex.
Speaker 2:At this point he's not really recognizing any limits that she's putting on it. Many of the victims said he seemed to sort of be turned on by rough sex, hurtful sex. There were threats, threats of violence, threats of death, and so then by the fourth phase there's kind of a dynamic where she's beginning to really be very unhappy, angry, she's sometimes talking about leaving, which then for him becomes more reason to surveil her, more reason to monitor her. There's trial, separations. During those separations he steps up his monitoring. Some of them actually quit their jobs they were fired from their jobs in order to have more time to surveil her and so it's sort of like this terrible situation for the victim, where she knows that her life is at risk and the threats become more graphic at that point.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:More explicit to sometimes. Now he's threatening to kill her family. She's in kind of a no-win situation. The most dangerous point for any victim is when she's trying to end an abusive relationship. And yet to stay is dangerous as well, and so some victims have actually walked away at this point and have ended the relationship. I mean so.
Speaker 2:For the killer, there seemed to be two motives. One was to try to prevent her from leaving or to get her back through stepped-up threats and such. The other motivation was to punish her for ending the relationship to basically, if I can't have her, nobody else can, mentality. One of the killers said to me the idea that I could kill her was just a comforting thought that I had. I didn't think I would need to kill her because I didn't think she'd ever leave me, but I was comforted by that thought that that was an option. And so that was something that had formulated in his mind for a couple of years, that he had that option of killing her, and I think she probably knew that that was something on his mind. And what I also found was that frequency of threats is meaningful. I think that for the killer it's a way of psyching himself up, you know to normalize the idea he could do that.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of what you're telling me is leaving me somewhat speechless. Abusive men, or even those who have committed murder of their intimate partner, would explain to you that they're comforted by the idea that her death was an option.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've come to think of it as premeditation, but not pre-contemplation.
Speaker 1:What's the difference?
Speaker 2:So he's planned, he's made plans, he's purchased a firearm or he's made some plans.
Speaker 1:That's premeditation.
Speaker 2:He doesn't have any kind of plan for what he's going to do after that.
Speaker 2:He hasn't thought through what his life is going to be like. But many of them basically said I was so worked up, I was so upset I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat for weeks leading up to it. I was so worked up, I was so upset I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat for weeks leading up to it. I didn't think through. Interestingly, none of the killers had been in a batterers intervention program it was probably the most commonly cited deterrent that I kind of gave them a list of things that might have deterred them. We do that.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think the majority of abusers are redirectable. I think that some of them have not had the information that we provide, which is how to be empathetic to a partner, how to listen to a partner's concerns, how to respond in a sensitive manner to things that are happening, you know, in the relationship and to learn from them. And that's what we see in our program. For the most part, we see people that have started out on a bad path and really don't know how to maintain a relationship, and so, for the most part, they're very receptive to the information. Jealousy is not a good way of responding. That's your insecurity.
Speaker 1:So when you say they're redirectable, are you referring to those who have attempted to murder or who have murdered their partner?
Speaker 2:I think that it's less likely. I think that killers, what sort of separates themselves from not killers is that they're more extreme in their attitudes and their thoughts, in their thoughts Some of them would sort of fit an antisocial personality profile, which empathy is not something that people with that profile are capable of some of them Right.
Speaker 2:But even we have had some killers in our program, people that serve their time for having killing, and even in some of those cases I think they are able to learn from their mistakes. I think that our parenting program is very useful because I think that most abusers minimize how their children have been impacted by their abuse of their mother. I grew up in a violent home. My father was violent toward my mother. My mother died when I was 17 of domestic violence. My father was very critical of my mother. He would say violence. My father was very critical of my mother. He would say see how you make me feel, you know, and he'd say that to us kids as well. And I remember thinking, wow, dad wants me to be responsible for his feelings. You know, even when I was six I remember thinking that. But then also I think that I kind of copied some of my father's attitudes towards my mother. I think as a teenager I felt that my mother was an idiot only because that was what my father's attitude was towards her.
Speaker 2:You know, kind of like Archie Bunker, and I feel very guilty now, of course. I mean, I didn't get to outgrow that because you know she died when I was 17. You know, now I recognize she was much smarter than my father was, you know, and she was just everything. He was not, you know, she was just a giving, loving parent. But I think it's kids will sometimes take sides.
