Women's strategies for survival: Developing agency in abusive relationships

Abstract

The simultaneity of love and violence in the lived experiences of abused women forms the context within which these women construct meaning and develop agency. Utilizing grounded theory methodology (Glaser, 1978; Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987; Strauss and Corbin, 1990), this paper explicates these agentic processes by analyzing the strategies employed by 32 abused women, publically and privately, to mitigate the violence and its effects. By highlighting the contradictory duality in these relationships, the processes by which abused women strategize and develop agency to halt, change, and/or cope with the violence becomes analytically salient.