Silenced Voices and Structured Survival

Despite social and governmental responses to battering, many women continue to feel entrapped in abusive relationships. Using standpoint epistemology, this article examines the various aspects of help seeking, and the social and institutional responses to such efforts, through the narratives of 19 women in a domestic violence shelter. The findings are discussed with reference to Ptacek's social entrapment perspective and Gondolf and Fisher's survivor hypothesis, illustrating the socioeconomic and political context of the control tactics utilized by abusers and the structural impediments to battered women's successful help seeking.