Abstract
Within the U.S., the struggle for women's safety from intimate partner violence was brought into the national discourse with the Battered Women's Movement (BWM) of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Volunteer-run “safe homes” would soon become bureaucratized with the concomitant rise of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) and the repression of larger socio-political movements. These forces resulted in today's 501(c)3 crisis centers which are governed by stringent service eligibility requirements that define the parameters of their practice. Informed by eight months of ethnographic field work at a rural crisis center in New England, this article analyzes one part of the nonprofitization of the BWM – that of professional discourse. Drawing on the work of Canadian feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith, I utilize the theoretical and methodological tenets of institutional ethnography (IE) to examine one dominant discursive practice – “Is she imminently fleeing?” This discursive practice reveals how officialdom adversely impacts survivors’ lives. This study contributes to our understanding of how language concretely plays out in the daily operations within the crisis center. This work builds on the literature that exposes the fault lines of the NPIC in the U.S. context and serves to expand the work of IE as a vital investigative research lens.
Keywords
Rebecca 1
I met Rebecca in mid-December of 2020 at the motel she was staying at, a week after she was in a car accident with her boyfriend Nathan. Nathan was incarcerated awaiting his arraignment, charged with a DUI, heroin possession, and assault charges for strangling Rebecca. Rebecca was “scared to death” he would get out and come after her. This was not the first time Nathan had strangled her. She had neck surgery eight months ago, and she believed he would intentionally strangle her: “I think he thought maybe if he could strangle me or like suspend me in the air from my neck, that something would happen and it would mess up my surgery…he's going to not mean to kill me, but he's going to end up killing me, not knowing his own strength.”
Two years ago, at age 51, she moved to rural New England with Nathan, whom she had been with for five years. She bought a piece of land in a “very secluded” area of a small town, living in her camper with no running water, electricity, or phone service. Nathan isolated Rebecca from her family and attempted to prohibit her from accessing the local methadone clinic. Nathan is an active heroin user, while Rebecca has been in recovery for three years from opioid use.
The day of the car accident, Rebecca sensed that Nathan was in “one of his moods.” She doesn’t recall much about the accident but remembers waking up in the hospital. A police officer, accompanied by a social worker, talked with her. The social worker asked if she had been physically abused, in which she then proceeded to detail Nathan's abuse and the recent strangulation incident. The officer gave her the number to Emily's House, the local crisis center. Emily's House, however, referred her to the homeless shelter. When I inquired why that was the case, Rebecca explained: “I guess, because I told [the crisis advocate] I was on heroin, we got caught with heroin in the car. So immediately, she hears that, and then I said ‘well, I am going to the methadone clinic,’ and that's when she said ‘oh, because of your medical condition, we can’t let you stay here.’”
Rebecca felt “disappointed” by the response from Emily's House: “I am out here struggling, banging my head against the wall trying to get some help because he has abused me…I go to the [methadone] clinic. I know, it's embarrassing…I could have used that help that night. I cried out in the rain when I was released from the hospital…now I have no help, I am out on my own.”
Introduction
Rebecca's story typifies the ways that the professionalization of the antiviolence movement within the United States and consequent bureaucratic practices unintentionally place abused women in further precarious positions – i.e., homelessness, risk for relapse, and possible return to an abusive partner (Bumiller, 2008; Durazo, 2017; Mehrotra et al., 2016; Richie, 2012). This professionalization of social movements is an intrinsic part of the larger nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC). The NPIC framework was popularized by INCITE! (2017) a collective of radical feminists of color organizing around violence against women in all its forms. The framework highlights how nonprofits manage social problems and provide essential services, yet the very system of capitalism that fractures people's lives and produces their suffering remains intact (Jenkins, 2020; Kivel, 2017). A crucial piece of nonprofitization is the siloing of issues (Gilmore, 2017). Service provision requirements are necessarily narrow because nonprofits largely manage a single issue struggle, i.e., the crisis center exists to manage and respond to intimate partner violence (IPV). Emily's House, like any 501(c)3, necessarily carries out sorting categories for their clientele to delineate service provision. Advocates must determine daily if a situation is “our work.” Rebecca was denied shelter services from Emily's House after the accident. The mention of heroin and the methadone clinic seemingly chafed with institutional assessments of the worthy client. The crisis center advocate who spoke to Rebecca said in a subsequent morning meeting that the call was “substance use-related” and “not our work.”
This paper is a result of a data set from a larger study and focuses on one tenet of the NPIC: how bureaucratized professional discourse shapes institutional policies. Using Dorothy Smith's institutional ethnography (IE), I focus on the following question: How do institutional policies and discourses within one crisis center (Emily's House) shape and reproduce the delivery of services? Illustrative examples gleaned from in-depth crisis advocate interviews and eight months of field work demonstrate how this phenomenon plays out specifically in the stringent shelter eligibility guidelines. I examine one dominantly used discursive practice – “Is she imminently fleeing?” This discursive practice used in the crisis center reveals both notions of the undeserving victim and how officialdom impacts survivors’ lives.
