Child Protection and Battered Women's Services: From Conflict to Collaboration

The past three decades have witnessed a rapid expansion of programs for abused children and for battered women. Despite evidence that child maltreatment and woman battering often occur in the same families, these service sectors mostly operate independently of each other and are sometimes in conflict. There are scant data available on either the current practices of child protection workers and battered women's advocates in these cases or on the varying perspectives that bring them to conflict or collaboration. This article reports the results of an effort to systematically probe the practices and views of these two groups of workers in an effort to pinpoint ways in which current practices might evolve toward greater cooperation. Six focus group interviews involving 23 child protection workers and battered women's advocates were conducted. This article describes our methodology and results and concludes with a discussion of the future potential for resolving outstanding issues so that closer collaboration might develop.