The process of seeking help
By Davina James-Hanman
Other points
Research shows (**) that on average, women make between five and twelve contacts before they get the help that they require so it is rare for abused women to make a single journey through this model always leading neatly on to the next stage. Real life is much more complex.
The dotted arrows on the right hand side of the diagram indicate what happens when women reach out for help and don’t get it. For example, if she approaches the Housing Department for temporary accommodation and is told that she has insufficient evidence of the violence, she is left with trying to find out about other choices and options. In other words, she is returned to the previous stage of the diagram: ‘woman seeks informal support’. If in her information gathering stage, she receives three different versions of her legal rights as regards her children, she is left with either taking the risk that the best possible scenario is the truth or returning to relying on the support of her family and friends. If whilst seeking this support from friends and relatives, she is told ‘every relationship has its ups and downs’, ‘marriage isn’t always a bed of roses you know’, ‘we’ve never had a divorce in our family - sort it out’ or other similar sentiments, the abused woman is left with trying her own strategies to resolve the situation.
We all have a role to play in assisting abused women and children in both our professional and personal capacities. We may not all be in a position to offer high quality services which perfectly match women’s needs but it is, at the very least, possible for everyone to make a personal commitment to at least listen to abused women and children and not to deny, minimise and disbelieve.
At each and every stage of seeking help, women are seeking an end to the violence. This does not necessarily mean they are seeking an end to the relationship. It should be remembered that how she feels about the abuse, the abuser, herself and the relationship are all subject to change. Emotions are not a static entity; just because an option is not being considered one day, does not mean it never will be. The important thing for friends, relatives and professionals is to make sure that they do not create a situation where if / when her feelings do change, she does not feel inhibited or embarrassed about approaching them for help.
Finally, although research into domestic violence has improved immeasurably over the past decade, we still don’t know just how prevalent domestic violence might possibly be. Certainly we do know that many more women experience domestic violence than actually make use of services available.
The model of help-seeking described above, therefore, also has arrows going straight down on the left hand side to represent those women who, having named their experience as abusive, may never involve ‘outsiders’ either formally or informally.
** ‘What Support?’ McGibbon et al, L.B. Hammersmith and Fulham, 1989