“I Have Lost Everything”: The Trade-Offs of Seeking Safety from Intimate Partner Violence

Background and Purpose: A chief aim of mainstream domestic violence programs is helping survivors achieve safety. The outcomes of survivors’ safety-seeking efforts, however, are heavily dependent on the context in which a survivor is embedded and may trigger enormous costs, both expected and unexpected. The idea that safety-seeking efforts can be costly is not new, yet how survivors understand and evaluate these trade-offs is largely unexplored in the empirical literature. This study addressed three research questions from survivors’ perspectives: (a) to what extent and how does working towards safety affect other domains of their lives?; (b) to what extent do survivors anticipate the challenges they face across domains?; and (c) how do survivors evaluate their safety-seeking efforts in light of retrospective knowledge of the new challenges that were triggered?

Methods: This mixed-methods study was part of a larger project designed to create measurement tools for domestic violence program evaluation. As part of the parent study, we administered a 30-page survey to a convenience sample of 301 female survivors recruited from domestic violence programs across three states located in the Northeast region of the United States.  In the present investigation, which reflects a triangulation design-convergence model (Creswell & Clark, 2007), we analyzed responses from a subset of closed- and open-ended questions developed to assess trade-offs of safety-seeking efforts. Analysis included generating descriptive statistics for the quantitative data and conducting a content analysis of the qualitative data.

Results: Tradeoffs were common among participants. Nearly two-thirds of participants (61.6%) indicated that they have to give up too much to keep safe, 48.5% of whom indicated that this was true most or all of the time. Almost half of all participants (48.7%) reported that working to keep safe created, or would create, new problems for them. About half of survivors reported that they did not expect the problems they experienced (50.5%), and roughly one quarter (28.2%) would have done something differently. The new problems that participants described fell into seven categories, with an overall theme of loss. For example, participants described how their safety-seeking efforts led them to lose or have to reduce contact with their networks and communities.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings provide a useful lens through which practitioners can view domestic violence survivors’ evaluation of and progress toward goals, advocate for macro change efforts, and challenge the tendency of services to silo and overspecialize. 

Creswell, J. W., & Clark, V. L. P. (2007). Designing and conducting mixed methods research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.