Social Services Fatigue in Domestic Violence Service Provision Facilities

Abstract

Findings presented here draw upon 9 months of ethnographic research in three domestic violence service provision facilities as a means to articulate the key elements of social services fatigue, a phenomenon resulting from residents’ need to (1) document progress toward self-sufficiency, (2) use particular language and behavior in the presence of staff as a means to demonstrate this progress, (3) actively engage with staff and advocate volunteers, at least some of whom are victim-survivors of domestic violence themselves, and (4) quickly learn that these elements constitute conditions of service provision. It concludes by exploring the practical implications of recognizing social services fatigue as a problem.

Keywords

intimate partner violence participant observation shelter

Introduction

This article addresses a silent paradox framing everyday interactions between residents and staff in U.S. domestic violence service provision facilities. It explores how residents and staff members at such facilities make sense of a system that simultaneously advocates what in any other circumstances would seem to be two opposing goals; that is, to facilitate independence in an environment of control. The coauthors explore this paradox by articulating the elements of social services fatigue, a phenomenon that directly results from the demands that this rhetorical system places upon residents.

From the moment a woman enters a domestic violence service provision facility, she is the subject of great scrutiny by staff and, often, other residents (Haaken & Yragui, 2003; Kendrick, 1998; Peled & Dekel, 2010). This scrutiny comes at a point in her life when she has made a courageous and, in some cases life-threatening decision to leave an abusive relationship. In the midst of this trauma and upheaval, she finds herself in a situation in which she faces constant monitoring by staff in almost all areas of her life, from the need to meet a curfew and inform staff of her whereabouts at all times, to the requirement to self-disclose about her intimate life and decision-making processes with respect to relationships. She may also find her abilities as a mother, friend, and intimate partner questioned on a daily basis in mandatory group meetings. And finally, in order to access housing and other services necessary for herself and her children to survive, she must show what staff deems to be appropriate progress toward applying for state benefits and eventually getting a job.

In order to give a name to this complex set of phenomenon, here we articulate four key elements that form the phenomenon of social services fatigue, which results from the need for residents of domestic violence service provision facilities to (1) document, both in paper form and through their choices and behaviors, progress toward self-sufficiency and independence in an environment that actively limits their independence through constant surveillance and limited personal autonomy, (2) use particular language and behavior in the presence of staff as a means to demonstrate this progress and, as a result, receive better treatment and access to services, (3) actively engage with staff and advocate volunteers, at least some of whom are victim-survivors of domestic violence themselves, and (4) quickly learn that these elements constitute conditions of service provision.

Domestic Violence Service Provision Facilities and Their Clients

Domestic violence service provision facilities vary in size and assistance provided, from small rural emergency shelters capable of housing just a few women and their children for short periods, to urban transitional housing facilities otherwise indistinguishable from high-security multistory apartment complexes. These facilities exist as a result of long-fought battles by feminist activists, some of whom were survivors of intimate partner violence themselves (Haaken, 2010; Tierney, 1982). These facilities serve a critical need in communities throughout the United States; according to the most recent survey conducted by National Network to End Domestic Violence, such facilities provided assistance to a staggering 67,399 women and children within a single 24-hr period (National Network to End Domestic Violence, 2012).

Research indicates that many women who seek domestic violence–related services are economically disadvantaged; nearly 40% of women at one urban facility self-identified as homeless (Baker, Cook, & Norris, 2003). The annual administrative statistics from one of the research sites discussed in this article, an urban transitional housing facility, indicate that 65% of its residents had an annual income of less than US$5,000, 14% earned between US$5,000 and US$10,000 in a year, 17% earned between US$10,000 and US$25,000 annually, and the remaining 4% had no income. Social work scholars have found that women who seek shelter have experienced higher degrees of socioeconomic vulnerability than those who do not (Grossman & Lundy, 2011). Women who had children at the time of the violent incident, who called for assistance from a location other than their home, who did not have a current order of protection in place, and who were injured were also more likely to seek help (Miller-Clevenger & Roe-Sepowitz, 2009, p. 359).

