Battered Women In New Jersey

Women battering is one of the most pervasive and dangerous problems in American society today. An estimated 8.7 million women fall victim to violence in their own homes each year. Helping Battered Women provides students with the most current, empirically-based and realistic overview of policies and intervention methods, combining a rich array of perspectives by internationally recognized professors and scholars in the fields of social work, criminology, and clinical psychology. The authors provide cogent and clear arguments for advocacy and social change in such places as battered women's shelters, police precincts, state legislatures, family courts, and criminal courts. The book focuses on a full range of policies and programs which include case management service models, 24-hour hotlines and crisis intervention programs, social worker-police collaboration, mandated arrest of batterers, electronic technology, and group/play therapy for the children of battered women, methods which are all effective in breaking the inter-generational cycle of abuse.

Having made enormous strides since the first shelters for battered women opened in the 1970s, these institutions are still planned and operated according to local needs, regulations, and resources. There are, however, a number of universal standards, or guidelines for shelter planners, boards, staffs and volunteers. The author has interviewed a number of individuals whose work is dedicated to shelters for battered women and their children, and he supplements those interviews with additional research. This volume compiles his research through an exploration of current statistics on shelter operations, current assistance opportunities for shelters and the women who turn to them for help, and some current realities of shelter life. What works and what does not work under the widely varied conditions of actual shelters is explored in terms of setting up a new facility; potential internal and outreach services; staffing and volunteers required for 24-hour operations; budgeting issues and funding sources; admissions, processing, and counseling of residents; and overview of shelter life, including daily routines, health care and security issues; and the preparation of residents for new lives on their own.

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.

In this latest edition of her groundbreaking book, Dr. Lenore Walker has provided a thorough update to her original findings in the field of domestic abuse. Each chapter has been expanded to include new research. The volume contains the latest on the impact of exposure to violence on children, marital rape, child abuse, personality characteristics of different types of batterers, new psychotherapy models for batterers and their victims, and more. Walker also speaks out on her involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial as a defense witness and how he does not fit the empirical data known for domestic violence. This volume should be required reading for all professionals in the field of domestic abuse. For Further Information, Please Click Here!