Battered Women Need Refuges:
This is an edited version of an article published in Off Our Backs July 1981. The authors are Sybille Kappel and Erika Leuteritz. A selected bibligraphy of literature available on the subject in German, has also been included.
Most violence against women is taboo. It has been effectively suppressed from public attention by what can be described as a functional co-operation between the agencies of a patriarchical system and the ideological conditioning of women.
The West German women's aid movement is a part of the new world wide women's liberation movement. In the process of consciousness-raising, women realise that violence governs a large part of their lives, both as individuals and as members of society.
Underlying violence
According to the Federal Family Report, published in Cologne in 1977, " in nearly one half of German families (10 million), there are fights once a month , and in 5 million families they end in battering, the worst time being at weekends."
Existing crime statistics give vague and incomplete information on the relationship between offender and victim . For a bodily injury offense to be prosecuted, the victim must file a complaint against the batterer. This frigtens many women into inaction. Battering is a process in which the woman is unable t o defend herself before, during and after the offense and which makes her responsible for the bodily injury.
In March 1976, evidence of this kind of violence was collected at the International Tribunal On Crimes Against Women in Brussels. Later in the year, the National Congress on Violence Against Women in Munich, supplied more evidence of violence in all stages of women's life and discrimination
in all sectors of publiclife.
Violence against women is on different levels : direct physical violence; hidden violence in institutions, laws, morals; and internalized violence against ourselves. Violence against women is a structuring principle underlying the way life of modern western societies. It is due to unequal power distribution and is manifest in unequal opportunities.
"Physical violence therefore is only the tip of an iceberg, only a small, but most obvious part of the daily and takenfor- granted structural violence," stated the Cologne Women's House. The standard form of structural violence against women is safeguarded by the institutions of marriage and the family .
The German legal terminology even refers to the marital relationship as "violence". Instead of marital power, the term "eheliche Gewalt" explicitly speaks of violence. In trying to determine the causes for this violence, the Cologne women stated, " important is not the form in which violence is clothed , important are the relationships — cemented by society — in which women and men engage, or rather, are forced to engage."
The first women's aid project was started by six feminists in Berlin who worked as family counselors, psychologists, and social workers.
Creating safe houses
The task of the Berlin group was to make the problem public and to begin to look for ways to finance a house for battered women. Among themselves they did intensive consciousnessraising and became aware they were not only doing something for other women, but, by fighting one aspect of violence against women, also working on their own behalf. " A house for battered women is an expression of practical solidarity between women based on their shared experiences", they stated.
Federal and city governments and other social agencies of Berlin showed no interest in a women's house until the broadcast of Sarah Haffner's film "Screaming's Useless" — on battered women. It was only then that they decided to fund a model project for three years with 80 % federal and 20 % city funds.
A house was rented in October 1976 and opened in November. Contrary to the funding institutions ' will , the house was not called "crisis center " but "women's house". Any other designation, the women argued, would have left open the question of who or what was in crisis — the battering men or the battered women, or the society in which battering is tolerated, or even considered normal ?