The focus of this criminological thesis is partner violence. More specifically the paper aims to research women’s shelters also known as women’s refuge and battered women’s shel-ter in relation to relationships and prevention of further partner violence.
The research questions that this paper aims to answer is as follows: What meanings do relationships have at shelters seen from the perspective of employees and how do em-ployees at shelters work with prevention.
To elaborate, explore and answer the research questions this study has incorporated two theoretical perspectives. The one theoretical perspective is Judy Kokkinns theory about the encounter between a social worker and a vulnerable group.
The other theoretical perspective is Tore Bjørgos theory about a model for prevention of crime.
The empirical findings are based on 7 interviews with employees who work at women’s shelters in various places in Denmark.
To shortly sum up the thesis results it became clear that relationships in the shelters were important to be able to help and support the women. Furthermore, the employees were also depending on their colleagues’ emotional support and understanding after difficult conversations with the women in the shelters. Relationships that turn into friendships could also be formed with other residents of the shelters. They could likely understand each other, because they were in the same situation as having been through partner violence themselves.
It became clear that the employees work with prevention of partner violence in two differ-ent ways. Inside of the shelters the employees used the method of processing the vio-lence the women were exposed to.
Outside of the women’s shelters employees used methods of information to the Danish population, presentations at schools and educational institutes about partner violence and teaching professionals about partner violence.
In the section of discussion, I have discussed the weaknesses and strengths in this thesis that involve too little existing research and not relevant enough research, and the strength of the theory about the encounter with vulnerable groups which can be analyzed in the empirical data.
I have discussed my results in relation to existing research which is deficient and not gen-eralizable to all women’s shelters in Denmark. It is only generalizable to the 6 women’s shelters I have researched.
Last and least I have also discussed the overall employee’s agreement that women’s shel-ters can prevent partner violence.
But the one employee who is critical about the role in which shelters can prevent partner violence, raises new research questions which gives rise to new research in the field.