Battered Women's Protective Strategies: Stronger Than You Know (Interpersonal Violence)

Battered Women's Protective Strategies: Stronger Than You Know challenges the stereotypes that depict battered women as passive and shows how to use the strength of battered women to create better research and intervention. The book also presents a new approach to safety planning for domestic violence, the Victim Inventory of Goals, Options, and Risks (the VIGOR), which is based on a well-validated approach called Multiple Criteria Decision Making.
Through an alternative strengths-based framework, Hamby deftly illustrates how battered women are not passive and in denial but are active and diligent in protecting themselves and their loved ones. Domestic violence is not just about physical assault. Many women who experience domestic violence also face the risk of homelessness or the threat of losing custody of their children in a divorce battle. Understanding the full range of risks is necessary to understanding the complex problem of domestic violence.  This book reveals a wide range of protective strategies: immediate defensive responses in the moments following an attack, protecting children and other loved ones, reaching out for social support, turning to religious and spiritual resources, and engaging in formal helpseeking.
Many, many strategies are still largely invisible to providers and researchers, and the steps that women take that receive very little attention or acknowledgement in the domestic violence field. The author identifies the vital role that researchers can play by simply acknowledging the variety of approaches that battered women employ. In this book's two new studies, survivors of domestic violence identify more than 140 different protective strategies in open-ended questions. These and other insights from survivor testimony make this volume the largest and most comprehensive review of battered women's strengths to date.

Sherry Hamby, PhD, is a Research Professor and the Director of the Life Paths Research Program at the University of the South. She is a clinical psychologist with more than 20 years' experience in a variety of settings, including grassroots domestic violence agencies, hospitals, an Apache reservation, and a range of other clinical and research settings. She was appointed to the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Center for Disease Control, and she joined the Research Advisory Council of the National Latin@ Network. She is also the founding Editor of Psychology of Violence.