Counseling battered women: Recommendations for a new approach

Abstract

This paper shows how the battered women's shelter where I work has become, like many other battered women's shelters in the US, enmeshed in a bureaucratic web of procedures and requirements. The shelter uses a therapeutic, self-help model in its approach to counseling residents, partly as a result of its bureaucratization. This paper provides a forum to discuss the advantages and disadvantages to the shelter's use of the self-help model, and proposes the adoption of a different counseling model by the shelter, that of resistance. Data from interviews conducted individually with thirteen shelter residents over a period of six months buttress the recommendation.