roy

Battered Women and the Criminal Justice System: Violence Is Violence or Is It? A woman is beaten by her husband hundreds of times. She divorces him and then testifies against him in court. He is sent to prison and vows to get even with her some day. A note is placed in his file that […]

Enabling Victims Who Feel Trapped to Escape From its start, the highest priority of the battered women’s movement has been to provide tangible aid at a time of great need. To offer immediate support to victims during a crisis, activists estab- lished shelters as places of refuge. In 1974, follow- ing the lead of feminists

Explaining Intimate Partner Violence: Why Does not She Just Leave Him? In criminology, an offender-oriented question would be, “Why does he beat her so viciously?” A victim-centered question that is often asked is, “If he is so brutal, then why does she put up with it and stay with him?” Until the 1970s, this compli-

Fatal Attractions: Slayings of Intimate Partners A married couple is walking down a suburban street when a man accosts them, shooting the 27-year-old wife to death and wounding the 26-year-old hus- band. He tells the police that three men shouting ethnic slurs were the killers. But the wife had recently texted her brother that she

Recognizing Warning Signs Besides seeking answers to the question of how many, victimologists also wonder, “What kinds of families are wracked by these problems?” At first there were only media images and personal revela- tions (true confessions), but this kind of anecdotal evidence might be very unrepresentative and mis- leading. Atypical cases make the news,

How Victims Suffer A 39-year-old nurse who is the mother of two boys is attacked by her estranged husband. He breaks into her house, beats her with a baseball bat, and then he squirts industrial strength lye on her from a plastic bottle. She is burned beyond recognition. What 290 CH APT ER 9 Copyright

Blaming Her for His Violent Outbursts The battered women’s self-help movement initially encountered resistance and opposition because of the widespread acceptance of victim-blaming argu- ments that portrayed beaten wives unsympathetically. Many people, including some counselors and family therapists, believed that a high proportion of beatings were unconsciously precipitated or even intentionally provoked. The wives who

VIOLENCE WITHIN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS AND FAMILIES Domestic violence affects every American. It harms our communities, weakens the foundation of our nation, and hurts those we love most. It is an affront to our basic decency and humanity, and it must end…we acknowledge the progress made in reducing these shameful crimes…and recognize that more work remains

Abuse of Adolescents by Parents The fact that even teenagers can be abused by their parents used to be overlooked entirely or subsumed under the heading “child abuse” and then neglected in favor of a focus on the very young and totally helpless. Attempts to define and measure abuse become confusing because of cultural ambivalence

PROACTIVE VERSUS REACTIVE STRATEGIES Strategies to prevent children from being abused take many forms. Proactive approaches attempt to prevent abuse from taking place. They range from screening potential child care workers to weed out known molesters, setting up help lines and crisis nurseries where parents can drop off their children if they feel they are