Pathways of Victimization and Resistance: Toward a Feminist Theory of Battered Women’s Help‐Seeking

Although intimate partner abuse has been extensively researched over the last thirty years, battered women's help‐seeking remains perplexingly undertheorized, particularly within criminology. This analysis aims to offer a corrective by applying the feminist pathways theoretical model—which examines women's and girls' offending behaviors in the context of their past victimization experiences—to battered women's help‐seeking. Data from in‐depth life history interviews with 22 battered women in two states indicate that the women's childhood victimization experiences informed their adult help‐seeking decisions in meaningful ways. The primary theoretical contribution of this analysis is the identification of specific mechanisms—five help‐seeking inhibitors and three help‐seeking promoters—through which childhood victimization influenced participants' help‐seeking. Results of this analysis demonstrate the benefit of a feminist pathways theoretical model of battered women's help‐seeking in order to better understand how pathways of victimization and resistance develop over the course of women's lives. Keywords: intimate partner abusebattered womenhelp‐seekingfeminist pathways Notes 1. This excludes the five women in Southeast City who were court‐ordered to attend the support group, either because they had been arrested on scene after calling the police for help, or because they had failed to appear at a hearing to testify against their partners. 2. Initial (open) coding was performed using the N6 software program. This program facilitates the coding process and provides an electronic means of categorizing and sorting blocks of text. Once I moved from open to axial and selective coding, I stopped using the N6 program and instead coded by hand. Whereas the software program was useful in the early stages of analysis when I was dealing with large amounts of data, as the data analysis became more directed and manageable I felt it was easier and faster to code by hand. 3. Like other researchers who have interviewed across great social distance and found their participants to be generally forthcoming (e.g., Websdale, Citation1998), I perceived the women to be extremely candid during their interviews. Time and again, they shared with me—an outsider and a complete stranger—incredibly painful, private, and personal details of their lives. In fact, more than one woman stated that I was the first person to whom she had ever revealed such intimate details of her life. Many women expressed gratitude for the opportunity to tell their stories and thanked me repeatedly for acknowledging and validating their experiences. For these reasons, I believe that providing the women with an opportunity to "give voice" to their experiences went a long way toward overcoming the potential challenges presented by our social distance. 4. Recall that in 1999, the median household income in Midwest Metro was $29,526, and over one‐quarter (26%) of the city's population was living below the poverty level at that time. 5. The support group in Midwest Metro provides extended services—that is, after the time of initial crisis and often after a woman has left her partner—which likely explains why none of the women in that city stayed in a shelter at the time of the interviews. 6. Notably, nine women (40.9%) had been in more than one abusive relationship (see Table 2), sometimes beginning as early as high school. 7. The exception, Eleanor, had a partner who emotionally abused her and who physically abused the minor child living in their home, but who never physically assaulted her. 8. The calculation of this percentage excludes the 5 women from Southeast City who were court‐ordered to attend the support group (9 out of 17 = 52.9%). 9. The one exception is Darlene, from whom I did not collect thorough background information due to time constraints during our interview. It is not known for certain whether Darlene experienced childhood victimization, so her data are excluded from the calculation of percentages appearing in Table 5. However, comments from her interview suggestive of victimization are included in the discussion that follows. 10. From a strictly functional perspective, strained family relations stemming from a violent/disruptive home life sever one potential avenue of help‐seeking for women that might otherwise be available to them. 11. These turning points need not be "defining moments" as Taylor (Citation2002) suggests, but also could be "a succession of choice points" that occur over time (Elder, Citation1998). 12. Though not presented here, results from this study suggest that prior IPA victimization works similar to childhood victimization in informing women's help‐seeking pathways, often through the same mechanisms (i.e., inhibitors and promoters). Certainly, use of a developmental framework like feminist pathways is desirable for understanding long‐term patterns of victimization, including childhood abuse as well as successive experiences with IPA in adulthood.