A health-care provider is likely to be the first professional contact for survivors of intimate partner violence or sexual assault. Evidence suggests that women who have been subjected to violence seek health care more often than non-abused women, even if they do not disclose the associated violence. They also identify health-care providers as the professionals they would most trust with disclosure of abuse. These guidelines are an unprecedented effort to equip healthcare providers with evidence-based guidance as to how to respond to intimate partner violence and sexual violence against women. They also provide advice for policy makers, encouraging better coordination and funding of services, and greater attention to responding to sexual violence and partner violence within training programmes for health care providers. The guidelines are based on systematic reviews of the evidence, and cover: 1. identification and clinical care for intimate partner violence 2. clinical care for sexual assault 3. training relating to intimate partner violence and sexual assault against women 4. policy and programmatic approaches to delivering services 5. mandatory reporting of intimate partner violence. The guidelines aim to raise awareness of violence against women among health-care providers and policy-makers, so that they better understand the need for an appropriate health-sector response. They provide standards that can form the basis for national guidelines, and for integrating these issues into health-care provider education.

Written by experts with a combined 50 years of experience teaching and researching in the field of domestic abuse, Intimate Partner Violence: Effective Procedure, Response, and Policy provides practical instruction for practitioners and lay people responding to domestic violence, as well as ideas for policymakers working to create solutions to the violence. Narratives by victims of intimate partner abuse provide a framework from which students and practitioners can assess address problems of domestic abuse. This book focuses on what can be practically done to address the problem of domestic violence for individual practitioners as well as policymakers, lawmakers, and criminal justice practitioners.

A look at gun control, campus sexual assault, immigration, and more that considers the future of responses to domestic violence Domestic violence is commonly assumed to be a bipartisan, nonpolitical issue, with politicians of all stripes claiming to work to end family violence. Nevertheless, the Violence Against Women Act expired for over 500 days between 2012 and 2013 due to differences between the U.S. Senate and House, demonstrating that legal protections for domestic abuse survivors are both highly political and highly vulnerable. Racial and gender politics, the move toward criminalization, reproductive justice concerns, gun control debates, and political interests are increasingly shaping responses to domestic violence, demonstrating the need for greater consideration of the interplay of politics, domestic violence, and how the law works in people’s lives. The Politicization of Safety provides a critical historical perspective on domestic violence responses in the United States. It grapples with the ways in which child welfare systems and civil and criminal justice responses intersect, and considers the different, overlapping ways in which survivors of domestic abuse are forced to cope with institutionalized discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status. The book also examines movement politics and the feminist movement with respect to domestic violence policies. The tensions discussed in this book, similar to those involved in the #metoo movement, include questions of accountability, reckoning, redemption, healing, and forgiveness. What is the future of feminism and the movements against gender-based violence and domestic violence? Readers are invited to question assumptions about how society and the legal system respond to intimate partner violence and to challenge the domestic violence field to move beyond old paradigms and contend with larger justice issues.

Overcoming the Stigma of Intimate Partner Abuse addresses the impact of the shame surrounding intimate partner violence and the importance of actively challenging this stigma. Through examples of survivors who have triumphed over past abuse, the book presents a new way to understand the dynamics of abusive relationships as well as demonstrates the strength, resourcefulness, and resilience of victims and survivors. Overcoming the Stigma of Intimate Partner Abuse offers professionals, survivors, and communities an action plan to end stigma, support survivors, advocate for better response systems, raise awareness about abuse, and prevent violence.

Decriminalizing Domestic Violence asks the crucial, yet often overlooked, question of why and how the criminal legal system became the primary response to intimate partner violence in the United States. It introduces readers, both new and well versed in the subject, to the ways in which the criminal legal system harms rather than helps those who are subjected to abuse and violence in their homes and communities, and shares how it drives, rather than deters, intimate partner violence. The book examines how social, legal, and financial resources are diverted into a criminal legal apparatus that is often unable to deliver justice or safety to victims or to prevent intimate partner violence in the first place. Envisioned for both courses and research topics in domestic violence, family violence, gender and law, and sociology of law, the book challenges readers to understand intimate partner violence not solely, or even primarily, as a criminal law concern but as an economic, public health, community, and human rights problem. It also argues that only by viewing intimate partner violence through these lenses can we develop a balanced policy agenda for addressing it. At a moment when we are examining our national addiction to punishment, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence offers a thoughtful, pragmatic roadmap to real reform.

Domestic Violence Advocacy: Complex Lives/Difficult Choices, Second Edition is a comprehensive and highly practical resource for anyone working with domestic violence victims. The essential elements and values of the victim-defined approach provide the foundation for a completely revised exploration of all victims’ perspectives and advocates’ roles. Authors Jill Davies and Eleanor Lyon draw on the far-reaching progress and increased knowledge of the field and delve deeply into the experiences of victims, their perspectives and decision-making, culture, and risks. Attentive to the real- world context of limited time, resources, and options for victims and for advocates, this enlightening text focuses on what is feasible and offers ideas for working within such constraints.

Intimate Partner Violence and Advocate Response: Redefining Love in Western Belize offers new insight into the cross-cultural analysis of gender-based intimate partner violence by blending activist anthropology with in-depth ethnographic research to evaluate and help ameliorate the crisis in Belize. Drawing from twenty months of fieldwork in the Belizean Cayo District conducted between 2002 and 2013, Melissa A. Beske investigates the prevalence and complexity of partner abuse, the contributing cultural and structural factors, and the advocate dynamics across local, national, and transnational frameworks in combating the problem. Combining enlivened narratives, comparative viewpoints, and scholar-activism, this book not only illustrates the lived suffering of partner abuse in Cayo, but it also engages with the passionate commitment of survivors and supporters as they endeavor to create a more equitable and peaceful community. In doing so, it demonstrates an effective strategy for the interdisciplinary assessment of gender-based abuse, which satisfies demands for theoretical impartiality while simultaneously enabling researchers to take an ethical stand in social causes.