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Domestic Violence Has No Borders

Domestic violence and other attacks on women are borderless crimes. "These issues are very much the same in a Russian village or in any U.S. city," Pam Brown, Social Work, said.

The range of cultural and national responses to social problems is vast. In Scandinavia, social welfare programs are as much a given as roads. Domestic violence has long been seen as a problem requiring official and legal intervention. Sweden has a law that makes the "violation of a woman's integrity" a crime. It allows the prosecution to lump together a group of acts, rather than trying each incident singly. In Russia, daily living conditions for everyone are dire, and protection against domestic violence is nil. In the United States, domestic violence is recognized as a crime, but funding for social welfare agencies dealing with domestic violence is not a given.

Brown is involved in a three-year international project that compares shelters for abused women in regions of Norway, Russia, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Chico is the city studied in the U.S. The study compares the context and the experience of domestic violence across cultures by examining social policies, the organization of shelters, and the shelter experience for workers and clients. Brown and her colleagues began with current policies on domestic violence and "the historical development of how the problem has been defined, and the ways that women are trying to address those problems," Brown said. The researchers will share the results with each other prior to continuing the second phase of the project, in which shelter workers and women using the shelters will be interviewed.

The interviews will cover a range of areas including seeking help, the local history of domestic violence, the most recent experience of battering, the experience of children in the family, and the role of the professional worker at the shelter. "Then we will be able to look at differences and similarities among these regions and how much social policy and culture has made a difference in how women perceive and deal with these issues," Brown explained.

The collaboration came out of last year's international conference, Building Bridges: Social Work in Changing Cultures and Societies, where Brown gave the keynote speech. Brown (the only American at the conference) met with social workers from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia in Arkhangelsk, Russia, to discuss the conditions of women in the Barents region in the far north of Scandinavia and Russia.

In June, Brown travels to Norway for the next conference, where she will deliver a keynote address on the empowerment of clients in social work practice.

Barbara Alderson