This provocative book challenges the pervasive stereotypes that depict battered women as passive and presents an alternative strengths-based framework. Battered women are not passive and in denial; they act to protect themselves and their loved ones in many ways. Many women who experience abuse are facing numerous other risks, such as the risk of homelessness or the threat of losing custody of their children in a divorce battle. Understanding the full range of risks is necessary to understanding the complex problem of battering. Using an approach called Multiple Criteria Decision Making, this book outlines a procedure for comprehensive risk assessment, safety planning and risk management. One key step is recognizing all of the protective strategies that battered women routinely use. Quantitative, qualitative, and clinical data reveal a wide range of protective strategies: immediate defensive responses in the moments following an attack, protecting children and other loved ones, reaching out for social support, turning to religious and spiritual resources and engaging formal helpseeking. There are many, many strategies that are still largely invisible to providers and researchers-steps women take that receive very little attention or acknowledgement in the domestic violence field. In two new studies, survivors of domestic violence identified 133 different protective strategies in open-ended questions. These and other insights from survivors are included throughout the book. This book shows how to use the strength of battered women to create better and more nuanced research and intervention.

There is an increasing appreciation of the interconnections among all forms of violence. These interconnections have critical implications for conducting research that can produce valid conclusions about the causes and consequences of abuse, maltreatment, and trauma. The accumulated data on co-occurrence also provide strong evidence that prevention and intervention should be organized around the full context of individuals experiences, not narrowly defined subtypes of violence. Managing the flood of new research and practice innovations is a challenge, however. New means of communication and integration are needed to meet this challenge, and the Web of Violence is intended to contribute to this process by serving as a concise overview of the conceptual and empirical work that form a basis for understanding the interconnections across forms of violence throughout the lifespan. It also offers ideas and directions for prevention, intervention, and public policy.

A number of initiatives are emerging to integrate the findings on co-occurrence into research and action. The American Psychological Association established a new journal, Psychology of Violence, which is a forum for research on all types of violence. Sherry Hamby is the founding editor and John Grych is associate editor and co-editor of a special issue on the co-occurrence of violence in 2012. Dr. Hamby also is a co-investigator of the National Survey of Children s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), which has drawn attention to polyvictimization. Polyvictimization is a focus of the U.S. Department of Justice s Defending Childhood Initiative and has recently been featured in calls for grant proposals by the Office of Victims of Crime and National Institutes for Justice. "