Motherhood of Battered Women: The Struggle for Repairing the Past

The purpose of this study was to describe and analyze battered women's subjective perceptions of their own motherhood. Although there is substantial knowledge about the negative effects of children witnessing their mothers' abuse by their fathers, there is little research available on the motherhood of battered women. Examining this issue in the clinical, ethical, and research domains is a complex process. Yet, increasing our understanding of battered women's own perspective is essential if we want to implement comprehensive and effective treatment. The present study is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 battered women. The finding show that battered women describe a basic mission in their life that structure the core meaning of their motherhood, namely, to repair the negative experiences of physical and emotional distress caused by their parents. Such repair is seen as compensating for the past and as building a positive and safe emotional reality for their children's future.     

Understanding Chinese Battered Women in North America

SUMMARY

Spouse abuse is an ignored, invisible, but significant problem in the Chinese community. This paper describes the experience of Chinese battered women in North America and provides suggestions for culturally sensitive and competent interventions for them. The discussion is based on an extensive review of the literature regarding Chinese battered women. In understanding the experience of Chinese battered women and their strategic responses to the abuse, helping professionals are urged to consider cultural, contextual, as well as individual factors including family dynamics. A three-tier model of intervention for treatment of spouse abuse in the Chinese community is proposed that targets the individual battered women, the family system, and the larger community.     

Rebirth of the Self: How Battered Women Experience Treatment

The study analyzes battered women's experiences of treatment processes and results. A qualitative methodology based on the phenomenological approach, including semi-structured deep interviews, was used in collecting and analyzing the data of 60 women who had undergone treatment in six different agencies. All the agencies were highly qualified in providing psychosocial intervention in cases involving domestic violence and were operated by the Israel Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. The findings reveal that the most significant experience for the women was being held and contained by the social worker, an action that allowed their recognition of self. Concerning outcomes, objective results such as taking action toward changing the violent relationship or leaving it were much less significant in the women's experience. Various aspects of the experience are described and analyzed, emphasizing the treatment process as a rebirth of the women. Implications for treatment based on this significant perspective are given.     

The Experience of Formerly Battered Women with Divorce

Abstract

The study measured the feelings about their parents' divorce reported by early adolescent children at the time of the divorce, three and ten years later, and retrospectively, at the ten-year mark. Sadness, shock and disbelief were the most common feelings at the time of the divorce, but relief, anger at one parent, gladness and a desire for parental reunion were also quite usual. Three years later, sadness, shock, disbelief and desire for parental re-union had declined sharply, and relief and gladness had increased. Ten years on, most feelings except gladness and relief were at a low level; but anger at one parent continued to be reported by more than one-fifth of the sample. Principal components analysis suggested the presence of two rather different groupings of feelings. The first described shock and upset, and had a relatively limited life span; the second centred on anger at one parent and relief and gladness at their departure, and these feelings continued into adulthood. At all three times, this latter group of feelings was associated with poorer relations with fathers. Stronger feelings about the divorce were not generally associated with poorer psychological adjustment, although at Time 3 bad feelings about the divorce were reflected in bad feelings about the self. The retrospective reports made at Time 3 substantially over-estimated the intensity of the negative emotions reported at the time of the divorce.     

"Victims" and "Survivors": Emerging Vocabularies of Motive for "Battered Women Who Stay"*

This paper reviews the literature providing reasons for why battered women "stay" in abusive relationships and examines the emergence of images of battered women as "survivors" in early and contemporary activists' discourses, drawing on ideas from social constructionist approaches to social problems, identity, and deviance to explore this phenomenon. Most of the early representations of battered women I analyze emphasize their emotionality and their victimization, while the more recent constructions of this collective identity discussed here emphasize their rationality and their agency. Both "victim" and "survivor" typifications provide accounts for why battered women stay in violent relationships, thus providing a vocabulary of motive for this oft-imputed "deviance." Constructing battered women as survivors, however, may also remediate some of the stigma that can attach to victimization more generally. After situating victim and survivor discourses and considering how the image of a survivor may meet normative expectations that a victim image perhaps violates, I briefly discuss some implications of these alternate collective identities.     

