Violence Never Heals / Anthropologies of American Medicine: Culture, Power, and Practice (PDF)

Explores experiences with disability and aging for immigrant survivors of domestic violence across the
life course

Across the United States, one in three women experiences violence in their intimate relationships. More resources are now being devoted to providing these women with immediate care; but what happens to survivors, especially those from marginalized communities, as they grow older and grapple with the long-term effects? In Violence Never Heals, Allison Bloom presents a life-course perspective on the disabling experience of violence in Latina immigrant communities.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork performed in a Latina program at an Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) crisis center, Bloom offers insights into the long-term effects of systemic and gender-based violence, revealing that these experiences become subtly disabling long before old age. Drawing from her own background as a practitioner, Bloom further details how current IPV services fail to acknowledge and accommodate such effects, in large part because of their disproportionate focus on younger survivors and the particular development of the domestic violence services field. She offers both scholars and practitioners concrete strategies for how they can alter their approaches to better treat and mitigate the lifelong effects of domestic violence. Violence Never Heals addresses a glaring omission in IPV scholarship, providing both an aging-focused perspective on IPV as well as laying out concrete steps for how to implement this perspective in pursuit of more comprehensive treatment.