Research also indicates some correlation between help seeking at domestic violence service provision facilities and substance abuse (Braitstein et al., 2003; Fals-Stewart, Golden, & Schumacher, 2003; Fowler & Faulkner, 2006; Tucker, Wenzel, Straus, Ryan, & Golinelli, 2005). A synthesis of the research on domestic violence service provision facilities indicates that anywhere between 22% and 72% of residents have current or past problems with alcohol or substance abuse (Schumacher & Holt, 2012). This research suggests that women who seek services at domestic violence–oriented facilities have multiple concurrent needs and experience vulnerability in complex and multifaceted ways that reflect the racial and class-based inequalities that shape their lives (Haaken & Yragui, 2003; Kanuha, 1996; Kushel, Evans, Perry, Robertson, & Ross, 2003; Richie, 2000). These may be further compounded for migrant women who are resident in U.S. shelters, and accordingly beholden to U.S. cultural norms, who are leaving abusive partnerships that may involve additional complexities regarding their citizenship status (Abraham, 2000; Rudrappa, 2004).

Staff and Funders

These demographic characteristics pose a stark contrast to the increased professionalization of staff at domestic violence service provision facilities in recent decades. This transformation from the peer-to-peer model of the first shelters that opened in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s to the federally funded and professionally staffed organizations that exist today has involved a massive increase in the number of forms and documentation that staff are required to complete as a condition of receiving funds. It is no coincidence that since the welfare reform initiatives of nearly two decades ago, domestic violence service provision and other facilities that address violence against women have found themselves increasingly struggling to respond to clients’ needs while meeting federal and state reporting requirements (Maier, 2011; Postmus, 2003).

Anthropologist Jennifer Wies (2008, p. 231) notes that while the shelters of the 1970s offered housing and services provided by victim-survivors of domestic violence, contemporary services “are now provided by paid ‘advocates’ who often hold different lifetime experiences (such as education level) than the women who are their ‘clients’.” Anthropologist Lisa Markowitz likewise identifies the “paradox of professionalization” inherent in the significant reconfigurations that feminist activist groups have undergone following their acceptance of funds from federal, state, and local government sources. Like Wies, she notes that this much-needed funding “often generates organizational specialization that takes the form of inequalities in pay, authority, and the division of labor” (Markowitz & Tice, 2002, pp. 949–950).

The greatest risk in professionalization, critics argue, stems from its positioning of domestic violence service providers as credentialed “experts” and those who receive their services as needy “clients.” Through the discourse and practice of expertise in domestic violence service provision, sociologist Karen Kendrick argues, “women who experience abuse become reified, naturalized as battered women, ‘always already’ victims of either patriarchy or their own psychological problems” (Kendrick, 1998, pp. 155–156). Critics like Wies and Kendrick further argue that the abstraction of individual women as “clients” mirrors broader trends in social services, thereby working to obscure important differences in their lives in ways that further marginalize them.

Critical Perspectives on Domestic Violence Service Provision Facilities: A Literature Review

The vast majority of scholarly research on domestic violence service provision facilities has been carried out in shelters, rather than in transitional housing facilities that provide longer term shelter to victim-survivors of domestic violence. Much of this literature reinforces the prevailing view of shelters as much-needed community organizations and rightly so. Yet responses to domestic violence have been fraught endeavors from their very inception due to the need to reconcile differing feminist politics with prevailing gender and social mores.¹ Sociologist Bess Rothenberg (2003, p. 773) notes the tension between the views of domestic violence activists, who sought to underscore the structural inequality enabling the problem, and broader popular “interest in seeing battered women as weak individuals.” This, as sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa (2004, p. 589) notes, presents an immediate set of contradictions in reconciling individual and organizational goals, particularly with respect to encouraging resident autonomy while engaging in rule setting.

Like Rudrappa, international entities including the World Health Organization (2000) have also begun to acknowledge the powerful role that cultural norms play in the construction of service provision considered appropriate for women in need. One example that well illustrates such contradictions involves the “deficient perspective” adopted by Israeli shelter staff with respect to residents’ mothering skills, whereby staff members “care for the children directly by working with them and, indirectly, by guiding and supervising their mothers” (Peled & Dekel, 2010, p. 1232). Social ostracizing and stigmatizing residents, psychologist Lisa Goodman argues, by isolating shelters make domestic violence a problem between two individuals rather than of a community at large (Goodman & Smyth, 2011). Researchers who explore the experiences of women of color with domestic violence service provision facilities echo this critique; in one study, women of color likened their experience of entering shelter to “going underground” because the practice of confidentiality frequently mandates that shelter has an unpublished address and that residents not disclose the location to family or friends (Haaken & Yragui, 2003). It should be noted that the gaps between theory and practice in deciding to have disclosed or undisclosed shelters are debated within the field with some scholars arguing that downplaying danger by ex-partners could put women in harm’s way. Chester-James (2004, p. 584) argues that “The effects of having lived with domestic abuse suggests that acute fears around the refuge address being public knowledge exists for many mothers and children.” Both perspectives agree that the safety concerns for survivors in shelter are the impetus for the undisclosed nature of the location and the subsequent rules residents are required to comply with in terms of keeping the location secret.

