The Battered Woman And Shelters

The first history of the battered women's shelter movement in Canada, No Place to Go traces the development of transition houses and services for abused women and the campaign that made wife battering a political issue. Nancy Janovicek focuses on women's groups in small cities and rural communities, examining anti-violence activism in Thunder Bay, Kenora, Nelson, and Moncton. She also pays close attention to Aboriginal women in northwestern Ontario, where the connections between family violence and the devaluation of indigenous culture in Canadian society complicated effots to end domestic violence. This book lays bare the aims and challenges of establishing women's shelters in non-urban areas. The local histories presented here show how transition houses became hubs in a larger movement to change attitudes about domestic violence and to lobby for legislation to protect women.

In the supposedly enlightened ’60s and ’70s, violence against women was widespread. It wasn’t talked about, and women had few, if any, options to escape their abusers. Yet in 1973 — with no statistics, no money and little public support — five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened Canada’s first battered women’s shelters. Today, there are well over 600. In Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists, journalist Margo Goodhand tracks down the “rogue feminists” whose work forged an underground railway for women and children, weaving their stories into an unforgettable — and until now untold — history. As they lobbied for funding, scrounged for furniture and fended off outraged husbands, these women marked a defining moment in Canadian history, triggering monumental changes in government, schools, courts and law enforcement. But was it enough to stop the cycle of violence? Forty years later, these pioneers describe how and why Canada has lost its ground in the battle for women’s rights.

Arguing that we commonly understand "wife abuse" and the "battered woman" in terms of standardized images of problems and people, the author explores how these images inform and shape social services for women who have been assaulted. Using ethnographic data of shelter work from the perspective of workers, she shows how these standardized images affect organizational structure and how front-line workers make sense of their interventions into clients' lives.

With a foreword by Barbara W. White, PhD, University of Texas at Austin The definitive work on battered women is now in a timely third edition. Considered the complete, in-depth guide to effective interventions for this pervasive social disease, Battered Women and Their Families has been updated to include new case studies, cultural perspectives, and assessment protocols. In an area of counseling that cannot receive enough attention, Dr. Robert's work stands out as an essential treatment tool for all clinical social workers, nurses, physicians, and graduate students who work with battered women on a daily basis. New chapters on same-sex violence, working with children in shelters, immigrant women affected by domestic violence, and elder mistreatment round out this unbiased, multicultural look at treatment programs for battered women.

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!

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.