Domestic Violence Awareness Month October 2022: Recommended Books

A comprehensive and timely resource for students, activists, educators, and advocates, Domestic Violence and Abuse: A Reference Handbook provides a rich and scholarly assessment of this important social issue while also including stories and profiles for a more personal understanding.

Whatever the number, domestic violence victims remain far too many for a preventable crime. More and more victims of intimate partner violence are reaching out to police, prosecutors and judges only to be sorely disappointed, even betrayed. While laws and programs have multiplied over the last few decades to address domestic violence, the country is getting safer for almost everyone except for women who have, or have had, abusive male intimate partners. Andrew R. Klein and Jessica L. Klein look at the criminal justice response to domestic violence across America today, ranging from police to prosecutors and courtrooms across the nation.

Your journey to healing and wholeness after domestic violence begins here. Domestic violence is about power and control. As a Black woman and a survivor of domestic violence, you have had your power taken away from you against your will. You are not alone, and there are tools you can use to feel whole and in control of your life again. Written by two psychologists and experts in BIPOC mental health, this book will show you how to start healing--mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

In this book Christine Murray carefully weaves her personal experiences as a survivor with her professional expertise as a counselor, community advocate, and researcher into a comprehensive guidebook for survivors of abuse.

Even if you haven't been hurt by domestic violence, someone you know has and wishes they could tell you about it. Perhaps you are a therapist, teacher, academic, or social worker who wants to help those who are suffering. Or maybe you are in an abusive relationship and need to know that you are not alone. The poems, memoirs, and creative nonfiction pieces collected here tell of real incidents of abuse, as well as of those who left destructive and unsalvageable relationships.

A groundbreaking overview of transgender relationship violence In the course of their lives, around fifty percent of transgender people will experience intimate partner violence in their relationships?including psychological, physical, or sexual abuse. In Transgender Intimate Partner Violence, Adam M. Messinger and Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz bring together a diverse group of scholars, service providers, activists, and others to examine this widespread problem, shedding light on the often-hidden experiences of transgender survivors.

A trauma revolution is quietly sweeping social services in the United States. For women who have experienced domestic violence, proving that you are a "good victim" is no longer enough when navigating these institutions. Women must also show that they are recovering, as if domestic violence were a disease: they must show that they are transforming from "victims" into "survivors." Through archival research, life story interviews, and participant observation, The Politics of Surviving shows that "becoming" a survivor is full of contradictions, perils, politics, and pleasures.

A pioneering researcher and one of the world's foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing   Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology. Sadly, trauma sufferers frequently pass on their stress to their partners and children.   Renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain's wiring--specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust.

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman--through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness.

Nationally representative studies confirm that LGBTQ individuals are at an elevated risk of experiencing intimate partner violence. While many similarities exist between LGBTQ and heterosexual-cisgender intimate partner violence, research has illuminated a variety of unique aspects of LGBTQ intimate partner violence regarding the predictors of perpetration, the specific forms of abuse experienced, barriers to help-seeking for victims, and policy and intervention needs. This is the first book that systematically reviews the literature regarding LGBTQ intimate partner violence, draws key lessons for current practice and policy, and recommends research areas and enhanced methodologies.