Indeed, new residents at domestic violence service provision often find that upon arrival, they must complete a considerable number of forms almost immediately following their entry to the facility, including applications for public assistance as part of federal reporting requirements (Postmus, 2003). They must also abide by a set of rules that involve curfews, limited or no visitors, restrictions upon their personal decision making, and mandatory attendance at life skills courses on a variety of topics from parenting to job training. It is paradoxical then, that more research has not been conducted on the impact that this increased professionalization has had upon residents of domestic violence service provision facilities. Researchers note that there is a very limited amount of “victim-centered” research that documents for women’s satisfaction with particular services (Fugate, Landis, Naureckas, & Engel, 2005). Findings presented here seek to fill this significant gap in the literature by documenting issues that women in three domestic violence service provision facilities experienced as problematic in the course of their everyday lives.

Methods: Sites and Approach

This research involved 9 months of intensive participant observation at three domestic violence service provision facilities in a Midwestern state. Findings presented here are part of a grounded theory study that emerged in tandem with a project that the lead author conducted on two group quarter populations, domestic violence service provision facilities and military bases, for the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010 (Dewey & Chan, 2013). The lead author carried out research at three sites. The first, New Directions,² a four-story transitional housing facility located in a large town, provides housing for 28 very poor families³ headed by women who have experienced domestic violence. Maximum resident capacity at New Directions is approximately 120 residents, with one adult female and up to four children per individual apartment, and residents may stay in the facility for up to 2 years. The second site, Emergency Shelter, has a maximum capacity of 20 residents and is located in a large Victorian house on a corner of a residential area in the same town as New Directions. There is no predetermined maximum length of stay at this facility, although most women stay no more than a few weeks. The third facility, Safe Harbor, is a three-story building near the downtown area of a large city. It combines both the short-term shelter services of Emergency Shelter and the longer term transitional housing services of New Directions in a high-security building housing a maximum of 144 women and children.

Participant observation-based studies in domestic violence service provision facilities have been relatively rare, with most studies reliant upon interviews or surveys for the purposes of data collection.⁴ Participant observation allows the researcher to witness and document the everyday behaviors of individuals in a group while acquiring an in-depth knowledge of the hierarchies and power structures that inform everyday life for group members (Babbie, 2001). For 9 months, the lead author spent 4 days a week in each facility on a rotating basis.

The form that participant observation took in each facility varied based upon staff preferences as well as the lead author’s desire to be as unobtrusive as possible. At New Directions and Safe Harbor, she sat behind the reception desk in the lobby area, which placed her at the center of life at each facility, privy to all office activities as well as to residents’ movements in and out of the building. Many residents brought their infants and toddlers into this large, open area to socialize with staff and other residents throughout the day and evening, making this an ideal area for the observation of activities and interactions between staff and residents. Female volunteers, some of whom are former residents and many of whom have experienced domestic violence, are a common sight in this area, and hence the risk existed that residents might have assumed that the researcher was there to assist the facility in some capacity. To reduce this risk, staff announced the lead author’s presence as a researcher and the purpose of her study at group meetings, and residents were fully aware that she was not a staff member. The lead author took detailed field notes for several hours following each of her observations; all quotes presented in this article derive from her field notes. The much smaller size of Emergency Shelter, combined with residents’ recent trauma, made participant observation feasible only in the form of Wednesday night dinner and support groups.

The lead author deliberately avoided engaging in interviews or other formal research methods with residents due to her concern that this group of already exhausted and overburdened women might feel obligated to speak with her or, moreover, to provide positive reviews of the facility and their experiences with staff members. Instead, she engaged in hundreds of conversation hours with female residents in the course of her participant observation, a methodological strategy that led her to understand the complex ways in which women understood these domestic violence service provision facilities as places of both constraint and liberation.

Findings

The results of this study led us to identify the concept of social services fatigue, a condition brought on by the constant need for residents to complete forms, answer questions, and disclose information that in any other U.S. social context would signal tremendous bonds of intimacy. This section articulates each of these four elements, each of which is substantiated with examples from the research.

Documentation of Progress Toward Self-Sufficiency and Independence

Residents at domestic violence service provision facilities must demonstrate to staff that they are taking steps toward attaining economic self-sufficiency. Staff members themselves are beholden to federal and state reporting requirements, mandating that residents demonstrate eligibility for benefits they receive. New Directions would not be able to exist if not for the local Housing Authority’s provision of Project-Based Housing Assistance Payments (also known as Project-Based Section 8) to 22 of its 28 apartments. Residents wait 3 months on average for an apartment, and a woman’s procuring one might impact her ability to be reunited with children in foster care.

