| New Approach to Researching Domestic Violence | |
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Numerous researchers have studied domestic violence and women who suffer from it in today's society. However, most of these studies are strictly based on statistics and quantitative research -- until now. A researcher at the University of Missouri Columbia sought a closer understanding of the women who physically and emotionally suffer at the hands of their partners. Thus, she listened to actual life stories of dozens of women and has released her findings, which provide a more qualitative research approach to this problem.
Elaine Lawless, professor of English and women studies, spent months volunteering in a women's shelter and interviewed more than 50 residents who told her their life stories from childhood to the present. Lawless found that the women become empowered when they told their stories to another person.
"At the end of their stories, I heard a new voice," Lawless said. "After telling their stories to me, these women walked out of the room visually different." Being able to verbally tell one's life story, Lawless argues, can provide an assessment of women's past behaviors and open the door for them to successfully move from shelter toward a new life away from their abusers.
Many patterns became evident to Lawless. For example, many of the women grew up with violence, abuse and sexual molestation and had to learn to cope with it even during their childhood years. Since they had been abused or raped as children, they often lost a sense of self, and violence became a way of life for them.
Most of the women's mothers and grandmothers also had been in violent relationships. Lawless said one of the most disturbing aspects she found was that many of the women's mothers were not able to emotionally support their children in ways they might have been able to under different circumstances. She hopes her findings will cause people to acknowledge the violence and abuse of women in all of our families.
An ethnographer interested in women's narratives, Lawless recorded and transcribed the women's stories and included them in a new book, Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment through Narrative to educate others about these women, their minds, their struggles and, ultimately, their escapes. The book, which Lawless says is not a typical self-help book, is written in a manner that both an average person and a scholar could read.
"I could sit up here in my cozy office with my Ph.D. and ignore what's going on in society, but I felt a need to see what it was like to work in a women's shelter," Lawless said. "I wanted to learn more about this problem, help these women and make other citizens aware of what's going on in so many households around the country."
Women Escaping Violence, which features life stories of many different women in their own voices, was released this month and is available through the University of Missouri Press.
--- University of Missouri, Columbia
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