Confronting “Victim” Discourses: The Identity Work of Battered Women

In this article I explore how battered women both draw from and reject victim discourses in their processes of self‐construction and self‐representation. Data gathered from semistructured interviews with forty women who experienced violence from an intimate partner in a heterosexual relationship demonstrate that available “victim” discourses are both enabling and constraining. Four common representations of a victim emerged as most influential to women's identity work: as someone who suffers a harm she cannot control; as someone who deserves sympathy and/or requires some type of action be taken against the victimizer; as someone who is culpable for her experiences; and as someone who is powerless and weak. “Victim empowerment” and “survivor” discourses also played a role in how women understood and made sense of their experiences. In their attempts to construct identities for themselves, battered women become caught between notions of victimization, agency, and responsibility.     

The Poverty of Services for Battered Lesbians

This paper addresses the poverty of services available to lesbian victims of partner abuse, despite the need for such services. Drawing on data from a survey of 1,505 help providers (to which 566 responded), the paper focuses on the services that the help providers themselves claim to offer. The data reveal a serious disparity in help providers' rhetoric and offical policies and the reality of the services available. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving services to battered lesbians.     

Women Acting for Women

In the new country of Timor-Leste, women constituted in 2011 32 per cent of the parliament, a relatively high figure in the world and in the region. But to what extent has the presence of women in parliament contributed to progress towards gender equality? In this article we argue that the passage of a parliamentary resolution on gender-responsive budgeting in Timor-Leste was an act of substantive representation, and we draw on a range of data to examine what made it possible. We find that while ‘newness’, international norms, women's movement unity, women's machinery in government and parliament and networks linking them were important, it was the development of a cross-party parliamentary women's caucus that was crucial to success. The role of gender-focused parliamentary institutions in supporting critical actors has rarely been examined in the literature on substantive representation. This is in contrast to the rich literature on institutions such as women's policy agencies. Our study suggests that more focus on parliamentary institutions is needed to discover what enables women parliamentarians to become critical actors.     

Battered women and the myth of masochism

Domestic violence is a major health issue. Research on this problem is just in its infancy. It remains a problem because there has been widespread acceptance of violence in our culture as a means of solving and dealing with problems. Women have been the targets. Waites admonishes health professionals to stop using the concept of masochism as an explanation for abusive behavior. She asks instead for us to look at female motivation in terms of the actual choices that are available and the realistic consequences of these choices. Perhaps only then will health professionals become able to break the cycle of violence and intervene in a way that stops the woman from becoming another homicide statistic.     

Slaughter of the Innocents: A Study of the Battered Child Phenomenon

This study of child abuse, sometimes called the Battered Child Syndrome, recounts some of the secret history of the phenomenon, and proposes that the phenomenon be understood in terms of evolutionary history and the history of civilization.     

Slaughter of the Innocents: A Study of the Battered Child Phenomenon

This study of child abuse, sometimes called the Battered Child Syndrome, recounts some of the secret history of the phenomenon, and proposes that the phenomenon be understood in terms of evolutionary history and the history of civilization.     

Health Care for Older Women:

The issue of health care for older women as it relates to their financial resources and health care reimbursement is the focus of this paper. Federal regulations that affect older women and also the role of the medical establishment are examined. Suggestions are given for policy changes on the federal and local levels and for a redirection of the women's health movement. It is suggested that women tend to be seen as burdens to the health care system and face both age and sex discrimination from many health care providers. This is the disease that needs to be cured.     

Executive Orders for the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

Abstract

Debate surrounding the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives draws both fire and praise as the Bush Administration continues to promote the federal funding of partnerships among state and local government and faith-based service providers. President Bush has endorsed religious groups as valuable partners in delivering services that address social problems through a series of Executive Orders. The intent of this article is to further our understanding of the history related to these executive decisions, the different conceptualizations for defining and classifying faith-based organizations, the issues surrounding faith-based organizations, and the legislative effort to make the faith-based initiative a permanent statutory feature.