Also under the auspices of fostering independence, staff members encourage residents to explore ways that they can engage with the criminal justice system. One of the first things that Emergency Shelter staff members do with new residents is to explain options, and likely consequences, for filing charges against an abuser. In the state in which the lead author carried out her research, a suspect is held for 12 hr following a domestic battery, after which the police file a report with the prosecutor’s office, which then makes a decision about whether to file charges; if charges are filed, a victim’s assistance department staff member contacts the victim-survivor for an appointment. Staff members actively encourage women to contact the free legal advocates provided in order to understand the complexities of these civil and criminal orders, all in a crisis situation that often involves small children.

Once residents complete the intake forms that detail the abuse they have experienced and other information about their lives, staff members actively expect that they will begin searching for alternative housing and employment opportunities. As one staff member at Emergency Shelter explained to the lead author, “They can’t just stay here, they have to report to us 5 days a week about what they’ve been doing to move forward.” Sometimes that “move forward” is to a transitional housing facility such as New Directions or Safe Harbor, both of which have similar intake procedures.

Women who would like to live at either of these facilities must call for an appointment or stop by during business hours to pick up an application. Once a staff member reviews the application to see that the woman is eligible to reside there, she is called to a screening interview, to which she must bring her driver’s license or other state-issued identification, birth certificates, and social security cards for all household members, marriage licenses or divorce/separation paperwork for all household members, and all court documents related to child support payments if they are being received. Staff members expect full disclosure during this interview; during one of the lead author’s observations at New Directions, a staff member told a young woman who brought her elementary school-age child with her to the intake interview (which the lead author did not observe), “We’ll put him in child care here while we do the interview because there might be things you want to tell me that he can understand.”

Staff members meet postinterview to determine the applicant’s conditional approval, a decision made in light of grant criteria that need to be met for continued facility funding and the likelihood of space becoming available to accommodate the woman and her children. If staff members approve her application, the woman has another appointment with the facility’s site manager to complete required paperwork and determine rent, 30% of her anticipated annual income, and to schedule a move-in date if space is available. This is a minimum of four meetings for most women, which can be prohibitive due to transport, child care issues, and other life realities.

Once a woman becomes a resident at New Directions or Safe Harbor, she must apply for food stamps and any other government services for which she might be eligible as determined through conversations with facility staff members. New Directions resident Ava expressed frustration to the lead author, as she struggled to send a fax to the social services office responsible for making a final decision about her food stamp benefits:

You never know with them faxes and things, and once you miss a food stamp deadline you’re off for a month. That happened to me one time. And then they [at New Directions] tell you to get a job but then as soon as you do, you get a letter saying they [the state] cut back this or that much, and so it almost isn’t even worth it. But then when they [her children] go to school you just go crazy sittin’ at home, so I said, “I got to get me a job, I don’t even care no more.”

Her vague use of the word “they” indicates a generalized sense of powerlessness regarding her life circumstances, as she uses it to refer to the transitional housing facility, the state office responsible for delegating food stamp benefits, and her children—all three forces that she could quite understandably regard as beyond her control.

Refusal to comply with these requirements can have serious consequences for residents. During the course of the lead author’s fieldwork, staff members sometimes expressed frustration toward residents who requested what staff viewed as inappropriate forms of assistance. In one instance, a Safe Harbor staff member gave a young resident with a broken arm bound in a cumbersome cast, a form to complete and submit to a social services office as a petition for financial support from the city despite her former home’s location in another county. The resident politely asked the staff member whether the staff could fax or mail the form because it would be difficult for her to take public transport with her two small children and a broken arm. The staff member firmly replied,

I can give you a bus ticket. They need to meet you in person and they’ll ask you some questions and you’ll either get approved or denied. If you’re approved, they’ll start paying us from the day they meet you and that’s one more day that we’re not losing money from your room and board and that helps us because we’re a nonprofit.