Previous work has explored the bureaucracy of service delivery at shelters serving victims of gender violence: e.g., the service movement, social policy, and discursive construction of domestic violence in Victoria, Australia (Theobald et al., 2017); how the combined forces of neoliberalism, criminalization, and professionalization shape and constrain the work of social workers at crisis centers (Mehrotra et al., 2016); the enactment of policy documents and its adverse effects in both urban (Burnett et al., 2015) and rural (Mantler et al., 2020) settings in Canadian shelters; and the neoliberal management of domestic violence shelters in the U.S. (Finley & Esposito, 2012) and more recently, at private shelters in Sweden (Lauri & Lauri, 2024). This study, however, uniquely looks at how language concretely plays out in the daily operations within the crisis center and builds on the literature that exposes the fault lines of the NPIC in the U.S. context. This research also serves to expand the work of IE as a vital investigative research lens examining institutions.
Background: The Nonprofitization of the Battered Women's Movement Within the U.S.
Historically within the U.S., the struggle for women's safety from IPV was brought into the national discourse with the Battered Women's Movement (BWM), part of the broader Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The momentum of the BWM's efforts resulted in increased numbers of women who came forward to share stories of their experiences with intimate violence and rape, to seek refuge, and to leave abusive relationships. By the 1980s, what had been a grassroots social and political movement transformed into a set of individualized and professionalized social issues; within the BWM this was characterized by the rise of 501(c)3 funded crisis centers that relied on state funding and legislation (Durazo, 2017). Funding restrictions create “targeted constituents” (Munshi & Willse, 2017, p. xvi), creating a process of clientization (Gubrium & Järvinen, 2015). Durazo (2017) calls this transformation as belonging to the larger “nonprofitization of social movements” (p. 117). The revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were met with state repression, especially toward Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and US-based 3rd world liberation movements (Rodriguez, 2017). This repression was part of the exponential growth of the policing apparatus that went in tandem with President Johnson's War on Poverty. The War on Poverty launched in 1964 with the Economic Opportunity Act increasing siloed-single issue social welfare programs (Hinton, 2016) and thus, the beginning of the nonprofitization, bureaucratization, and professionalization of what were larger connected social movements (Durazo, 2017).
Reagan's presidency pushed further nonprofitization, with the amping up of 1970s neoliberal policies resulting in huge slashes to welfare programs and the dismantling of social safety nets (Munshi & Willse, 2017). Nonprofits had to assume more responsibility for social welfare with these cutbacks and were forced to compete for money due to increasingly scarce public funds (Durazo, 2017; Kivel, 2017). Given these changing socio-political dynamics, along with the increased demands of victims and a liberal White middle-class leadership, the BWM began to rely on and request financial assistance from the state in order to meet funding needs such as additional shelters and services that could potentially help women fleeing violence (Richie, 2012).
Today, these centers across the U.S. often bear the brunt of responsibility for supporting victims of IPV and helping to manage the fallout in women's lives after leaving an abusive relationship – especially serving low/no-income women who are less resourced. These centers are equipped with professionally trained “advocates” and 24-h hotlines; in many centers, there are also transitional shelter spaces, legal services, and community education programs. What began as a more multi-faceted grassroots movement transformed into a professionalized single-issue problem with narrowed services and restricted eligibility requirements.
Literature Review
Dorothy Smith's Use of Institutional Ethnography
Greatly influenced by feminist struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987) initially sought to create a “sociology for women” that would depart from the historically male-dominated field of conventional sociologies. Smith's (2005) “alternative sociology”(p. 50) shifts the gaze of research investigation onto institutional processes that organize and affect the everyday, particularly within the broader relations of capitalism. Smith, influenced by a Marxist scientific approach, wanted to make visible the social relations that “coordinate people's actions…often without their conscious knowledge” (Campbell & Gregor, 2004, p. 31). According to Smith (2004), dominant societal ideas are realized and observable in discourse, a predominant consideration in IE. This discourse is embedded in the actual everyday activities of people and especially in the materiality of language (via talking, interviews, and/or documents and text). Smith focused on the active participation of individuals in discourse: how language concretely plays out in the daily operations of the institution under study and how people use, produce, and activate talk and text to organize and execute their daily work activities (Campbell & Gregor, 2004; Smith, 1999). These discourses are embedded within particular institutions and workers “enact this discourse and bring it to life” (Carpenter & Mojab, 2017, p. 102). While individual people may arrive at their workplace with “distinctive histories” and “distinctive perspectives” (like the advocates at the crisis center), these workers and their perspectives can become transformed and coordinated through overarching and dominant language of the institution (Smith, 2006, p. 65). Smith coined the term “textually-mediated social organizations” to describe this process of coordination (Campbell & Gregor, 2004).
In her foundational work, Smith delved into the organizational and ideological components of public schools as it relates to the work that single mothers do to manage their children's education. In her own life, Smith (1987) felt the rupture between managing her child's education and the school's dominant discourse that labels single parents as “defective” and less capable. Through interviews with other single mothers, she investigated how single mothering is done under life conditions that do not always allow single mothers to do what public schools expect of parents. Smith's work offered important insight into the overall relations of schooling within capitalism. For example, the term “single parent” provides the school personnel with particular ideology – the educational struggles that the child may experience are pinned on the household arrangement and often the single mother, thereby ignoring broader societal conditions (Grahame, 1998). Smith (1987) illustrated how schools are organized in ways that depend on parents (and especially mothers) for supplementary support in teaching and learning outside of school: homework, supplies, social engagements, and so on. Schools, Smith found, often offered no outside help for those single parents working full-time and living in under-resourced communities. Her analysis shows both how inequality arises in the school and points to solutions that involve institutional school changes rather than ‘fixing’ single mothers. Smith's initial work provided an outline for the approach and has matured and developed over subsequent decades (DeVault, 2006).
