| Recognizing that issues concerning women in abusive intimate relationships are still pervasive I undertook a study to gain new insight by hearing from women themselves. I focused on three women's experiences of moving out of abusive intimate relationships into living circumstances without abuse or violence. Through in-depth interviews I learned of their capacities and struggles, and the barriers they faced as well as their turning points, insights, strengths, and accomplishments. The transcribed interviews are the texts for discourse analysis. A critical discourse analysis provides a means to explicate the assumptions and ideological relations structuring the women's experiences of leaving abusive intimate relationships. Ideologies within discourses provide form and structure to people's understandings of family, marriage, violence, abuse, religion, and contemporary welfare and social policies that frame their experiences in particular ways. This analysis illuminates how dominant discourses influenced the women and in turn how they resisted the discourses as they developed their self-images, made decisions and acted. |
