Ending Intimate Abuse: Practical Guidance and Survival Strategies

This is the first book to examine domestic violence in terms of a continuum of five distinct categories or levels of woman battering. This book, based on 501 in-depth qualitative interviews, places emphasis on how to recognize the warning signs of a dangerous relationship and urges women who have been battered in a dating, cohabiting, or marital relationship to end it quickly. This very practical and comprehensive study, which took more than seven years to complete, includes a step by step safety protocol and survival guidelines. The primary advantage of this new classification system is that professional counselors, social works, criminal justice professionals, and advocates will be better prepared with diagnostic indicators, risk factors, legal remedies, and ways to assess severity and potential lethality of abusive incidents. Detailed case histories are provided of formerly battered women of varying ages and backgrounds. Ending Intimate Abuse examines critical incidents in childhood and adolescence, the first and worst battering incidents, crises precipitants and traumatic events, and the turning points that led to women breaking off with their abusive boyfriends or husbands permanently. The authors are a husband (professor and researcher) and wife (women's health advocate) team who firmly believe that this book is designed to prepare professionals, parents, and concerned young women to understand the often complicated dynamics that differentiate the women who end the relationship soon after being battered from the women who stay. The book includes a national directory of domestic violence hotlines and intervention programs and a detailed glossary of key terms. It also includes several chapters with empirically based date rape prevention guidelines as well as the latest methods for improving police and court responses on the college campus and in the community.