the Women's Aid Movement in West Germany

Since it was a model-project, the Berlin house had to accept an Advisory Board composed of non-feminist women from public life to share responsibility with the feminists and to ensure a form of control over money.

Official support for women's groups initiating houses, was seldom granted. Most often it was refused by a two-step blockage : first, the group was asked to prove the problem's actual existence in the specific city; and when that was done, the problem's existence was admitted but it was said that the social administration could cope with it, due to an adequate number of municipal and other shelters.

Feminists oppose municipal homes set up for battered women, as their very structure tends to hinder women from finding their own way. Municipal homes offer help to the helpless and thereby impose the role upon their clients. Feminists argue that battered women are not helpless. These women have sometimes, for years and decades, found the means, developed strategies, to make an intolerable situation tolerable for themselves and their children. What battered women need is not "resocialization" into their former environment, but a house where they are safe, where they can find both medical and legal advice, and where they are encouraged to make decisions regarding their future.

Self-help basis

Thus women's aid groups set up their houses on a self-help basis. Women working in the house give newcomers information concerning the house and advise all women on legal and medical questions. Everything else is organized by the battered women themselves in weekly meetings. Tasks are distributed  and problems of mutual concern are discussed. The battered women answer the telephone and take care of newcomers at night and on weekends. They accompany each other to various social agencies, thereby making the experience more successful than by going alone.

Create shelters

What is more important in self-help, is the exchanging between women. They discover the battering they experience is common to all of them. Their conversations take on the character of consciousness-raising groups where they can finally discuss their hidden fears and their constant humiliations. This enables them to find out more about their needs and to explore new ways of organizing their own lives.

Self-awareness without men

Men are not allowed into any of the groups of houses. Men cannot be truly sensitive towards the typical kind of violence women experience, and consequently only women can really help women change their situation. Society in general has a positive conception of men and a negative one of women; both are internalized to a great extent by individuals. Whereas the battered woman's positive image of men is confronted with her negative experiences, her negative image of her own sex is reinforced whenever she experiences herself as being weak, and a victim. Therefore it is important for women to see that they can cope without men, that they can help each other, give each other security and thus learn to grow more independent from men.

It is fundamental to the concept of self-help that there is no hierarchy among the women working in the houses. All of the daily work, except working with the children, is done on a rotation principle. There is an informal agreement that all women should receive the same pay. Furthermore, everything is done to try and avoid creating new dependencies — on therapy, on the women of the initiating group or anyone else. A house for battered women is not a therapy center. The starting point of its organization must therefore be the potential self-determination of the women living in it, their capacity to solve problems and to help each other.

Avoiding social work

This is a dilemma the movement has become increasingly aware of : we started out by saying that all women experience violence and that changes can only come about on the basis of   sisterhood and self-help. The reality in the women's houses is different. Although they experience the structural violence against women, almost none of the woman working in the houses have experienced direct physical abuse. This had the effect of them taking on the role of listening to and advising those less privileged than they — a relationship that can be characterized as a hierarchy typical of traditional social work. Women are again doing "emotional work" by which is meant
that we offer and put to use on a professional basis the psychological and emotional abilities that we have learned in preparation for our roles as housewives and mothers. An emotional worker forgets herself and her own problems thinking them to be slight while concentrating all her efforts and emotional energies on her client. The result is an increasing emotional dependency between emotional worker and client, which obviously has nothing to do with self-help. A possible way out of this dilemma, that has been discussed since the beginning of the German shelter movement, might be to take self-help seriously and to have only battered women organizing the houses.

Money strategies

In order to increase funding prospects, all of the feminist groups and shelters in North-Rhine Westphalia have joined in a Working Group of Women's houses which also has the task of coordinating the flow of information between the group and of organizing regional and national meetings. There has already been a small success in that the state government of North-Rhine Westphalia has granted 1.5 million Deutsche Mark (app. US Dollar 750.000) to be used for paying women working in the women's houses; two women per house receive an official salary.

This however does not solve all financial problems. Most communities are still very reluctant to support a house operated by feminists; however, they can no longer close their eyes to the problem of battered women. Means and ways had to be found to show their awareness of the problem and at the same time to avoid having to support feminists. So far they have come up with three alternatives :

1) To grant financial support only according to Section 72 of the Federal Social Welfare Act which states, "Persons, whose special social difficulties hinder them from participating in community life, are to be granted help to overcome these difficulties, provided they are not able to do this with their own resources and facilities."

The feminist women's aid movement refuses all financial support on the basis of this article because:

— with this paragraph, battered women are forced to accept the status of a marginal group of society

— it is taken for granted that they are the ones with "social difficulties" and that they cannot cope with "life in community"; this can only refer to their having left their
husbands and their homes as otherwise Section 72 would not be applicable at all

— it is dangerous to acknowledge that battered women are utterly helpless because this can result in their not getting custody of the children

2) To ask other welfare organizations (catholic, protestant, workers' welfare, etc.) to open a shelter which will of course be supported financially.

3) To set up their own municipal shelters for battered women, in order to make the feminist groups superfluous. This strategy was also not very successful : in those cities where the feminists opened their own shelters, both houses were full. But, support from the population is very important as could be seen recently in Frankfurt, where the feminist shelter stood in danger of having to close after 2 years of effective work because of severe financial problems .

So while it is a good thing to have as many shelters as possible, the movement feels that after having practically forced the socio-political administration and bureaucracy to become aware of the problem, they opened their eyes even further and saw women combatting it independently, effectively and in a way that may even affect the basic structures of society. So now they try to re-integrate us into traditional social work which in effect means trying to cure the symptoms without getting at the causes and which is — in the long run — contrary and damaging to the women's movement and to our goals of basically changing society.

By Sibylle Kappel

Erika Leuteritz

Further literature :

Fischer, E. Lehmann, B., and StoffI, K : Gewalt gegen Frauen. Cologne 1977 : Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ISBN : 3-462-01188X

Frauenhaus Berlin (Ed.) : Frauen gegen Mannergewalt - Berliner Frauenhaus fijr mishandelte Frauen. Erster Erfahrungsbericht. Berlin 1978 : Frauenselbstverlag. Order from : Frauenbuchvertrieb GmBH, Mehringdamm 32-34,1000 BerIin 61.

Frauenhaus Koln (Ed.) : Nachrichten aus dem Ghetto Liebe — Gewalt gegen Frauen. Frankfurt 1980 : Verlag Jugend & Politik. ISBN : 3-88203-051-8. Pp. 6 / 7.

Haffner, Sarah : Frauenhauser — Gewalt in der Ehe und was Frauen dagegen tun. Berlin 1976 : Wagenbach. ISBN : 3-8031-2025X.

OhI, D., and Rosener, U. : Und bist du nicht willig... Ausmass und Ursachen von Frauenmishandlung in der Familie. Frankfurt-Berlin-Vienna 1979 Ullstein Materialien.
ISBN : 3-548-35021-6.

The fight continues

On 23rd August 1981 a Turkish woman was knifed to death by her husband in a battered women's refuge in Giessen. Continuously pursued by her husband, she had moved to the house from another refuge. After a while she had started to feel better, learn German and set about getting a work permit. However, her husband still followed, demanding to discuss  divorce and access to their two children. Now, after the murder, he is threatening to kill the friend who helped his wife escape from his violence.

At 11 o'clock at night, a man recently entered the women's refuge in Koblenz where he tried to murder his wife with a knife. She was taken to hospital and is happily alive and back in the refuge. The woman had come to the house seven times, seeking help. What is frightening is that the man, knowing where to find his wife, managed to get into the house and none of the ten women living there even heard him enter.