Institutional Ethnography in Practice
Similar to Smith's work on single mothers, Alison Griffith's (2006) work examines single parent family discourse, particularly how these families are constructed as different – broken, with problems. The single parent family is a social problem while the nuclear two parent family within capitalism is the norm. In a similar vein, Luken & Vaughan (2014) investigate the public discourse through the early twentieth century around single family suburban homes as the best setting for child rearing; numerous institutions from advertising to academics to home builders to government agencies participated in propping up the American Dream business of suburbia.
Following the example of Smith's foundational work, early IE studies explored how the discursive practices and policies of people doing “women's work” coordinate work activities and shape the execution and reproduction of organizational practices and biases within the broader context of a capitalist economy (DeVault, 2018). Ng's IE (1988) of an employment agency in Canada serving immigrant women uncovered the way in which the employment agency she volunteered for “came to function on behalf of the state apparatus in organizing and producing immigrant women as a distinctive kind of labour, as ‘commodities’ in the Canadian labour market” (p. 21). Ng emphasized text-mediated processes within her study and analyzed how these government-funded employment agencies’ written protocols mediated the relationship between the worker and immigrant women. Funding provided by the state required new sets of accounting procedures that resulted in employment counselors necessarily having to shift their focus from the full reality of immigrant women's lives to the agencies’ checklist of protocols. Rather than concentrating on the women's concerns about jobs, the counting of job placements and the government's formalized accountability systems of data collection superseded the counseling and personal interactions with these immigrant women. These women were largely placed into low-paid, gendered jobs such as domestic service and assembly line work, “essential [jobs] for the continuous accumulation of capital” (1988, p. 12).
Timothy Diamond (1984, 1992) conducted IE while he worked as a nursing assistant in two different nursing homes in Chicago. Diamond's work examined the way in which nursing and care-work are dictated by the administrative processes in these homes necessary to the functioning of the larger for-profit capitalist healthcare system. Diamond's (1984) time working in the nursing homes uncovered how the language around nursing shortages was woven into the capitalist administration of the hospital – nurses were often scapegoated for shortages, sparing others from looking at how the logic of a capitalist hospital structure produces overwork, bad working conditions, compressed budgets, and therefore, shortages. Gerald de Montigny (1995), who also studied under Dorothy Smith, used IE to focus on institutional discourse within social work. The tensions he felt between his training as a social worker and his own working-class background propelled him to investigate social work's imposition of classifying and categorizing social problems and people. He consistently found that the child welfare sector laid the blame on individuals for their struggles and lost the connection between structural injustices that produced conditions such as poverty or unemployment. De Montigny (1995) argued that dominant ideological practices (such as blaming the victim) are embedded within social work organizations and that language plays a key determinant for service delivery.
Examples of IE and its focus on discourse are found within IPV studies. For instance, similar to de Montigny and his discussion of specialized language within social work, Canadian antiviolence activist Gillian Walker (1990) describes “the development of appropriate language” that is part of the professionalized management of IPV (p. 10). She utilized IE to show the contradictions she experienced as a professional in the antiviolence field. For instance, the term “domestic violence” originates in police work and marks a specific bureaucratic language that prompts a certain type of legal response, a response that may not necessarily be the safest for the victim (Walker, 1990). Professional language around the issue of violence against women places “the actual experience into a set of conceptual practices and bureaucratic processes that do a particular kind of work” (Walker, 1990, p. 11). This bureaucracy can entangle women in harmful ways, as illustrated in Tang and Wang's (2014) IE work on Vietnamese immigrant women fleeing abusive situations in Taiwan. These women are often structurally constrained by the very laws that are meant to protect them – discrimination around gender, class, and nationality affecting the delivery of services. Ellen Pence, whose contributions to the movement to end violence against women are well-known in the field, used IE to look at just this problem of bureaucratic language that Walker described. Pence (2001) examined how practitioners in the police and court systems have work processes that erase women's experiences of violence and often put them at greater risk. A focus for Pence was on texts that coordinate these activities often obscuring the actual experience of a woman and turning her into an objectified case (Pence, 2001; Sadusky et al., 2010). A result of Pence's work was the Safety Audit, which gives the community a tool to work from the standpoint of the women rather than a standardized protocol – what became known as “coordinated community responses”(Edleson, 2010, p. 981).
Over the past several decades, IE has expanded not only within sociology but also into a number of other disciplines such as nursing, social work, education, environmental studies, and health (Luken, 2021). Smith (2005) writes that her “sociology for women…has necessarily been transformed into a sociology for the people” (p. 10). IE can raise consciousness about the social organization that shapes our everyday lives; it can make visible and link our often seemingly separated and siloed struggles. In doing so, researchers can aid in not only showing how inequities arise and how oppression is linked to the larger political economy, but they can also point to solutions that are focused on changing institutions rather than individuals.
Methods
Research Setting
The qualitative study was conducted over eight months at a rural crisis center in New England. Emily's House sprung up from an initial grassroots volunteer network that coalesced in the 1960s to help find safety and support for women experiencing violence in the home. Paralleling the trajectory of many grassroots crisis networks throughout the country, Emily's House was formally established in the early 1970s with the help of federal funding. Today, Emily's House has shelter spaces to provide emergency housing to victims and their children fleeing imminent violence from an abusive partner. Other services include legal and housing advocacy, a weekly support group, community education and outreach, youth programming, sexual assault hospital accompaniment, and a 24-h hotline. The center supports all victims of IPV, regardless of gender identity.
