Safety strategy use among women seeking temporary protective orders: The relationship between violence experienced, strategy effectiveness, and risk perception

Background: There is an urgent need for effective interventions that enable women in current or past violent relationships to reduce their risk of revictimization. One approach that can be taken is to encourage women to adopt strategies that theoretically increase their safety. Safety planning is an overarching term that captures many of these safety strategies. Although safety planning is common, there is little empirical research focusing on strategy effectiveness.

Objective: This study examined safety strategy use in relation to intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization, perceived effectiveness of the strategies, and perception of danger from IPV among abused women.

Methods: Interviews were conducted with 197 women seeking temporary protective orders from a domestic violence service provider’s legal clinic. All women were 18 years of age or older and had experienced some level of physical abuse by a current/former intimate partner.

Results: Over 90% of the women used one or more strategies in the six months prior to their interview. Severe physical (β=0.25;p≤0.01) and sexual (β=0.12;p≤0.01) violence were significantly associated with increased use of placating strategies. Perceived effectiveness of the strategies was high, yet not significantly associated with strategy use. Increased perception of danger from IPV (β=0.03;p≤0.05) was significantly associated with increased use of safety planning strategies.

Conclusion: The results suggest the women were in dangerous situations and they were attempting to protect themselves using safety strategies with questionable effectiveness. These findings contribute to an important line of research aimed at better understanding how context influences women’s help-seeking behavior.