Victims and survivors: Emerging vocabularies of motive for battered women who stay

This paper reviews the literature providing reasons for why battered women stay in abusive relationships and examines the emergence of images of battered women as survivors in early and contemporary activists' discourses, drawing on ideas from social constructionist approaches to social problems, identity, and deviance to explore this phenomenon. Most of the early representations of battered women I analyze emphasize their emotionality and their victimization, while the more recent constructions of this collective identity discussed here emphasize their rationality and their agency. Both,victim and survivor typifications provide accounts for why battered women stay in violent relationships, thus providing a vocabulary of motive for this oft-imputed deviance. Constructing battered women as survivors, however, may also remediate some of the stigma that can attach to victimization more generally. After situating victim and survivor discourses and considering how the image of a survivor may meet normative expectations that a victim image perhaps violates, I briefly discuss some implications of these alternate collective identities.