Positionality
I was brought to this research by my own discontent in the field of IPV where I worked as a crisis advocate for over 10 years. Within IE, researchers have often developed their research interest by “problematizing the situation and the setting of [the] study” before entering the field site (Campbell & Gregor, 2004, p. 96). I understood only too well how the professionalization of the field results in IPV as a siloed social issue. I bore witness to, and reluctantly participated in, the ways in which professionalization shapes decision-making policies regarding service delivery and adversely affects some survivors’ lives and wellbeing. As a White woman who spent over 15 years in rural New England, it was important for me to conduct the research in a predominantly White area and to reflect on how race has affected the antiviolence movement. This decision comes from a historical acknowledgment of how the White and middle-class led antiviolence movement has continually failed and harmed women of color. All advocates at the center are White, middle-class, and college-educated women between the ages of 28 and 62. Although not the focus of this paper, it is important to note that the majority of the survivors interviewed and/or engaged in services with the crisis center are low/no-income White women and experiencing hardships such as homelessness, substance use, and/or mental health struggles. While I do not struggle with these issues, I acknowledge the inevitable power differential between researcher and participant. Additionally, I have been an avid advocate for this population and a trained advocate for over 10 years. It was evident that my interviewees (both advocates and survivors) trusted me to capture their stories and use their voices ethically within the research.
Data Collection
Data collection for this subset includes: 1) eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews of Emily's House employees; 2) participant observation; and 3) document collection. I used NVivo 12 data management system to organize my interview transcripts, field notes, and document collection. All identifiers (names, locations, organizations) within my data were changed to protect the identity of research participants and Emily's House. In a formal letter and presentation to Emily's House prior to beginning fieldwork, I outlined my research objectives, including the intention of interviewing individual employees along with observation of center work. I was clear that my focus was on discourse, “best practices” of the center, and how the center navigates bureaucratic protocols. I told employees that they could have access to my dissertation and three employees requested and read the entirety of the completed work. My request to conduct research at the center was supported by all employees and I negotiated an eight-month, unpaid advocate position. Seeing that I was already a trained advocate, I seamlessly entered the center, answered hotline calls and met with survivors during my time there. Study protocols were reviewed and approved by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Institutional Review Board (IRB).
A total of eight in-depth, semi-structured and open-ended interviews were conducted over an eight-month period (November 2020 to June 2021). The eight interviews were with the employees of Emily's House (one director and seven advocates). Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Transcriptions were completed by a combination of trained research team members and professional transcription services. Inclusion criteria for interview participants included: 1) being employed full-time at Emily's House and 2) being at least 18 years old. Sociodemographic data was collected on age, race, and ethnicity, and how many years they had worked at Emily's House. Advocates all identified as White and are between the ages of 28 and 62. Advocates’ employment history ranged from six months to 35 years. The interviews focused on five key topics: 1) personal history regarding how each employee got involved in crisis work and their meaning making around “feminism”; 2) role at Emily's House and description of each employee's daily work activities; 3) the relationship between bureaucratic processes (including paperwork, documents, policies, and regulations), decision making processes, and service delivery; 4) thoughts on IPV and the carceral system; and 5) strengths and weakness of Emily's House. This paper focuses on topic #3. With these interviews, I implemented a member-checking process (Rossman et al., 2017); transcriptions were given back to employees to review – three advocates sent me clarifications and additions to their transcript. Through these interviews, I was able to probe deeper into each employees’ thoughts on language, definitions, and work processes at Emily's House.
Participant observation in my project was specifically related to Emily's House daily work. My method of field notes was guided by the “thick description” necessary to adequately capture the work processes in Emily's House (Geertz, 2001). I recorded daily notes based on observations of work activities, staff meetings, and informal conversations. I captured descriptions of the everyday practices, delivery of services, and organizational language re/produced at Emily's House. Guided by the practices well-known in the field of ethnography (Emerson et al., 2011), I relied largely on notes and in-process analytical memos, mostly written up outside of my time in the office so as not to interrupt daily activities and conversations taking place at Emily's House. However, when meetings were conducted virtually, I was able to take in-time notes and capture direct quotes by employees. Text collection included the center's training manual for new advocates, mandatory reporting forms on service recipients, housing eligibility forms for state assisted housing, restraining order paperwork used in the local court system, website and social media content, and brochures and other promotional materials for community education events.
Data Analysis
Data analysis began with developing themes reflective of investigating the research questions. This paper focuses on one dominant theme – “institutional language and policy.” I used the collected coded incidences of this theme to operationalize what Campbell and Gregor (2004) call the “explication” process of IE, a distinguishing feature of data analysis in IE (p. 59). The explication process draws out meaning from the data collection and facilitates the inquiry into the power relations of the institution under study. Explication requires two levels of data analysis, whose linkages are exposed by the researcher (Campbell & Gregor, 2004). Close reading of the interviews and fieldnotes enable thematic coding to take place in the entry level data. Here, I extricated incidences of the advocates and director's own discourse that reflected institutional policy and the differences that lay between them as a staff. Second-level data delves into the power relations of the broader setting by examining texts and discourses produced in the institutional setting to reveal the way in which employees’ (here, advocates’ and director) activities are organized. In my second level data, I particularly examine the ways advocates’ and the director's discourse – and here, “imminently fleeing” – influences their delivery of services and maintains and reproduces the bureaucratic pitfalls of the NPIC.
