An in-depth, multidisciplinary look at the approaches of society to domestic abuse.

Offers practical answers to extraordinarily complex questions raised by abuse. Provides a checklist of warning signs of domestic abuse.

This provocative book presents a strengths-based framework that challenges negative stereotypes about battered women. The volume also outlines ways to improve research, risk assessment, and safety planning.

Drawing attention to the complexity of helping battered women and their children, this volume introduces a new model of `women-defined' advocacy. The model emphasizes: understanding a battered woman's perspective, including her risk analysis and safety plan; building partnerships with battered women; and systems advocacy. It seeks to craft courses of action that will enhance women's safety given their individual realities - which might include, for example, a woman deciding to remain temporarily in an abusive relationship.

Based on a new treatment model for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, this manual offers an effective and comprehensive therapy targeting symptoms of PTSD in battered women. Pioneered by Dr. Kubany, this innovative intervention is called cognitive trauma therapy, or CTT. CTT includes modules on trauma history exploration, negative self-talk monitoring, stress management, PTSD education, exposure to trauma reminders, overcoming learned helplessness, challenging supposed to beliefs, building assertiveness, managing mistrust, identifying potential abusers, managing contacts with former partners, managing anger, decision-making, self-advocacy, and a very important module on overcoming trauma-related guilt. CTT is a highly structured intervention, deliverable to clients unlike any other therapy. Most procedures are described in such great detail, they can be literally read or paraphrased by therapists--thereby facilitating ease of learning and delivery and making this manual a valuable resource for community health providers and other individuals who counsel battered women, but who may not have advanced higher education.

The harrowing story of a woman's descent into prostitution and addiction, the remarkable tale of her recovery, and an exposé of the global trafficking industry.

In the landmark Lavallee decision of 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that evidence of “battered woman syndrome” was admissible in establishing self-defence for women accused of killing their abusive partners. This book looks at the legal response to battered women who killed their partners in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Elizabeth Sheehy uses trial transcripts and a case study approach to tell the stories of eleven women, ten of whom killed their partners. She looks at the barriers women face to “just leaving,” the various ways in which self-defence was argued in these cases, and which form of expert testimony was used to frame women’s experience of battering. Drawing upon a rich expanse of research from many disciplines, she highlights the limitations of the law of self-defence and the costs to women undergoing a murder trial. In a final chapter, she proposes numerous reforms. In Canada, a woman is killed every six days by her male partner, and about twelve women per year kill their male partners. By illuminating the cases of eleven women, this book highlights the barriers to leaving violent men and the practical and legal dilemmas that face battered women on trial for murder.

Women’s rights advocates in the United States have long argued that violence against women denies women equality and citizenship, but it took a movement of feminist activists and lawyers, beginning in the late 1960s, to set about realizing this vision and transforming domestic violence from a private problem into a public harm. This important book examines the pathbreaking legal process that has brought the pervasiveness and severity of domestic violence to public attention and has led the United States Congress, the Supreme Court, and the United Nations to address the problem. Elizabeth Schneider has played a pioneering role in this process. From an insider’s perspective she explores how claims of rights for battered women have emerged from feminist activism, and she assesses the possibilities and limitations of feminist legal advocacy to improve battered women’s lives and transform law and culture. The book chronicles the struggle to incorporate feminist arguments into law, particularly in cases of battered women who kill their assailants and battered women who are mothers. With a broad perspective on feminist lawmaking as a vehicle of social change, Schneider examines subjects as wide-ranging as criminal prosecution of batterers, the civil rights remedy of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, the O. J. Simpson trials, and a class on battered women and the law that she taught at Harvard Law School. Feminist lawmaking on woman abuse, Schneider argues, should reaffirm the historic vision of violence and gender equality that originally animated activist and legal work.

The author examines the paths South Asian immigrants in Chicago take toward assimilation in the late 20th century United States. She examines two ethnic institutions to show how immigrant activism ironically abets these immigrants' assimilation.