Title	BATTERED WOMEN AND THEIR CHILDREN:LESSONS ...
Author	Kathleen Waits
Synopsis	Law review article on domestic violence.
Description	Houston Law Review 1998 Symposium: Domestic Violence and the Health Care System Article BATTERED WOMEN AND THEIR CHILDREN: LESSONS FROM ONE WOMAN'S STORY (Cite as: 35 Hous. L. Rev. 29) The statistics are horrifying. Women are brutalized, terrorized, and murdered by intimate partners every day. [1] To make matters worse, battered women are often victimized a second time by police, prosecutors, lawyers, psychologists, and judges. [2] Batterers often seek and receive custody of children [3] even though they often abuse children as well as women. [4] While society and the legal system have improved their attitudes toward domestic violence, [5] we still have a long way to go. And yet the statistics cannot tell the whole story. They are too abstract and impersonal. The sheer magnitude of the numbers can desensitize us. Domestic violence is so widespread, we can easily become numb to the human suffering behind the statistics. Telling individual women's stories is one way to address this dilemma. Stories touch our feelings in a way that statistics cannot. [6] Stories can also spur us to action when statistics only depress us. [7] And so, I have decided to tell the story of one woman, a woman I will call "Mary." [8] After telling Mary's story, I discuss in Part III some lessons that can be learned from what she experienced. In Part IV, I then address some questions that might be raised by her story, including whether Mary's story is credible and whether Mary is a "typical" battered woman. -- continued on site --
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