Women's Narrative Accounts of Recent Abusive Episodes

Abstract

This study explores battered women's narratives of their most recent violent episode. Narratives include both relational partners' messages surrounding the violent act(s) as reported by the battered women. Schonbach's (1990) taxonomy of account giving and receiving was used as the analytic framework for examining these narratives. The most striking communicative features of the analysis are that (1) prior to the violent act(s), men's most prominent messages consisted of negative personality comments whereas women used refusals; and (2) after the initial violence, men became more violent and women used more excuses.