The safety intervention intends to ensure that the victims of assaults are kept safe from their oppressors. This process includes separating the victim, usually a woman, from their assailant by offering them a different shelter and ensuring they do not meet with their abusers. This separation is subjected to legal orders which restrict them from being together and it aims at protecting the victim from her assailant. On the other hand, Intervention through punishment relies on the law as its strategy in helping battered women prosecute and punish the batterers through courts. The laws treat these cases as criminal case and the perpetrators are punished severely as per the court judgments. The application of reform intervention aims at changing the character and the behavior of the batterer, who is taught on how to apply self-control when tempered so as to avoid victimizing his partner and it is achieved through education and training.
These three violence intervention methods differ in terms of their fundamental application to violent cases. For instance, in punishment the oppressors are subjected to prosecution in the law courts then are punished, while in safety the victims are kept safe from their assailants and on the other side, reform helps the oppressors to change from their violent habits. However, the three approaches are linked together by the fact that they use criminal system of justice which governs their application as well as aiming to remove abusive injustices done to the minority groups. The most affected group by these interventions in this case is the male gender, since they are mostly the batterers of the female gender.
The approaches explain the interpersonal violence which includes sexual and domestic violence experienced especially by spouses. For instance, Merry stated that “If a man hits his wife, she can call the police if there is clear evidence of violence, they will arrest him” (49). According to Critical Resistance and Incite! “also provide safety for survivors of sexual and domestic violence” (223).
The institutions like the shelter will accommodate the victims so as to separate them from their batterers. The women would then be kept safe there and cannot meet with their oppressors for a given period of time. While in shelters, women receive various supports, for example, jobs are offered to them for their sustainability alongside other services such as counseling, housing and assistance in terms of legal cases. These shelters rely mainly on the police for security or sometimes they are hidden to avoid attacks from the women’s oppressors thus ensuring the victims are safe.
These institutions sometimes respond slowly or never when women seek assistance from them. As illustrated below in Alcaldes’s book, a woman by the name Jemina experiences no response despite the fact that she reported to the institutions. She said “I didn’t find anything. I mean, it was closed, they told me to come back laterI would even call the police station when I had problemsBut the police said it was a private matter” (154).
On the other hand, Koyama uses the following example; “I am a survivor of domestic violence. I am someone who stayed in a shelter, back in 1994. My experience there was horrendous; I constantly felt the policing gaze of shelter workers across the half-opened doorit was clearly selective in terms of who got them most frequently” (209).
Works cited
Alcalde, M. Cristina. “Resources (Un) Available: Institutional Aid and Institutional Violence.” The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty, and Resistance in Peru. Nashville: Vanderbilt Press, 2010. 153-185. Print.
Critical Resistance and Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. “Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex.” Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge: South End Press, 2006. 223-230. Print.
Koyana, Emi. “Disloyal to Feminism: Abuse of Survivors within the Domestic Violence Shelter System.” Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge: South End Press, 2006. 208-222. Print.
Merry, Sally Engle. “Punishment, Safety, and Reform: Interventions in Domestic Violence.” Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective. UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 48-75. Print.
