Understanding the Help-seeking Decisions of Marginalized Battered Women

This dissertation uses data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nineteen battered women from marginalized social groups to explore how and why they made decisions to get help. Participants were recruited from community-based intimate partner violence (IPV) support groups in two research sites: a medium-sized Southeastern city and a large Midwestern urban center. Interviews were conducted to explore the informal and formal help-seeking strategies the women used, their reasons for using and satisfaction with those strategies, and the barriers to help-seeking they encountered. Data from this study also suggest that historical factors such as childhood victimization influence battered women's help-seeking. Two key concepts, help-seeking inhibitors and help-seeking promoters, are identified, as are the specific mechanisms through which childhood victimization inhibits and/or promotes help-seeking. These findings offer support for the application of two existing theoretical frameworks, feminist pathways and life course models, to battered women's help-seeking. Finally, the theoretical, practical and research implications of these findings are addressed, especially as they relate to marginalized women.