The requirement for residents to apply for social services as at least a partial means to help foster self-reliance paradoxically occurs in an environment that actively limits women’s independence through limited personal autonomy. Facilities vary in the amount of surveillance employed, due in part to philosophical differences and also to location. At Safe Harbor, staff members log residents’ movement and activity that takes place at the facility lobby by entering brief descriptions of them onto their desktop computers between answering phone calls. Such notations included small details such as “11:35 a.m. Resident backpack left in reception area; 11:40 a.m. Mary out to work.” At Emergency Shelter and New Directions, staff informally socialized with residents, often face-to-face rather than behind a desk as at Safe Harbor, but boundaries between those being surveilled and those doing the surveilling remained clearly set. The use of surveillance, like the practice of keeping shelter locations undisclosed, also provokes scholarly and activist controversy. Research indicates that abuse increases significantly in the period after a woman has left an abusive male partner (Hammer, 2000). The cross-cultural nature of domestic violence can put strains on staff, as they seek to balance the needs of one survivor for a safe location and the use of surveillance to protect it, against the needs of another resident’s desire for less surveillance and openness to the broader communities support (Chester-James, 2004, p. 587).

At Safe Harbor, the entrance to both the emergency shelter and the transitional housing facility sit at the back of the building with buzzers on the outer doors that link to the front desk, where staff members determine who is allowed entry through an intercom system. Six television screens display black and white images captured by the security cameras mounted on the wall behind the front desk and every 15 min an electronic alert reminds staff members to look at the television screens to ensure that no potential intruders are lurking outside the building. At New Directions, women use an entry code that changes weekly, and at Emergency Shelter, staff answer the door.

Visitors to all three facilities must enter their names into a logbook, and at New Directions, the one facility that allowed adult males to visit residents privately, required identification for staff members to search for the man’s name in a criminal records database.⁵ This is part of a broader understanding of domestic violence as a complex phenomenon; indeed, most of the photos provided by women on their abuser show a birthday party or other happy family scene, next to battery or sexual assault charges against him. It can be jarring to see what is supposed to be a happy, safe, and comforting family scene next to accounts of violent, dangerous situations. Hence while surveillance is not unwarranted, it can sometimes be somewhat difficult to see how such an environment fosters the kind of independence advocated by domestic violence service provision facilities.

Use of Particular Language and Behavior

The second element of social services fatigue involves the need for residents to use particular language and behavior that mirrors that of staff to demonstrate their progress toward the goal of independence. Like many other domestic violence service provision facilities, New Directions mission statement reads that it:

… will work with low income, homeless families headed by women to secure permanent, affordable, safe housing, achieve economic security, and develop the capacity for self-determination. [It] empowers women and children by offering two-year service enriched transitional housing that is stable, non-violent, and safe, in an environment in which personal differences are respected, strengths recognized, and where personal responsibility and accountability are promoted.

Hence, staff members are in the position of constantly evaluating whether, and how well, residents are meeting these goals. They do this, in part, through individual case management meetings, mandatory 2-hr nightly group meetings on subjects from parenting to trauma recovery and, most of all, through observations of behavior. Women’s relationships with their children constitute a key area where this modeling is particularly evident. A staff member who oversaw child care at New Directions recounted a story to the lead author about how two brothers in child care exhibited behavior that, according to her, resulted from not seeing others take responsibility for their actions. “He hit his little brother and then said ‘no, I didn’t’,” she explained, “and I thought, ‘that’s the result of never seeing anyone take responsibility for their actions in an environment in which violence is normalized.’”

In another instance, a woman left her two girls, one in a stroller and one of elementary school age, in the lobby with staff and other residents, when she forgot her keys. When she returned, a staff member sternly reprimanded her by saying, “You can’t just leave your kids here without asking anyone! That’s not good parenting. You have to take them with you.” During almost every social interaction at domestic violence service provision facilities, women receive messages about the appropriate way to behave.

Active Engagement With Staff and Advocate Volunteers

The third element of social services fatigue involves residents’ need to actively engage with staff and advocate volunteers, some of whom are victim-survivors of domestic violence themselves. This raises the question of how someone who has survived trauma and hopes to serve others through this project can do so without making the work a project about oneself rather than the women seeking much-needed services. When women go through domestic violence advocacy training prior to engaging in volunteer or advocacy work with a service provision facility, many often share stories about their own experiences with trauma and violence. For some, the safe space of training and shelter can be an opportunity to deal with the suffering they have endured in their own relationships. Yet despite the rhetoric of sisterhood and women’s helping women through difficult times, procedures make it clear that staff and residents are anything but equals. While staff members and advocate volunteers self-disclose at will and return to their private homes after their shift, residents remain and are required to share information as a condition of service provision.

