Staying Put and Evicting the Batterer: Institutional and Non-Institutional Strategies Some Battered Women Use

Author: Cecilia Castelino

Dissertation School: City University of New York Graduate Center

Pages: 386

Publication Date: January 2003

Availability:
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Access Number: 10821

Abstract:

This dissertation explore why some battered women "stay put" (that is, evict their batterers rather than flee to confidential locations), and the process and means by which they establish home in the site-of-battering.

This study also examines "electronic monitoring-plus-coordinated community intervention programs" developed to help battered women keep their housing, by placing the burden of leaving home on the batterer, and equipping the woman with a pendant alarm and/or cellular phone to summon rapid police response.

Policy and practice recommendations for law enforcement, housing planners, and battered women service providers and activists, and for battered women and society in general, are based on interviews with 36 battered women who: 1) attempted to keep or reclaim their housing by evicting their batterers; 2) could (re)claim their housing but chose not to; and/or 3) tried to flee from their batterers.

The women's ages were between 21 and 60. They were from various racial/ethnic/religious, and economic groups. Most were same race/religion couples. One-third of the participants were in alarm programs; almost two-thirds responded to flyers in police precincts, hospitals, victim service centers, and (incarcerated) battered women's programs.

Almost 50 percent (17) "stayed put" and 33 percent (12) fled to a known address (for example, parents'), primarily because of a socio-environmental connection (more than the pendant alarm) that served them well in terms of physical safety, emotional healing, economic viability, and residential stability. They had sustaining positive memories and relationships, reliable (in)formal vigilantes, affordable low rents, and familiar public schools in which their children excelled and had safe friendships.

Their personal contentions with safe-place tended to stem from the surveillance and isolationtactics of batterers; the fuzzy boundaries between private versus public space, and/or private versus public good; and the simultaneous need for connectedness and anonymity, change and stability, remembering and forgetting.

The report aims at stirring attitudinal change in residential communities, and programmatic change in (non)governmental agencies, toward psychologically, ideologically, materially, and practically fortifying battered women who want to keep or reclaim their housing, without the batterer and the post-separation violence, which puts them at grave risk, not unlike women who flee to confidential addresses.

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