I looked for ruptures between what advocates believed and espoused in their individual interviews and the activities they had to carry out, regardless of whether they individually agreed with or supported these activities. These activities are at times driven by the text-based policies of Emily's House. Through the “activation of texts” – for example, policies regarding shelter – advocates, even if they individually disagree, “sustain and support” the institution and the reproduction of who gets what services (Balcom et al., 2021, p. 1539). In my data analysis, I continually looked at dominant organizational ideological practices, compared with individual ideologies, and traced how ideas were executed in actual practice documented via my fieldnotes. The results are showcased via three illustrative survivor examples of how the activation of “imminently fleeing” adversely played out at the crisis center. I identify these survivors using the pseudonyms Shelley, Jodie, and Andrea.
Study Challenges
An overarching challenge of my study was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic affected my ethnographic ability to consistently capture daily activities at Emily's House therefore observation of in-person service delivery was, at times, curtailed. To address this challenge, I concentrated on writing fieldnotes at each virtual staff meeting in which service delivery and women's situations were discussed. Since my investigative lens was largely on the discourse of Emily's House, this approach sufficed, as virtual meetings granted more time for in-time notes. For four months of my eight-month fieldwork time, workers staggered their hours in the office to adhere to COVID-19 prevention practices. One benefit of this staggered set-up was that I was afforded more time to spend individually or in small groups with advocates and could have deeper conversations about the work of the center, something that would have been more difficult with everyone in the office. The shorter time-period in the field, due to COVID-19, narrowed the scope of the study and forced me to place parameters around which service providers I interviewed. I chose to interview all seven advocates and the director of Emily's House. Given more time, I would have expanded institutional interviews to include the Board of Directors and other advocates at sister organizations throughout New England. The Board of Directors is a vital piece of 501(c)3s, and these interviews could provide insight into how board activities and discourse impact the day-to-day of a crisis center. Interviews at sister organizations could provide comparison analysis.
Results
The project's findings demonstrate how the discursive practice of “imminently fleeing” operates to deny shelter to certain women. In this section, I will begin with how crisis center advocates defined, understood, and struggled with the term “imminently fleeing.” This is followed by the survivor accounts of Shelley, Jodie, and Andrea, which provide illustrative examples of the way advocates’ adherence to definitional terms trumps survivors’ descriptions and the full reality of their lives, potentially placing them in more harm.
What is “Imminently Fleeing?”
Amy, who had been with Emily's House for eleven years and was the primary housing advocate, defined the shelter's eligibility criteria: [W]e provide shelter space to all survivors, regardless of their gender. I don’t want to call it criteria, but it is, in a sense, criteria. Someone has to be imminently fleeing domestic violence or sexual abuse or stalking…So, fleeing a domestic violence situation and/or have lost their housing due to domestic violence or sexual violence. That's the fundamental screening criteria. Survivors also need to be actively fleeing. If someone left their relationship three months ago and hasn’t been able to put housing together and has been bouncing around with friends, that becomes an issue of homelessness at some point. It doesn’t mean that we can’t provide support but, in that situation, we would most likely refer that person to the homeless shelter. Each survivor's situation is so unique, because there could also be a person who fled three months ago, but now the abuser is texting and threatening them, and it feels unsafe. In that situation, we would reconsider that three-month timeframe, and possibly bring them into shelter.
Molly, another housing advocate at Emily's House, worked closely with Amy on housing and shelter. Molly remarked that shelter screening is “a little bit murky.” She expressed her confusion: Because you know, it's a length of time thing. And that's something that I've been unclear about, because it's come up a couple times where I'm like, what's the cut off? When does the problem move from being intimate partner violence to just being homelessness? And I guess safety is the answer to that. But you could argue that if somebody's homeless, they're not particularly safe, period. It will always bother me that with all of the homelessness that we have, all of the people who are without a space to be, that we now have three [shelter spaces] that are often empty. Let's put COVID aside for a while, because that was true when we moved into our new office space. That upstairs sat empty for months. I would say that part of our organizational decision about some of this is about sustainability. If we were to say everyone could come and stay with us for two years, or, it doesn't matter when you left your abuser, we would only be able to help based on our resources, right? A handful of people would drain, we would be completely done. I understand that we need to keep our focus on domestic and sexual violence, truly, but I think how we define that, how we screen for that, how we most times necessitate that somebody had a real recent experience, not that somebody's entire life has been upended by ongoing violence against them starting from childhood. We have these arbitrary division places in how we understand somebody's risk, and then how we respond to meeting that need. I’ve noticed that trend in our organization that somebody left six months ago, if that person hasn’t been stalking or looking for them, then it may be homelessness and no longer domestic violence. I think the message, then, when somebody has reached out to us and she's not running within an inch of her life, that we can’t make that happen, I think that message has a ripple effect. I think that sometimes we will bend for a person who we've determined is worthy of bending for and other times, we don't bend based on various things that I might not even be able to articulate in this moment. But even, like, how they sound; like, if they sounded like they were maybe under the influence. I feel like sometimes [giving services] has to do with whether we perceive that the person is doing as much as they possibly can, to not have to have that resource from us? You know what I mean? And that doesn't feel good, either. Because it's, like, everyone's always doing the most they can.