Nonetheless, staff members face their own hardships in a poorly paid and rather insecure line of work. Just as the lead author witnessed occasions of exhausted staff losing their patience with what they regarded as poor decision making by residents, she also observed instances of genuine solidarity. One day, an Emergency Shelter staff member who was raising her son without other support told a staff member and resident about her frustration at discovering she had no money in the bank that morning. She said, “I went to get lunch money for my son for school and my debit card wouldn’t go through. Normally I can make it on US$40 a week, but I can’t do that on negative US$5. The bank is pretty understanding, they know I’m a single mom and everything.” The resident responded by commiserating; in this particular case, her finances were quite a bit better than that of the staff member.

Quick Mastery Over Elements of Service Provision

In this environment, women learn rather quickly that mastery over particular language and behaviors, formation of bonds of affinity with staff ensures that they will receive services that they need. Much of the programming and rules at domestic violence service provision facilities depend upon the underlying notion of the self as a work in progress. Hence while Emergency Shelter maintained a “do not house” list of residents who had been violent during their stay or abused drugs and alcohol, the discourse of change remained predominant in many of staff member’s discussions about residents. At Emergency Shelter, for instance, one staff member explained, “The ones that seriously want to make a change, they’re the ones who usually stay longer. Some women have no boundaries and so they can’t take the rules.”

A Safe Harbor staff member noted that she felt an obligation to document changes in residents, as “we have to show statistically in our grants that who women were is not who they are now—that’s our philosophy.” At New Directions, a staff member noted that change was a process:

We’ve had one resident here six times with serious addiction issues, congestive heart failure, cancer, kidney stones, infected blood. She’s not healthy enough to have surgery and survive, and her mother is raising her two children and is trying to get custody of them from an abusive partner. We measure how well she is doing by how bad she was.

This fraught situation presents a scenario in which women staff members are tasked with judging resident women’s progress in an environment characterized by inequality and trauma. As such, we now turn to a discussion of ways in which domestic violence service providers might comprehensively address social services fatigue as a means to better and more holistically engage with women leaving abusive relationships.

Implications for Practice: Envisioning Alternative Pathways?

In their article on the “deficient perspective” staff at an Israeli shelter held regarding residents’ mothering and other interpersonal skills, the authors suggest that domestic violence service provision facility staff might “benefit from examining their personal, professional, and sociocultural experiences and values toward mothering in general and toward abused women as mothers in particular” (Peled & Dekel, 2010, p. 1236). Any criticism levied toward these life-saving facilities must provide alternative solutions, as facilities work within tremendous financial, legal, and social constraints to provide services to women in great need (Fowler & Faulkner, 2006; Ogle & Baer, 2003). Hence, in conclusion and in light of our discussion of the dynamics underlying social services fatigue, we ask the question of how domestic violence service provision facilities might continue to be safe spaces that provide women with the abilities to establish their own goals and life pathways, sometimes against tremendous odds.

Social service fatigue is the direct result of external pressures being brought to bear upon domestic violence service programs, which increasingly must demonstrate their effectiveness to funders, in the form of measurable outcomes, as a requirement for receiving continued funding. Nonprofit grassroots shelters became increasingly dependent on the state for funding following the passage of the STOP Violence Against Women Formula Grants Program (Safe Streets, P.L. 103-322). By 2000, US$672 million had been distributed through the STOP Program with 9,186 grants issued to communities across the United States (Burt et al., 2007, p. 1; Zweig & Burt, 2007). While the passage of Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) constituted enormous gains for the movement, particularly by providing a vital source of funding and political legitimacy, it remains controversial among feminist scholars. While both sides agree that institutionalization, bureaucratization, and professionalization are the result of organizational shifts, the cooptation of the grassroots movement is more problematic to some, such that “the work people set out to accomplish is vulnerable to becoming mission impossible under the sternly specific funding rubrics and structural prohibitions” (Wilson, 2007, p. 47). Villalón, in her analysis of staff perceptions on public funding restrictions, notes that some staff internalized such restrictions “to the point that when asked directly about feeling restrained they would deny or moderate saying things like they were ‘not limiting’ and that staff were ‘lucky’” (2010, p. 134). Neoliberal political and economic macro-level pressures have changed the nature of domestic violence shelters, resulting in an individualized and corporatized environment of social service provision. Kwon, in her analysis of youth of color activism draws similar conclusion, “In addressing social injury through mainstream political representation, incorporation, and redistribution, the state as a site of domination and oppression—and as a site in which to wage struggle and confrontation—disappears” (2013, p. 60). Shifts in domestic violence advocacy practices and concomitant trends toward professionalization indicate a move toward unequal power relationships between the advocates and the women, reduced victim-survivor and advocate participation in the creation and implementation of programming and services, and the professionalization of domestic violence organizations with the goal to obtain or continue state and philanthropic funding.

