Non-Violent Survival Strategies in the Face of Intimate Partner Violence and Economic Discrimination

SUMMARY

Intimate partner violence (IPV) theory often locates violence equitably between women and men. Women, however, sustain greater degrees of injury than men and often use violence as a measure of protection rather than as an act of aggression. Yet measures of protection must be viewed in multiple contexts. In this case, the context is poverty, which reveals that violence by women in response to IPV is not the only way that women deal with the violence in their lives. This article explicates four strategies that battered women in poverty deploy in their protective trajectory and highlight alternative resistance strategies women use to overcome multiple structural barriers.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate partner violence
• battered women
• poverty
• structural violence
• black women
• survival and resistance strategies
• welfare reform