Battle Cries: Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse (review)

The rise of the feminist movement resulted in increased attention to intimate partner abuse both in research and practice. However, despite clear evidence that black women are at a higher risk of domestic violence than white women, much of the progress toward preventing this violence against women, attributable to the feminist movement, has been made by white, primarily middle-class women for white, primarily middle-class victims. As a result, most of our understanding about the specific experience of domestic violence for black women has been theoretical and many of our efforts to prevent domestic violence have failed this population. In Battle Cries:Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse, author Hillary Potter provides an analysis of in-depth interviews with 40 black women who have experienced intimate partner abuse. This study offers important information that has been lacking regarding the nature, reactions and implications of intimate violence as experienced by this specific group of women who must navigate through issues of race, gender and often social class.

For Battle Cries, Potter's research participants were drawn from a purposive sample of women who responded to newspaper advertisements about the study and a snowball sample in which the women who contacted Potter were asked if they knew of other appropriate participants. This second method provided Potter with the fortunate opportunity of interviewing four mother-daughter pairs, providing insight on the cycle of abuse in a highly intimate manner. From these in-depth interviews Potter defines the abused black women within the parameters of what she terms "dynamic resistance." She finds from her interviews that women do not see themselves as victims of, but rather as resisters to, the violence they endure. In addition to resisting further partner violence, these women also see themselves needing to resist family members, religious leaders, non-black partner violence victims and the criminal justice system, a unique position due to their race and culture.

Potter applies a feminist framework to guide her research where individual experiences and patterns in those experiences are extracted from the women's stories. Her approach provides us with a unique insight into what is driving the consistent quantitative findings regarding risk factors of intimate abuse. The book looks beyond the risk of age, race and marital status into how and why these factors are continuously identified as risks. For example, her interviews help explain the nuances to the statistical findings that black women are more likely to "fight back." As a result of a number of subjects detailing their willingness to physically respond to their abusers, Potter writes, "The semantics of viewing the abuse as fights and battles redefines the circumstance of 'woman battering' for battered Black women, making abuse equal to being solicited into physical conflict with a stranger." This redefinition influences both how the women and how outsiders, such as those in the criminal justice system, view their abuse.

The author believes that to understand how black women experience intimate partner violence, we must hear their stories while considering the unique role they play in our society. This comes across quite clearly with the exception of two key areas.

The chapter, Surviving Childhood, stood out as the least developed overall. While it is unquestionable that the experiences these women had as black, female children tie very much into their perceptions of both their gender and race, this chapter is missing a significant gender or race analysis. The author's argument for the uniqueness of the black women's experience is weakened by her argument for the generalizability of her findings, that "in a similar manner, other women of color, such as Latinas, Native American women, Asian American women and immigrant women (of color) can easily be placed alongside Black women in this analysis."(20) If we accept Potter's argument that the experiences of black females play a significant role in how they see themselves in terms of victimization, it would seem to follow that we should explore other ethnic groups in...