In the race for measurable outcomes, the experience of the women in shelter is often lost and social service fatigue becomes another hurdle that clients have to overcome. Domestic violence service provision facilities increasingly must provide what psychologist Cris Sullivan and the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence director Carole Alexy described as “‘hard evidence’ to present to funders (Sullivan & Alexy, 2001). The authors further note that measuring outcomes in domestic violence service provision is difficult at best due to the potential for data misinterpretation, intangibility of service provision outcomes, short-term nature of many domestic violence interventions, difficulties in measuring success when the batterer’s actions cannot be controlled, and the need for confidentiality (Sullivan & Alexy, 2001).

Findings presented in this article’s analysis of social services fatigue critiques this accountability model, in which funders require domestic violence service provision facilities to measure outcomes and success rates using models that do not account for the realities of everyday life in such facilities. In order to secure approval from funders, which proves the organization is meeting objectives, such facilities must focus upon measurable outcomes to the exclusion of client satisfaction. Hence, documenting progress for residential and other health and welfare services take precedence over the objectives that otherwise drive the facility’s existence, particularly the immediate safety of victim-survivors and their children. The accountability model itself is becoming controversial as practitioners from social work to medicine examine its impact on client-/patient-centered practice (Sweet, 2013), which calls for a reengagement from feminist scholars and practitioners working with residents in domestic violence shelters.

Satisfaction with services, loosely defined as victim-survivors’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the intervention in meeting their needs and personnel’s attitudes toward survivors of domestic violence, must be an integral part of the process for evaluating program success. However, research presented here identifies several reasons why women in domestic violence service provision facilities might not be willing to provide critical responses that would identify social service fatigue. For example, survivors must use particular language and behavior and actively engage with staff and advocate volunteers in order to receive better treatment and get access to services. This is further exacerbated, as Sullivan and Alexy (2001) note, by the drive for measurable or quantitative data because it is generally quicker and easier to obtain, analyze, and interpret than qualitative data. Advocates understand that qualitative data, where social services fatigue would likely be identified, are more difficult to synthesize and less valued by funders. Techniques like face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, and focus groups are all methodological “sites” where clients would likely perform responses learned as appropriate in the service provision facility, and where interviewer bias can affect the quality and quantity of the information being obtained, placing more challenges on qualitative evidence gathering.

Research presented here exemplifies feminist concerns for thinking consciously about how and why we do our research with the crucial goal of producing knowledge that will promote social justice. Advocates representing women of color in the United States and those from developing countries have had to create pathways for addressing domestic violence that diverge from liberal North American and Western European feminist approaches and their solutions; in turn, they offer new ideas for program change. The mainstream antidomestic violence movement in the United States, which emerged largely with the interests of white middle-class women in mind, presents similar challenges for survivors whether they involve race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class. For example, women of color who survive sexual or domestic abuse are often told that they must pit themselves against their communities, often portrayed stereotypically as violent, to begin the healing process (Smith, 2005, 2006) and as this research showed poor women are isolated from their communities of support in similar ways through the isolation as safety approach used by the shelter system.

The contemporary domestic violence movement works through a nonprofit model that sees survivors simply as clients who need services and promote an individualistic empowerment model. Smith (2009) notes this approach teaches survivors to accept violence as social fact rather than encouraging them to engage in transformative social change it. With the passage of the VAWA in 1994, the bulk of funding has been passed through state criminal justice agencies to the point where most domestic violence service provision facilities have become dependent on the government for their continued existence. The model of shelter prevalent before VAWA emphasized “working collectively and politically to change the conditions of women’s lives” that caused wife abuse (Haaken & Yragui, 2003, p. 55). While an underground, underfunded, predominantly volunteer movement of the 1970–1980s was not the ideal, turning grassroots shelter workers into quasi-governmental public service providers through the distribution of state funds appears not to have served the women’s movement’s efforts to mobilize for change either. Some scholars have argued that the shift to a not-for-profit industrial complex (Kwon, 2013; Smith, 2005) has made it impossible for staff to push for political change resulting in both conscious and unconscious reproduction of systematic gender inequality (Villalón, 2010, p. 140) that clearly relates to the use restrictions of state grant funding.

Research presented here has critiqued the current mainstream strategies that produce social service fatigue. What might alternative models look like? A harm reduction approach, for instance, would presume how women should live, but rather facilitate their safety based on their current conditions. Research presented here underscores how domestic violence advocates and facilities prescribe correct lifestyles and behaviors for women in order to obtain services. Harm reduction, which stems from interventions developed by activists and practitioners working with drug users and sex workers, suspends moral judgment on behaviors to consider individuals as authorities of their own experiences.