Speaker 1:It's going to affect children. All experts will agree that children are impacted by domestic violence, even if they are not abused themselves and I'm sorry for what happened to your mom and I appreciate you sharing that with us, kind of that understanding of where you actually entered into this work and why it's so important to you. I want to go back to a couple of things you said and try to understand the correlation between sexual violence and femicide. What is that about?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that sexual violence more than anything denotes ownership for many abusers in general, and more so for those who are serious abusers. They objectify women. They think of women as sex objects and they have this sort of bifurcated attitudes towards women. There's women who are bad women, sluts, and then there's the women that you marry. But even when they marry somebody who they consider to be a good woman, that attitude still that women are not to be trusted.
Speaker 2:Part of what batterers do is they kind of project their own characteristics onto their partners. They think she's disloyal because I'm disloyal, she's not to be trusted, and they blame their feelings. Their expectation of women is that the women should be their emotional caretakers, and along with that goes the notion that she's responsible for my feelings. If I'm feeling bad about myself, she's responsible for that. So part of what we're trying to do in our program is, now that you're no longer in a relationship, if you're separated, there's an opportunity for the first time in your life to learn how to manage your own feelings, to learn how to manage your own boredom, to learn how to manage your own anger.
Speaker 1:Take responsibility for who you are as a person.
Speaker 2:That's right. That actually is a very good approach, because I think that at some level many abusers recognize that that has been a problem for them, that they have over-reliable on women to be their emotional caretakers and, as a result, have never learned to manage their own feelings, and it makes them a bad parent too. And so I think it's a good selling point, so to speak, for change. But I do think that sexual violence back to your original question I think is kind of like an aspect of that way that men exploit female partners, you know, and think of them primarily in sexual terms or don't really develop a relationship with a real person. One of the things we do in our program is we require them to use their partner's name Simple little thing, I mean. So rather than saying my wife or my girlfriend, what is her name, please and people in the program have said that really began to make me think of her as a real person by using her name. She's a real person.
Speaker 1:She is a real person, oh my gosh. So I'm curious about how much value we can place on the feedback from these abusive men, especially when they have been court ordered to participate in this type of a program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my program Emerge, proud of the fact that 35% of our clients are voluntary.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so many of them are what we'd call partner mandated, so they're men whose partners have asked them to come to Emer emerge.
Speaker 2:But I do think it helps to sort of show that you don't have to wait to be arrested to take responsibility for the problem. I think at the beginning what you see, particularly those who are court mandated, is somebody who's kind of externally motivated. So they're kind of like angry, resentful. They have these notions that women are always believed and I think that what we see reassuringly is that eight or 10 weeks, 12 weeks into the program, they begin to recognize how much they're gaining from the program. They thought it was their partner that was causing all the problems. They are beginning to be self-reflective, they're beginning to recognize.
Speaker 2:One of the exercises we do that's interesting is this it's kind of a brainstorm of how does domestic violence affect partners. Starts out with a list of things like distrust, avoidance of you, ambivalence about the relationship, doubts about the relationship, depression, blaming herself, being unhappy and, interestingly, many abusers. They'll say things like you know. See, that's exactly what I'm dealing with. She's unhappy all the time. They don't connect it to their abusive behavior. They're thinking of it as a burden. You know I'm with somebody who's never happy.
Speaker 1:Because how could it be them? They typically won't take blame.
Speaker 2:Right, and so what we're doing is we're normalizing the victim's behavior. We're saying the very things you're complaining about an unhappy partner, a partner who avoids you, is distrustful of you, is of your own doing, you are creating the very things that you complain about, and so that is actually the pathway to empathy. Just like kids need to be more clear about how their behavior acting out, how that hurts them basically so through consequences and limits that we set with our kids, then I think there's a possibility of thinking about how their behavior impacts other people. It's really the same process that we're using with abusers is that we're making them more clear about how their behavior actually always takes them away from the things that they say that they want. They want somebody who appreciates them. How could she appreciate you when you never appreciate her right?
Speaker 1:Or you don't do anything worth appreciating.
Speaker 2:That's right, and so then we begin a process where they kind of give each other feedback. You know, it's always easier to spot somebody else's problems than your own.
Speaker 2:It's easier to smell somebody else's bad breath, as we say, and so they actually are quite good at giving each other feedback. So here's an example. So one of the men he said that he had had his first contact with his wife for two years, so they were now in divorce court and so they were in court together, and so the way he described it during his weekly check-in was that he just was in the courthouse and he wandered down a corridor and he encountered her around the corner. She freaked out, was just terrified seeing him. But the way he presented it to the group is she actually filed a violation of restraining order. This is just what a vindictive bitch she is.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:So then we opened it up to the other men in the group, and so one of the men said you know what? I think she's really still afraid of you. There's no reason for her not to be afraid of you. One of them reminded him that the last contact he had had with her was a barricade situation where he was holding her and a kid hostage, and it took four police departments to respond. Wow, so literally that was her last contact.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she might be afraid of him, yeah.
