ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the specific effects violence had on the children of the women and related issues concerning women's work and child rearing as a single parent. It deals with the question of the intergenerational cycle of violence, and provides insights into the more immediate effects of violence on children. The chapter discusses the women's ideas about how the battered women's movement might become more involved with women once they left the shelters. Cloward and Piven suggest that women's deviant tendencies are directed primarily toward themselves, a theory reinforced by the prevalence of suicidal tendencies among battered women. Children of homeless battered women were forced to remain out of school, and had to adjust to living with strangers in a shelter, or were caught in intergenerational conflicts concerning child rearing when living with grandparents. Women's violence toward children connected to their own powerlessness in the larger sociocultural milieu, and their absorption of feelings of worthlessness that some men reinforce.
