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Screening
By Beth Leventhal
Article courtesy of the Northwest Network,
www.nwnetwork.org.
The Network has provided training and consultation to many battered
women’s programs seeking information on woman-to-woman battering.
We’ve been encouraged to note that in recent years increasing
numbers of programs are willing to work with battered lesbians and
bisexual women. Unfortunately, though, it’s been difficult for many
programs to direct that interest into the concrete action of
re-examining how they operate in order to make their services safer
for women batter by women – particularly where doing so seems to
challenge organizational philosophy and values.
Nowhere is this more true than when dealing with the issue of
screening- before accepting a woman for services, going through a
process to determine that she is in fact the woman who is battered
and not the batterer. While we believe that screening is critical to
working with battered lesbians/bisexual women, we have found that
many battered women’s programs find the decision to screen a
difficult on to make, for a number of reasons.
First, screening seems to contradict the philosophy held by most
battered women’s programs that a women who says she’s battered
actually is battered. I need to say that there is much about this
philosophy that we support, it is about acknowledging the truth of
women’s lives, and is the beginning of the end of the long history
of societal denial and minimization of battering. On an individual
lever, the act of believing someone as they describe what their
partner has done, believing that it is/was that bad, is often the
first step toward their ability to find safety, their empowerment,
and their healing from the horror they have experienced. On a
societal level, that same belief is the first step in creating the
cultural and political change necessary to end battering. The gains
made over the last 20 years by the battered women’s movement have
been possible in large part because communities have begun to
believe what they once considered unbelievable, and consequently
have gotten involved in efforts to end domestic violence.
The problem we have with this philosophy is that it means that,
because they are women, lesbian/bisexual women batterers and their
versions of their relationships will automatically be accepted and
sympathized with Batterers, regardless of gender sexual orientation,
usually see themselves as victims and many will present themselves
to a program as the battered partner seeking services. Other
batterers may try to join a support group or enter a shelter in
order to see if their partner is participating in services,
especially if they are stalking a partner who has left. Or, in a
pre-emptive strike, a batterer may contact the program before her
partner does in order to isolate her from a potential source of
future safety and support. On the other side of the relationship,
many battered partners present themselves as the abusers, having
been blamed for the problems in the relationship and/or been called
abusive by their batterer; if they have fought back in some way,
this accusation may be especially convincing. Thus, without a
screening process, a program can put the battered partner at risk in
a number of ways. The program’s message of safety allows a woman to
let her guard down, when in fact they haven’t done everything they
can to make sure that the batterer will not have continued easy
access to her. The program may unwittingly contribute to the
battered partner not exploring all her options; for example,
believing a shelter to be safe, a woman could decided to stay there
rather than consider leaving the area, only to have her batterer
find her by also getting into the shelter.
We would suggest to programs who are reluctant to screen that they
view the issue in the context of safety. Screening is not about
identifying battered women and screening them in, but identifying
batterers and screening them out – and battered women’s programs so
that all the time. It’s just that when working with straight women
with male batterers, the process is much simpler. By only giving out
shelter and support group location to women and being wary of men
who call the hotline or show up at the office, support groups, etc.,
batterers are effectively screened out- men are an easily
identifiable group to be cautious around.
Screening out female batterers is not as simple, because they are
not easy to distinguish as a group. They look like us, they act like
us (at least on the surface), and there’s no clear way to
automatically tell who they are. Without doing more intensive
screening that asks a woman for details of her relationship and her
experience of battering, a batterer will have easy access to the
program’s services. Obviously this is unsafe if the partner of a
particular batterer is seeking support from the program in some way.
But it’s unsafe even if she isn’t because, as stated above, by
getting into the program, the batterer effectively cuts off the
possibility that it could be a safe resource in the future since
shelter support group locations and times will no longer be
confidential.
A common screening-related issue is what to do if both partners in a
relationship call the program. Many programs have simply accepted
the first woman to call and referred the other to another batterer
women’s program so both could get services separately. While this
strategy deals with the immediate crisis, we believe it leads to
important questions about how the program views woman-to-woman
battering.
One question it raises is whether deep down the program believes
that battering between women is “mutual.” Accepting a woman because
she says she is battered, and then referring her partner to another
battered women’s program because the program also believes her (or
doesn’t want to make some kind of judgment as to who is who), what
they’re saying- and what both partners will hear loud and clear- is
that it’s possible for two women to batter each other. Otherwise,
why should both women receive services as battered women? This is a
dangerous message to be putting out to the battered woman, to the
batterer and to the community at large. It minimizes the seriousness
of woman-to-woman battering and denies that one woman can use
violence and coercion to control another.
The other question this raises is whether the program really
believes that lesbians/bisexual women who batter are as dangerous as
heterosexual men who batter. If there is no screening mechanism and
the program is willing to work with one partner of the other, then
they have to accept that some of the women they work with will be
batterers. Yet it is unlikely they would want to talk to straight
male batterers on their hotline about being battered, run a support
group with any of them in it, or have any of them living in their
shelter of safe homes. They would more likely be quite concerned
about batterers knowing where and when services take place,
expecting them to be at best disruptive and at worst dangerous to
the women and children receiving services as well as to staff. If
accepting male batterers into a program would put the organization
and those receiving services at risk, what makes it any safer to
have female batterers around? By not making an effort to determine
who is who, especially if both partners call the program is saying
that there is a real difference between straight male battering and
same-sex battering. The implication is that lesbian/bisexual women
batterers are not so bad, that they’re safe to be around, that they
may even be indistinguishable from their battered partners. Again,
this is a dangerous message to put out, because lesbians/ bisexual
women who batter do everything that heterosexual male batterers do,
from subtle manipulation to murder, and are equally unsafe.
The battered women’s movement cannot rely solely on it usual
precautions for protecting battered lesbians/bisexual women. To be
safe resources, programs need to develop policies and procedures
that take into account the differences in access that women
batterers have both to their partners and to services. Screening is
essential to creating safety, and we encourage battered women’s
programs to re-examine their core philosophies in their framework.
Article courtesy of the Northwest Network,
www.nwnetwork.org
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