Speaker 2:So one of the men said you know what? I bet she couldn't sleep for two months leading up to court.
Speaker 1:And so those are really good comments. This is a group of people who have been accused of being abusive. Oh, yeah, and they're able to call each other out on stuff.
Speaker 2:Like I said, it's easier to spot somebody else's lack of empathy than your own. But over time you're hearing other people's stories and you're hearing, and you're seeing it over and over again, that lack of empathy and how damaging that is, and so it begins to have an impact. I mean to recognize this has been the missing element for you Lack of respect, lack of empathy. None of your relationships are going to work if you continue to go down the same path, if you continue to think of yourself as a victim.
Speaker 1:In your opinion and based on your professional experience, how many if you could put a number percentage to it of the clients that you've worked with actually are able to get on the other side of this, are actually able to pursue a healthy relationship? Is there any way of knowing that Well?
Speaker 2:I mean we did an outcome study. Our probation department looked at what happens with our clients two years post-program and they looked at their arrest records and restraining orders and such, and the finding was that 11.6% of the completers had been rearrested within two years or had a restraining order.
Speaker 1:On a domestic violence charge.
Speaker 2:Domestic violence yeah, 20% overall and 30% for the program dropouts had had, so the completers were three times less likely to have reoffended. That doesn't tell the whole story because there's also domestic violence that's not leading to arrest, right. And so we do maintain contact with the victims throughout the program. Our program is really quite well known for that is, the extensive contact we have with the victims. We have a pretty good read of what's happening through the victims and hearing what's happening. Our letters are very meaningful, our reports we write a monthly report even for voluntary clients so that, for instance, like 12 weeks of the program if she's still blaming it on her that is going to go into her report.
Speaker 2:She's going to get a copy of that letter and that's helpful because she wants to know is he making use of this program? And so there's a type of accountability built into that. I think that some batterer programs do not do partner contact at all or have very limited contact with partners and as a result they're operating in the dark. They have no idea what's really happening. Somebody could be a good group participant but doesn't mean they're not continuing to be abusive. I think it's a real difference maker among programs those programs that have extensive contact, outreach to the victims, that informs their approach that we're using. We're able to keep pushing them to a higher level, because I think those programs that don't do that, I think in a way they're kind of reinforcing this sort of quick fix, this sort of superficial change, not really addressing what's really happening in the relationship. So that's something we train on. We train, do a lot of training of other programs and so we always promote that practice of having extensive outreach with the victims.
Speaker 1:You wrote a book called why Do they Kill?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Published about 20 years ago and you're working on a new one. What is the new book about?
Speaker 2:So the first book was based on interviews I did with 31 killers incarcerated killers in Massachusetts and 20 victims of attempted homicide. This one will be more focused on victims. I'm looking at intimate partner homicides in three states Massachusetts, which has the lowest rate of intimate partner homicide in the country, tennessee, which has one of the highest rates, and Colorado, which is kind of in the middle. And so what I want to look at is what are the factors that seem to result in high and low rates? One thing that we already know about is gun ownership rates. I mean so Massachusetts, we have 14% gun ownership rate.
Speaker 2:In Tennessee it's 60%. I'm also looking at women's rights within the three states domestic violence services. But I'm not comparing the states so much as I'm looking at what is each state doing to achieve reductions. Even in states like Tennessee has a very good high fatality review team in Nashville, so one county basically Davidson County and Colorado has an excellent high-risk team and fatality review statewide. They make recommendations every year. They actually follow up and report on their progress towards the recommendations they've made in previous years. And then I'm doing the interviews of the victims family members, mothers who lost a child to domestic violence too, by the way to illustrate those points, to sort of show what it looks like on the individual level in those cases.
Speaker 1:Very interesting work. Hopefully we can meet again and learn more about the outcomes of that work. David Adams, thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Genesis Women's Shelter and Support exists to give women in abusive situations a way out. We are committed to our mission of providing safety, shelter and support for women and children who have experienced domestic violence, and to raise awareness regarding its cause, prevalence and impact. Join us in creating a societal shift on how people think about domestic violence. You can learn more at GenesisShelterorg and when you follow us on social media on Facebook and Instagram at Genesis Women's Shelter, and on X at Genesis Shelter. The Genesis Helpline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by call or text at 214-946-HELP 214-946-4357.