Why would it be taboo to mention that damage to the brain might play a part in behavior problems? That actually makes much more sense than the advert approach. Mental health should be funded. Why is it getting defunded when mental health problems are rising?
Because some people build there whole career around one specific thing, and then when evidence comes along challenging the centrality of their ideas, they become hostile to it. It's not just in this field.
This is a pretty good article outlining the different perspectives:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/01/seeking-cure-domestic-violence/604168/Clipping a little out, and this can't do justice to the topic, so read the article:
At the time, little was known about the causes of domestic violence. Many psychologists viewed abuse as the side effect of some other difficulty—alcoholism, an inability to handle stress or anger, poor communication skills.
^ So this was the prevailing belief about DV
Like many contemporary feminists, Pence saw the phenomenon differently. Abuse, in her view, wasn’t an individual problem, but a social one. For millennia, men had been taught that it was their right to control women, by force if necessary. Domestic violence was the means by which a man exercised this power on an interpersonal level. Far from a dysfunction, it was a rational tactic—a tool for patriarchy.
^ In this bit, you see why I said the paper MetalSlimeHunt linked was "anti-feminist". The academic feminist view is that the DV is a rational tool of control, so when the paper on football-related violence said that it was an "irrational" loss of control, they were actually directly challenging this narrative, even if they did so in nicely-couched professional language.
The Duluth curriculum’s innovation, of attacking the societal roots of abuse, met with approval from activists and victims’ advocates. Lawmakers found in the groups a convenient means of dealing with the new wave of domestic-violence arrests. Over the next three decades, the curriculum spread rapidly, until programs advancing the theory that domestic violence was underpinned by sexism had been established in every state in the country. Over time, the “Duluth model” would come to refer to those specific gatherings, and their pedagogical focus on dismantling patriarchal norms, rather than to its original plan for coordinated community action.
^ So, here you see that it became the dominant narrative.
But as their popularity grew, Duluth’s men’s groups faced a backlash. As researchers began conducting more studies, they found that the early psychologists who had ascribed domestic violence to individuals’ underlying problems, such as addiction and trauma, were, to an extent, correct. Studies showed that the Duluth approach, with its broad social message, had little effect on whether men actually re-offended. It was also criticized as ill-suited for addressing assaults committed by women and within same-sex partnerships.
So, like anything that's just too darn convenient, it all fell apart. And like any model under fire, they fired back, generally a scatter-shot attack at other academics for doing research that contradicted the Duluth Model of domestic violence. Note also that they get US state funding since courts mandate them to treat offenders, so they're making $$$$ in this. It's not just ideological, the Duluth Model is an industry.
Most of the men in the room, it became clear, had issues with substances, generally alcohol or opioids. Facilitators generally like to give the men free rein on what topics they explore—Miller told me exit interviews showed that participants learn most from hearing each other’s experiences—but are quick to question men who cite addiction as a reason for their violence. For a facilitator, allowing the men to avoid accountability by placing the blame on substances would be a form of collusion.
Trying to shift topics, Rouse asked the class to consider how their abuse had affected their families...
^ Imagine if this was an actual therapist, but if you ever steered the conversation towards your personal problems, he went "woah there, let's put the emphasis back onto what a fuck-up you are ..."
In fact, it's in the manual they give you when running these things, that if the perp states drug or alcohol abuse, or having suffered violence themselves, as a factor in their own violent behavior, you're meant to challenge that, or your "colluding" with the perp, and you're supposed to instead point them at a feminist textbook and shoehorn their "privileged" behavior into that, until you've got them rabbiting the stock phrases. THIS is why and how they're hostile to researchers looking into drug, alcohol and other factors.
The points against it are:
1) It doesn't work. Offenders going through the program are no less likely to re-offend than people who didn't get sent to a program
2) Ideologically inflexible. It's an "i've got a hammer so every problem is a nail" type of belief.
3) financial vested interests in keeping rival research out.
4) fails any test of universality. The Duluth Model (which is basically the standard model of domestic violence now) can't conceptually deal with women who are themselves abusers. It can
somewhat deal with male victims of male abuse, but the kicker is that
it entirely fails female victims of female abuse. In the Duluth Model, such women can't exist so you get horror stories of lesbians who have suffered partner abuse unable to access help services, since the system goes "does not compute!"