Safety Evaluation for Battered Women

Creating safety for a woman who has been the victim of battering is a complex under taking. Most advocates, and many other interveners in cases where domestic violence has occurred, are trained in and deeply familiar with conducting face-to-face risk assessments with individual battered women. However, if we limit our analysis to the safety of one woman at a time, we miss valuable opportunities for examining how women’s safety can be taken up by and woven into every level of our work–from community organizing to program evaluation. This packet of resources was compiled in order to guide us–as advocates, systems practitioners,or policymakers–in our thinking about what the safety of women means in our community by broadening our perspective on safety evaluation for battered women and their children.