Every employee at Emily's House expressed wanting to provide the best service delivery possible and wishes the organization could do more. For instance, housing advocate Amy remarked on the attempt to make shelter eligibility flexible: “we’re always trying to screen people into shelter and not screen them out. I think that's a really important thing in our work, to just stay in conversation with survivors, to see if shelter is the right option.” However, as one of the newer advocates, Scarlett, pointed out, the center can be quick to deny shelter when other struggles are present: I think that sometimes the violence that survivors are facing is so vast and coming from so many different angles that there might be intimate partner violence and it might not be the main focus of the conversation. I think that sometimes if the safety concern isn’t first and foremost from the abusive partner, then we can be quick to say this isn’t our work.
Shelley
I activated the institutional definition of “imminently fleeing” while on the phone with Shelley, who was seeking shelter in December 2020. Prior to the call, advocate, Scarlett relayed to me that Shelley had called three months ago. Scarlett recalled how Shelley had been made to sleep out in the yard by her boyfriend, and he would take her disability check and give her $20 as an allowance. When Shelley answered my call, she was sitting on a bench in the parking lot of a local grocery store. She said she had nowhere to go because restaurants were closed due to COVID. She had been walking around the grocery store and was eventually asked to leave. A friend had paid for a motel room for two nights, and she could not check in until 1pm.
I proceeded to ask Shelley the necessary questions to determine shelter eligibility, which included establishing a timeline of abuse. Two weeks prior, her father in New Hampshire had contracted COVID, and she had gone to see him. When she returned home her boyfriend had kicked her out. Before she left for New Hampshire they had, as Shelley described, been “arguing.” She had seen her boyfriend yesterday; he had picked her up and taken her to get cigarettes. This reminded her of how much she did not like him. The next time before asking him for a ride, she would “walk 10 miles instead.”
Despite Shelley calling three months ago in which she did describe abuse, (i.e., making her sleep in the yard and taking her disability check), in this conversation she did not mention any recent abuse. “Arguing,” yes, but nothing that would currently meet the definition of IPV in accordance with Emily's House's view. There was nothing Shelley had conveyed that would suggest imminent danger. I inquired about any recent abuse from her boyfriend. I began categorizing immediately. She spoke of no recent abuse and indicated that she did not harbor any fear of him. These are two factors according to Emily's House that demonstrate that Shelley is not “imminently fleeing” violence nor would she be defined as losing her housing due to IPV. Her boyfriend had kicked her out, but based on the way that Shelley presented it, this was not linked to abuse. Shelley had experienced abuse at one point, however not recently. Shelley did not qualify for shelter. While I wanted to offer shelter, I knew her descriptions did not fit the official Emily's House criteria for imminently fleeing violence. I directed her to the local homeless shelter and encouraged her to call back if anything else arose with her boyfriend.
After Shelley asked why we could not shelter her, I responded by saying that we had to “reserve those spaces for women in imminent danger” (a phrase I have used countless times to redirect women who do not fit into our categorical definitions). She took the homeless shelter information and thanked me for the support. Later, I called Amy, the housing advocate, to debrief, and said that I had felt uneasy about not offering shelter to Shelley. Amy asked some follow-up questions about how recent the violence was and if the breakup was amicable. The breakup was mutual, and Shelley had indicated no recent experience of violence. Amy told me that I made the “right call.”
Jodie
One afternoon, I received a call from a nurse at the local hospital who said a woman, Jodie, was there and wanted to talk with us. Jodie had been drugged by her ex-boyfriend and been held in an apartment for a week. She was able to call the police and they took her to the hospital. Her ex-boyfriend was arrested and as it turns out, there was already a restraining order in place. The past summer, her ex had beaten Jodie; Emily's House had assisted in relocating her to a town in Vermont, where she had friends. She had returned a week ago to go to a medical appointment and pick up medication. According to Jodie, her ex had contacted her, and she said “being the idiot I am, I let him back in.” On the phone, I helped her strategize a plan to get her back to her friends.
After my call I checked in with the housing advocate, Amy. Amy told me that Jodie had stayed in the shelter last year for a short period of time and “kinda disappeared” – meaning, she was staying at the shelter but not in regular contact with advocates. Emily's House transitioned her out of shelter and helped her get to her friends in another town. Amy described the current situation as “tricky” because Jodie now did not lose current housing due to IPV. Amy felt it was best for us to get her back to her friends again. There seemed to be an underlying issue about Jodie that I was not privy to. Amy told me that Jodie “would not do well in the motel here” due to her history of substance use and that she “would not do well in our shelter.” Amy was “not inclined” to shelter Jodie again. Amy spoke with Kim, the director, about the situation, and Kim reiterated Amy's sentiment: “We really should not have her come into shelter.” It appeared the only option Emily's House would consider was to provide transit back to Jodie's friend's house.