Some examples include the Building Bridges community group in New York (Pyles, Katie, Mariame, Suzette, & DeChiro, 2012) and the San Francisco-based Creative Interventions program, which strives to bring knowledge and power back to families and the community to resolve family, intimate partner, and other forms of interpersonal violence at early stages and multiple points of abuse. It “critiques current intervention responses by illustrating the alignment of the binary logic of conventional feminism with individualistic and state-based remedies” (Kim, 2009, p. 213). This example shifts the power to self-actualize away from the individual and into the community by encouraging victim-survivors to become activists outside of the domestic violence system, which is often isolated from the community because of safety rules and local politics. It centers on developing a community-based intervention projects and provides skills in taking political action instead of service provision. In addition, it promotes a National Story Collecting Project in which it collects stories, both successful and unsuccessful, of intervention strategies.

This approach, originating among women of color, is distinguished from a mainstream domestic violence model that often denies downplaying a history of race and class-related difference in the movement (Chester-James, 2004, p. 586) or one that promotes a neoliberal view of “empowering” women on a individual basis as opposed to a community basis as described by feminist in the developing world as “Americanization” (Chowdhury, 2011; Rudrappa, 2004). Using qualitative data collection methods can overcome much of the replication of less than effective models like quantitative evidence gathering for measurable outcomes used in the mainstream movement. Qualitative method can identify problems like social service fatigue because it allows clients to be free to hold service providers accountable without fear of ramification.

The nonprofit sector is the world’s seventh largest economy, comprising a US$1.3 trillion industry (Johns Hopkins University, 2003). The nonprofit status of most domestic violence service provision facilities makes it difficult for staff members to engage in political advocacy due to their need to satisfy government and foundation mandates. This alliance results in increased amounts of surveillance through demands for evaluations that provide measurable outcomes and pass a burden social services fatigue onto shelter clients. Empowerment, narrowly defined as an individual’s progress through economic independence, has become the mainstream nonprofit model exemplifying a complex issue facing contemporary feminism.

International women’s movements outside North American and Western European contexts have also identified new approaches to democratizing feminist practice, the relation of feminist knowledge to organizing and social movements, and practices of accommodation and dissent. For example, a critique of the “progressive narrative” (Chowdhury, 2011, p. xvi), the transformation of a victim to a survivor and then to an activist, describes how local activists envisioned victim-survivors shaping the direction of the antiviolence campaign as empowerment. Empowerment for some Western European and North American feminists, for example, meant the liberation of the survivor from local oppression through their rescuing efforts and then empowering them using neoliberal concepts that promise individual rewards like economic or social equality and ignore structural constraints (such as racism or poverty; Kwon, 2013, p. 55).

Research presented here revealed similar tensions between the staff, volunteers (many of whom were themselves survivors), and clients and described multiple points of agency and restraint dominated by the rescue and progressive narrative. Evidence presented underscores that U.S. domestic violence service provision facilities can strip women of their agency and ability to self-actualize by rendering them objects to be rescued, or celebrated as exceptional subjects, prevailing in the face of abuse (Chowdhury, 2011).

Ironically, the progressive narrative was essentially exported via the global feminist movement to end gender-based violence. The “rescue narrative” that purports to save poor women, women of color, or women outside North America or Western Europe, from their localized violent oppression or the has been challenged by the very feminists that it was intended to help and the results are meaningful to feminist involved in the U.S. antidomestic violence movement today. Hence, transnational feminist theories can offer solutions that may help U.S. domestic violence service provision facilities to engage in more responsive and transformative efforts. For example, Chowdhury (2011) charts how a Bangladeshi women’s organization, Naripokkho, crafted a successful strategy to confront gender violence, educate local and international communities, and provide hope for survivors. While success resulted in the establishment of Acid Survivors Foundation, which was funded by international donor agencies to provide comprehensive care for survivors, it also resulted in decreased involvement of local activists, cooptation of Naripokkho’s strategy, the further dissemination of a simplistic, “survivor” narrative, and served to reinforce a neoliberal agenda (Chowdhury, 2011). Transnational feminism describes a complicated and interconnected world of gender violence, women’s activism, class politics, not-for-profits, and neoliberalism. In the domestic violence movement in the United States, this might look like a call to recenter the local within the state and national processes and how these factors interact or to remake the terms of women’s abilities to self-actualize on their own terms.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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