Listening to Battered Women: A Survivor-Centered Approach to Advocacy, Mental Health, and Justice


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Well-researched book tackles topic of domestic violence
(August/September 2008 Issue)

“Listening to Battered Women:
A Survivor-Centered Approach to Advocacy, Mental Health, and Justice”
By Lisa A. Goodman, Ph.D. &
Deborah Epstein, J.D.
American Psychological Association
Washington, D.C., 2008

By Paul Efthim, Ph.D.

Readers of a certain age will recall magazine ads picturing a woman with a black eye proclaiming defiantly, "Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!"

Nowadays such imagery would be seen as appallingly tone-deaf to the plight of battered women, but when the ads ran during the 1960s, the only controversy was the use of bad grammar in the slogan! Domestic violence was not on America's radar screen.

Fortunately, the 1970s brought feminism and the battered women's movement. Today, victims of intimate partner violence have access to highly professional advocacy and shelter programs, have benefited from widespread reforms in the justice system and can receive much more sophisticated psychological treatment as compared to 30 years ago.

In spite of these impressive reforms, it is not clear that domestic violence has been meaningfully reduced over the past three decades, according to a new book by psychologist Lisa Goodman, Ph.D. of Boston College and law professor Deborah Epstein of Georgetown University.

Why have reforms not had a greater impact? In "Listening to Battered Women," Goodman and Epstein survey progress across three different domains: the advocacy community, the mental health system and the judicial system. Sadly, it appears that many important reforms have had unintended negative consequences.

For example, as grassroots advocacy organizations such as shelters and hotlines expanded over the years, they needed financial support from private and governmental sources. These funders, in turn, have pressed domestic violence programs to demonstrate their effectiveness through outcome measures. This factor had led to standardization of services, a one-size-fits-all approach, that prevents advocacy groups from offering certain types of help and interventions that would be more meaningful to women who don't fit the mold. As a result, a diverse array of women who could benefit from an individualized approach to help are not able to get it - thereby reducing the impact of advocacy programs in the process.

Moreover, as professional services - psychotherapy, legal services - have become the core offering of organizations combating domestic violence, the role of political activism has been pushed to the periphery. This trend tends to focus attention toward individual variables and away from larger societal forces such as oppressive cultural and religious norms, lack of economic resources and opportunity and men's attitudes toward women.

The authors call for a renewed commitment to the central values of the early feminist movement - such as listening to the voices of individual survivors, honoring the importance of supportive relationships in a woman's community and economic empowerment - to guide future responses to domestic violence.

Along these lines, they argue, counselors should play a greater role in helping battered women identify the sociopolitical contexts that sustain intimate partner violence. Because many clinicians lack specialized training in this area, they should collaborate with advocates. For instance, a therapist working with a survivor could contact an advocacy/counseling program for consultation around safety planning, referral to support groups and identifying economic resources.

Perhaps the most stunning statistic in the book: one-third of battered women return to their partners immediately after a stay in a shelter, a figure that increases to 60 percent at the two-month mark after leaving a shelter. Goodman and Epstein illustrate how contexts of poverty and short-term necessity can mean that returning to one's abuser is not always masochistic behavior and in fact, is actually a wise choice in some cases.

However, the advocacy, legal, and mental health systems are biased heavily in favor of pressing survivors to leave their violent partners. As the narratives and data in this well-researched volume amply demonstrate, separation does not necessarily mean greater safety. The systems in place do not have sufficient flexibility to support women to chart their own best course out of domestic violence situations.

Specialists in the field will find this book a valuable reference and guidebook, while practitioners will appreciate its complex, nuanced approach.

Paul Efthim, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist in full-time practice in Brookline, Mass. He holds faculty appointments at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology and the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy.