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...million women the United States experience physical, emotional, sexual, and/or financial abuse from intimate partners according to crime data collected by the US Department of Justice (Greenfeld, Rand, Craven, et al., 1998). These data do not reflect battered women who do not contact law enforcement. For tens of thousands of battered women, leaving the abusive partner is the only way to break the cycle of violence. However, leaving a violent intimate partner is fraught with peril, and can be a very risky process with both psychological and physical dangers (Campbell, Sharps, Sachs, & Yam, 2003; Campbell, Soeken, McFarlane, & Parker, 1998). There are many barriers to safely leaving abusive relationships (Sheridan, 2001).
The purpose of this study is to further explore two barriers to leaving abusive relationships by further pilot testing two clinical screening tools that have preliminary reliability and validity developed by the co-investigators (Sheridan, 1998; Williams-Evans, Evans, Call-Schmidt, & Williams, 2000). The first barrier is harassment from the abuser (an external source) (Sheridan, 1998; Sheridan, 2001), with the second barrier being a history of experiencing abuse as a child (internal sources) (Williams-Evans, Evans et al., 2000).
HARASSMENT OF ABUSED WOMEN
Many women in the process of leaving abusive relationships describe a pattern of behaviors by abusive males that has been labeled harassment (Sheridan, 1998). From extensive interviews with abused women leaving abusive relationships, Sheridan (1998) developed from these lived experiences the following definition of harassment:
Harassment is defined as a persistent pattern of behavior by an intimate partner that is intended to bother, annoy, trap, emotionally wear down, threaten, frighten, terrify and or coerce a person with the overall intent to control choices and behaviors about leaving the abusive relationship (Sheridan, 1998, p. 294).
>From a qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of women trying to leave abusive relationships who were being harassed, Sheridan (1998) developed Harassment in Abusive Relationships: A Self-report Scale (HARASS). The HARASS tool originally contained 54-items, but was psychometrically reduced to a 45-item version used in his dissertation research samples. The HARASS tool contains OFTEN and DISTRESS scales that measure how often a harassing behavior occurs and how distressing the behavior is perceived by the...
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