An advocacy intervention program for women with abusive partners: Six‐month follow‐up

Abstract

Presented the 6-month follow-up findings of an experimental intervention designed to provide postshelter advocacy services to women with abusive partners. The intervention involved randomly assigning half the research participants to receive the free services of an advocate, 4 to 6 hours per week, for the first 10 weeks postshelter. One hundred forty-one battered women were interviewed about their experiences immediately upon their exit from a domestic violence shelter: 95% of the sample were interviewed 10 weeks thereafter (postintervention), and 93% were successfully tracked and interviewed 6 months later. At the 6-month follow-up, participants in both groups reported increased social support, increased quality of life, less depression, less emotional attachment to their assailants, and an increased sense of personal power. Although women in both groups reported some decrease in physical abuse over time, there were no statistically significant differences between those with and those without advocates, and abuse continued to be a problem for many women. Those who were still involved with their assailants continued to experience higher levels of abuse and had been more economically dependent upon the men prior to entering the shelter. Women who had worked with advocates continued to report being more satisfied with their overall quality of life than did the women in the control group.

How far does screening women for domestic (partner) violence in different health-care settings meet the UK National Screening Committee criteria for a screening programme? Systematic reviews of nine UK National Screening Committee criteria

“…Families saw their advocates for a mean of 10 hours a week, averaging 5 hours with the children and an additional 2.7 hours with the women. The basis of advocacy and the content of the sessions was similar to that of earlier intervention studies by Sullivan and her colleagues [125][126][127][128][129] (reported under Studies included in our previous review below). An important part of the intervention was ensuring that the advocate was no longer needed after 16 weeks.…”

“…11 In two separate randomised controlled studies (a pilot and a main study) by Sullivan and colleagues, [125][126][127][128][129] undergraduate psychology students were trained to provide 10 weeks of community-based advocacy to severely abused women exiting from refuges. Advocacy was tailored to the individual women's needs to help them to access community resources (such as housing, employment, legal assistance, transport and childcare), as well as empowering the women themselves.…”

“…Continued severe abuse or revictimisation was the outcome most resistant to advocacy, although this may partly be a function of short follow-up, as one of Sullivan's trials showed no decrease in abuse at 4 months follow-up, 124 but did find it at 2 years after the advocacy intervention. [125][126][127][128][129] Moreover, abuse is a factor over which the survivor has least direct control.…”

“…Two fairly wellexecuted trials [125][126][127][128][129]145,146 of individual cognitive therapy-based interventions for women with PTSD who were no longer experiencing violence provide reasonable evidence for this intervention, but this cannot be extrapolated to the women who were still in an abusive relationship. Consideration of only the high-quality studies 142,143,145,146 for individual interventions did not alter the findings.…”

Posttraumatic stress in children and adolescents exposed to family violence: II. Treatment.

“…Two interventions show treatment gains for children and mothers leaving domestic violence shelters: The Learning Club (Sullivan, Bybee, & Allen, 2002;Sullivan, Campbell, Angelique, Eby, & Davidson, 1994) and Project SUPPORT (Jouriles et al, 2001;McDonald, Jouriles, & Skopp, 2006). Both involve an advocacy and a mentoring component for the mother that includes modeling of appropriate child management strategies, empowerment and support, and assistance in acquiring resources.…”