ABSTRACT
The first shelters for battered women were opened in the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. Those shelters provided women and children with a place to flee from the abuse they were suffering at home, and represented the first real effort to assist victims of intimate violence. Despite dramatic changes in how such violence is addressed over the years, the overall picture hasn’t shifted much in the interim. In the early days of the battered women’s movement, an average of three women were murdered every day in the United States by their husbands or boyfriends, or, more often, their ex-husbands or boyfriends. Despite the progress made in understanding the dynamics of abusive relationships and attempts to improve the means to address this crime, we are still, in 2016, losing at least three women a day to domestic violence.1 Often, entire families are murdered, along with extended family members and bystanders.