I spent time working out bus routes. Schedules were slim. At this time with COVID, Amtrack was not operating at all in Vermont. I booked a motel room and organized the bus information for the next day. Amy told me to “really emphasize” to Jodie that we could only do one motel night, and she would need to leave on the bus the next day and contact the crisis center in that area. Amy's rationale for not putting her in the shelter and insistence on only one motel night was that Jodie did not lose her housing due to IPV. We did not hear from Jodie the next morning, but later in the week she called and was still in our area. A friend had paid for extra days at the motel, and she was now seeing if we could shelter her. Amy denied Jodie a shelter stay. Debriefing on the phone call at a subsequent staff meeting, Amy said that it was “her [Jodie's] choice” to come down here, she was not “imminently fleeing.”
Andrea
Differing ideas on eligibility can lead to contentious decision making regarding who gets shelter, perhaps best exemplified in the story of Andrea. Andrea experienced physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, whom she left in 2018. At the time of her contact with Emily's House in June 2021, she was reaching out for legal help around child custody. Andrea wanted to help regaining custody of her children, for whom she only had visitation rights. The children lived full-time with her ex-husband; since she left in 2018, she had been couch-surfing, sometimes staying in her car. Andrea worked night shifts at UPS, and she could not afford childcare. She also suffered from PTSD, revealing that she experiences incontinence when she has to be near her ex-husband during child exchanges. Paige was helping her with the custody matter and wanted Emily's House to offer Andrea a shelter space – a “safe landing place” for her to get her life together, even though she was not currently fleeing violence. Given the level of violence Andrea had experienced in the past, she reasoned that Andrea needed an “off-ramp to being in survival mode.” When Paige brought this suggestion to a staff meeting there were only three survivors housed in all three shelter facilities.
Both the director, Kim, and the housing advocate, Amy, felt that bringing Andrea into shelter would be a “stretch.” Shelter eligibility is strictly linked to acute crisis, not a chronic condition. They wanted to know why Andrea had not been able to acquire stable housing since 2018 and suggested instead that Emily's House could help her with housing applications and move-in money that was available through COVID-related state relief funds. During the meeting, Kim noted that Paige was coming from an “emotional space” in her advocacy for Andrea and that just because shelter space was available did not mean it could be offered. Paige said she was thinking “logistically” – Emily's House had the resources to help Andrea.
A decision was made that Emily's House would not provide Andrea a shelter space, since she was not imminently fleeing violence and had left the IPV situation in 2018; her precarious housing situation was deemed no longer related to IPV. This precarity Andrea faced could be due to a number of reasons, including the rising rents and low vacancy rates in rural New England – such factors were seen as a housing issue, not an IPV-induced issue. Amy met with Andrea to help her with housing applications. Later that morning, I spoke with Amy about the situation. She described experiencing a lot of the stress and weight of responsibility with these sheltering decisions. Amy repeated that providing Andrea a shelter space would be a “stretch” and said that the next day there could be four survivors “fleeing” who needed sheltering. The statement echoed Kim's in its emphasis on stringent and arbitrary timelines and scarcity of resources. Like Shelley and Jodie, Andrea was also deemed not “appropriate” for a shelter stay; Emily's House was not a place for women needing a temporary landing space, even if they had experienced IPV in the past.
Discussion
Findings reveal how professional discourse can have pervasive effects on survivors’ lives. It is important to note that definitional categories and professionalized language are not intentionally malicious; they are part and parcel of the bureaucratic social work landscape (de Montigny, 1995), as is the pathologizing of individual suffering (Finley & Esposito, 2012; Lauri & Lauri, 2024). Regardless of individual advocates’ dissent regarding service delivery decisions, the bureaucratic rules that emerge from siloed social services turn advocates into investigators, give precedence to a staunch and stringent institutional officialdom, and shape the parameters of practice. As a participant observer, I not only saw this process play out but also enacted it myself in encounters with survivors. Definitional practices in place at the center added more precarity to an already vulnerable situation. Guided by the sentiments of scarcity and eligibility rigidity, story details – especially timeline of the abuse – were often investigated in minute detail.
The lived survivor experiences of Rebecca (from the opening), Shelley, Jodie, and Andrea and the consequent denial of shelter put all of them at continued risk of violence and other harms. Their stories exemplify the need to take a holistic perspective on the “vast” violence that survivors face, as cogently articulated by the advocate, Scarlett. Each of these women experienced IPV whether it was current or in the past. All four women were also simultaneously experiencing other challenges, such as substance use and/or PTSD. All these women faced housing insecurity; women who are experiencing homelessness are at higher risk for all sorts of violence, especially sexual assault, and they could be susceptible to sex-trafficking (Posada-Abadía et al., 2021). Yet, each of these survivors was deemed not to be an appropriate victim for a shelter stay. As a participant researcher, I was also drawn into this set of relations as seen in the story of Shelley. With Shelley and my denial of shelter to her, I enacted here what De Montigny (1995) refers to as professional “re-channel and re-direct” within social work. I used kindness and warmth in my call with Shelley to “administer distanced bureaucratic policies” (p. 50).
