NEWS & ARTICLES
The October AAUW program, featuring guest speaker Alyce LaViolette, will delve into the causes and dynamics of violence in intimate relationships, with an emphasis on both male and female perpetrators. With extensive experience since 1978, LaViolette founded programs for abusive partners, has been an expert witness, and co-authored the best-selling book "It Could Happen to Anyone: Why Battered Women Stay." Passionate about her work, she encourages discussion and questions during her talks.
IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE!
For Alyce LaViolette ’69, ‘80, the issue of violence against women is deeply personal. In the 1970s, two women who were very close to her were raped by strangers. “That inspired me to study violence against women,” said LaViolette, a marriage and family therapist who’s also a domestic violence expert and scholar in women’s issues. And many of her classmates in graduate school were also “motivated to do that because of things that happened in their lives.”
Recurring Questions Under the Domestic Violence Prevention Act
Alyce D. LaViolette and Warren R. Shiell, Family Law News, Vol. 39, Issue 3, 2017
Section 22 on Family Law Form DV-130 provides that the court has discretion to order that a party attend a fifty-two-week batterer program approved by the probation department.
When is that appropriate and how should the party attend a batterer intervention program?
Assessing Risk With Perpetrators
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE REPORT, August/September, 2016
Alyce LaViolette started one of the first programs to work with perpetrators of domestic violence in 1979, at Women’s Shelter in Long Beach, CA. In this article, LaViolette shares her experiences in the clinical assessment of batterers in group therapy.
Assessing intimate partner violence: A Context Sensitive Aggression Scale
Journal of Child Custody, Volume 6, Issue 3-4, August 2009, pages 219-231, Alyce LaViolette
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, researchers began exploring the differences in men who physically abused their female intimate partners. Since that time, there has been an emergence of research on that topic which has led to the development of batterer typologies. These men were identified around the issues of behavioral characteristics, traits, emotional responses, and experiences. Shelter advocates, for the most part, have presented a relatively one-dimensional view of abusive men based on their experiences with battered women and their children. This author proposes a continuum of aggressive acts with the intention of creating a context that could aid in assessment and intervention when intimate partner violence (IPV) is an issue.
Batterers' Intervention: A View From the Trenches
By Alyce LaViolette
From the chapter in the book, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE OFFENDERS (editors Bob Geffner and Alan Rosenbaum).
Women's shelters and/or safe houses developed in almost all major population areas throughout the United States and abroad. The goals were to provide a safe environment for abused women and their children, to offer advocacy, counseling, and medical services, and to empower women to leave their abusers. While shelters continue to serve these and other critical needs and are an essential part of the service delivery system for battered women, they address only part of the problem. Left untreated, batterers often will continue to abuse their partners who leave shelters and return to the relationship.