The process of seeking help

By Davina James-Hanman

Woman seeks validation

At this stage, women are beginning to exhaust their own strategies and need to tell someone. The most likely candidates are a best friend, their mother or a sister. What she is seeking here is validation of her definition of her experiences as abusive without having control taken away from her. She is seeking reassurance that the abuse is real and serious and possibly some suggestions as to what else she might do as opposed to being told what she must do.

Women tend, on the whole, to confide in female friends and relatives. The deciding factor as to whether male friends and relatives are told seems to be what kind of response she thinks they will have and her assessment of whether this will increase or decrease her (and her children’s) safety. For example, if she thinks that if she told her brother, his response would be to aggressively confront her partner, she may decide not to tell her brother in case her partner later takes it out on her. If on the other hand, she thinks that her partner being aggressively confronted may inhibit him from further abuse, she may consciously and deliberately decide to tell her brother.*

It is at this stage that she will pick up leaflets, note which organisations display domestic violence materials such as posters and make (often anonymous) 'phone-calls to agencies to seek information. It is common during this stage for a woman to drop hints as to why she is seeking the information without being explicit. For example, she may say ‘I’m having some problems with my boyfriend and I’d like to know if the council could re-house me’. It is also possible that she may explicitly reveal the abuse to a professional although it is likely to be someone with whom she already has an established relationship and who she trusts not to ‘take over’. In these circumstances, women are often revealing the abuse in an attempt to get help for themselves and/or their children rather than seeking to leave the relationship. For example, she may tell her child’s teacher so that the teacher better understands why the child has become disruptive in class. She may tell her G.P. that she is having trouble sleeping because she is always rowing with her husband. Interventions at this stage need to be an extremely careful balance between responding to her immediate concerns and assisting her to consider the wider context of her life so as to address the underlying issue of abuse.

* This example is not meant to indicate that the response of male friends and relatives is always aggressive; indeed many abused women talk warmly of the sympathetic and supportive assistance they have had from male friends and relatives.