Sociologist Donileen Loseke's (1992) early work on IPV survivors and shelter work in Canada looked at the “collective representation” of the battered woman. One component of this is the appropriateness of a woman's behavior – is she deserving of public sympathy? Is she a “good client?” Does she follow shelter rules? Does she want the services that the organization offers? In receiving services, is she grateful? An individualistic ideology permeating capitalist society can result in advocates blaming the victim (Ryan, 1976), and the vicissitudes of women's everyday lives are turned into sites of deviance. For instance, Jodie did not (according to some advocates) appropriately use her past shelter stay, thus affecting her subsequent request for shelter. In fact, the housing advocate Amy noted it had been Jodie's “choice” in coming to town, therefore implying it was Jodie's problem to figure it out. Undeserving survivors are therein blamed for so-called “bad choices,” as if individuals are structurally unconstrained; they become situated in ignorance of the historical trajectory of their lives. If a person makes “bad choices,” then that person is deemed undeserving of sympathy and of services. Rebecca, Shelley, Jodie, and Andrea do not conform to the expectations of a deserving victim and thus, the narrow definition of “imminently fleeing” is more easily and justifiably applied to exclude them.
In addition to deciphering who is a deserving victim, this discourse reinforces that shelter resources must be safeguarded. Knickmeyer (1972), whose early work on social work mirrors that of Smith's Marxist influences and approaches in developing IE, points out that the “scarcity of resources” argument frequented in social services is often “used to mollify dissident workers who are dissatisfied both with the quantity of services and resources to low-income people and with the manner in which these services are delivered” (p. 59). Advocate Paige was dissatisfied not only with the situation facing Andrea but with how shelter spaces are allocated. In this circumstance, the dominant organizational reply argues that resources are scarce, and thus rigid eligibility parameters must be constructed and applied. Knickmeyer (1972) writes that “social workers are in a dilemma: they want to provide relevant services to their clients, but are restricted from doing so by institutional policies” (p. 58). Like Amy had noted, they are always trying to screen people into shelter, not out. Yet Amy, who bears a large brunt of shelter decision-making, must adhere to the narrow eligibility requirements that have been shaped and reproduced by rigid definitions of IPV based on acute, singular crises rather than a long-range and holistic lens that places women's current situation within a context of systemic injustices (i.e., poverty, housing crisis, lack of resources for adequate healthcare).
Key Implications and Conclusion
The findings from this study reinforce findings in other literature on the NPIC, showing the problems with funding constraints and siloed services. This study is unique in that it looks directly at actual discourse activated within the professionalized crisis center. IE allows for an examination of bureaucracy and the discourse of crisis centers; these centers, while dedicated to helping survivors of violence, at the same time constitute an overlooked pathway of entanglement that impacts both the lives of low/no-income women and the available approaches to eradicating IPV. Adopting Smith's methodology enables us to explore how such shelters function as part of the NPIC and the impact they have on how the issue of IPV is addressed. In addition, this qualitative study adds to the growing use of IE as both a methodology and theoretical approach to critique the structural forces embedded within capitalism (Kearney et al., 2019) that wreak havoc on people's everyday lives. While often providing life-sustaining services and safety, the crisis centers as a bureaucratized 501(c)3, must be scrutinized structurally.
Loseke (1987) writes that we need to attend to women in their “full phenomenological realities,” rather than trying to fit survivors into stringently defined categories that can result in denial of needed services (p. 229). Service provision eligibility must and should be addressed; stretching definitions of “imminently fleeing” is a first step (see also Mehrotra et al., 2016). Center conversations at Emily's House worked to enhance advocacy skills, address individual biases, and discuss visions for better and more robust service provision. Advocate Paige spoke several times about “risk-taking,” that could happen at the center. Risk-taking could expand defined categories thus housing more survivors with varied experiences and timelines of abuse. Advocate training practices, although important, are not the only answer. The problem in actually attending to “full phenomenological realities” does not fully lie with individual advocates, despite incidents where sympathy (and a resource) is extracted or not bestowed (i.e., Rebecca, Andrea), or a survivor is blamed for her “bad” choices (i.e., Jodie).
Attending to people's full scope of suffering will take more than change within individual organizations. Social services within capitalism are part of the larger oppressive system – managing and providing sometimes temporary relief to those afflicted by capitalist forces (Jenkins, 2020). The analysis and work of advocates, therefore, must go beyond any individual crisis. Knickmeyer's (1972) approach to social work emphasizes that “organizing must go on in every social institution” amongst the workers to reject capitalist bureaucracy and ideology and work to transform social work sites and the conditions of people's lives (p. 64). Internal organizational critiques are just as vital. A broadened political-economic lens of women's overall suffering, that moves beyond a singular focus on IPV, is necessary to be able to transform siloed work sites into more expansive spaces. This work echoes that of Mehrotra and colleagues (2016) who contend that social work fails to pay enough attention to the political and economic factors that shape policies within crisis centers (and social work as a whole), therein depoliticizing IPV work. This paper answers their call for a structural analysis. Without such an analysis, research and practice are both constrained by individual neoliberal approaches to prevention and solutions.
Speaking on nonprofits, Gilmore (2017) writes, “Likely allies have all become constricted by mission statements and hostile laws to think in silos rather than expansively” (p. 51). A political-economic approach to crisis centers includes unpacking the history of professionalization and bureaucratization that arose to manage societal ills and unrest caused by neoliberal policies. A structural approach presents us with a better understanding of how social relations came to be organized and how we can untangle and re-organize them to better survivors’ lives. IE is a critical qualitative methodology/theoretical approach that will continue to illuminate the common siloed nature of the NPIC. IE used in this way can be a source of activism, propelling ideas, policy changes, and ways of organizing work processes that can address the larger societal structures and work toward bettering people's lives.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Graduate School (School of Public Health and Health Sciences Dean’s Office, Dissertation Fellowship Grant).
