Abstract
The book
The book discusses how, over the years, such Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) services have moved from a grassroots beginning to a more professionalized present. Today, such help, on the one hand, plays an important role for helping women at difficult junctures in their lives. On the other hand, a present neo-liberal approach (a paradigm in which individual women who have been subject to IPV are expected to make headway through concerted action) has some highly problematic aspects. For example, Bloom, the author, emphasizes that this individualistic mindset and strategy may work well for young and strong women, but is often out of reach for older people, worn-out individuals, or those with a major disability. How to support more fully women with fewer resources and life chances than others is clearly a topic close to the author's heart.
With her life story approach, Bloom unpacks how immigrant survivors of domestic violence carry their past with them. This past has often left women's bodies heavily scarred. While abusive husbands or partners play major roles as perpetrators, so do hard childhoods, grueling border crossings and the strains of being, for example, undocumented migrants in the United States. Furthermore, with her ongoing relation to several women, Bloom is able to convey how their present lives make them unable to follow well-meaning advice on how to “reinvent themselves” in order to succeed in life. Lessons on the need to get rid of harmful influences, for example, also imply that the causes of harm are within the women's control, something which is very often not the case.
The main part of the book is organized using a life course perspective with attention to immigrant IPV survivors’ increasing age, with chapters moving from perspectives on the lives of younger, to middle-aged, to older women. Bloom conveys well how the women's lives set them on a course towards incurring bodily strains and disability. Premature death linked to domestic violence does not need to occur directly. It can also be linked to a greater susceptibility to complex chronic disorders and be manifested in mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. Bloom uses the life stories of individual women to discuss how such health issues can emerge in relation to IPV and interact with other aspects of life. A central point is the way that hardships in an unforgiving context often age the women beyond their years.
Bloom writes in an accessible style and clearly knows her field from the inside. She draws on an array of concepts and research discussions—from intersectionality and embodiment to disability theory, to mention a few of her perspectival bases. The various conceptual discussions in the book are grounded in the author's concrete cases and her ethnographic fieldwork. While the book does not break new theoretical ground, it provides a well-anchored understanding of the hardships arising from the intersections between aging, bodily harm and interpersonal violence. A central point of the book is the immense power of state law to enable abusers to weaponize the undocumented status of female partners. In relation to this key theme, the Trump Presidency (2017–2020) meant a rapid loss of security for immigrant survivors, showing how easily hard-earned progress can be lost.
Towards the end of the book, Bloom changes her researcher voice somewhat, as she begins providing direct advice to practitioners in the field. One of her suggestions is based on the observation that the written response forms handed out to women are ill-advised, given that a large proportion of users have difficulties reading and writing. (The IPV-center that Bloom is involved in tries to obtain feedback from its users, but runs into literacy barriers in the process.)
Other recommendations include collaborating more effectively with both other service-providers (such as Adult Protective Services) and with vulnerable women's networks to provide enhanced and longer-term care and support. Such advice is certainly useful and brings out the book's hybrid character that involves practice and research. I find the concrete grounding of the book to be one of its strengths. It provides insights, both into the difficult but important field of support provision for an underserved population and into the lives of the women utilizing such support measures. Hence, the book can be useful for researchers and practitioners alike, as well as for students interested in this important topic and population.
At times, the chasm between the needs of IPV survivors and the available support for them seems despairingly wide. But then a woman's story from the IPV center provides a glimpse of hope. A young, abused mother who has been mandated to attend a support group moves from resisting the option of leaving her partner to considering that possibility after listening to other, more mature women's experiences. Or a support group meeting becomes a crisis intervention, giving a woman much-needed support in a desperate housing situation. Expanding on the power of such support groups as cathartic rituals rather than opportunities for learning new strategies in life, Bloom's book highlights a way to move forward.
