NCJ Number
205972
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 10 Issue: 5 Dated: May 2004 Pages: 514-533
Editor(s)
Claire M. Renzetti
Date Published
May 2004
Length
20 pages
Annotation
Through interviews with battered women, this study examined the issue of battered women’s safety planning strategies, increasing the understanding of battered women’s responses to the violence against them.
Abstract
Intimate partner violence is and continues to be a serious and pervasive social problem with millions of women falling victim to intimate partners and ex-partners. However, women will engage in a multitude of strategies to protect themselves and their children, such as leaving the relationship or turning to informal and formal sources of support. Nonprofit domestic violence victim service programs discuss a variety of safety planning strategies with battered women to help each woman protect herself and her children from the risk of future abuse. This study involved asking survivors of intimate partner violence about the myriad strategies that they had ever employed to reduce the risk of abuse recurring. In addition, women were asked about the consequences of their actions; whether the tactics used resulted in the abuse increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same. The study recruited 160 research participants from multiple sources within a mid-sized urban city. As hypothesized, women used a variety of strategies to try to protect themselves and their children from intimate partner violence. There were 28 possible strategies with women reporting the use of, on average 16.19. The most common tactics used by women included: trying to talk to the assailant about his violence; contacting the police; avoiding him; and trying to end the relationship. Eighty-three percent of the women reported fighting back physically, and almost half or 43 percent either used or threatened to use a weapon to protect themselves. The findings demonstrate that women engage in numerous and diverse risk-reduction and safety-planning strategies to keep themselves and their children safe and that women’s actions depend on several contextual factors, including the severity of the violence and their relationship with the assailant. In addition, it documents what domestic violence advocates and survivors have known, that there is no simple answer or best strategy to respond to intimate partner violence. The same strategy has different consequences for different women. References