Philosophy of the Domestic Violence Movement

We believe that the best work of the battered women’s movement is the work based on analysis and approach which:

• Recognizes battering as an issue of power and control.
• Recognize many facets of battering (emotional, sexual, economic and physical).
• Work to establish battering as a crime.
• Understand the social-political nature of widespread battering.
• Make safety for battered women the top priority.
• Make safety for battered women the top priority.
• Believe that battered women benefit from the support and understanding of other women.
• Recognize that the most effective work is based on peer support and self-help models. Both encourage women to exchange information, support and assistance, while taking action and making decisions for themselves.
• Hope to foster empowerment through collective action.
• Use an organizing model to recruit battered women and formerly battered women and their children and their advocates into the social change work.
• Insist upon direct accountability to battered women.
• Constantly blend work for individual safety and healing, with work to eliminate the institutional and cultural supports for violence.
• Work to develop the local, state, national and international connections between working to end violence.
• Point out both the oppression which leads to and includes violence, and the power and success of women working to end the violence and oppression.
Excerpted from an unpublished paper written for the National Coalition against Domestic Violence Battered Women’s Task Force: “A Current Analysis of the Battered Women’s Movement.” Copyright 1989, Marcia Niemann.