Abstract:

Violence against women is considered to be one of the most common and at the same time the least recognizable forms of human rights violation. It is a phenomenon that involves both rich and poor, all racial and ethnic groups. This is a universal problem occurring regardless of the victim’s and abuser’s education, socioeconomic status or age. It has already been proved that all over the world every third woman has been beaten in her life. Unidentified and undefined by society, violence poses a threat to women's life, physical well-being, psychological integrity and freedom (Vasiliauskaitė, 2013, Kurst,Swanger, Petcosky, 2003,). In most of the cases women experience domestic violence.

Domestic violence is named as hidden phenomenon. Its great latency manifests when violence victims are liable to suppress experienced domestic violence and its harm. Victims experience not only physical injuries; often psychological effects and the trauma, which negatively influence life quality and working capacity of a victim, are not estimated. Such women face particular difficulties in changing painstakingly and taking responsibility for their life. Thus comprehensive help and prevention must help women to refuse the position of ‘a victim’ or to avoid their becoming victims. In this sense woman’s emancipation becomes relevant; it should be treated as person’s emancipation from different constrictions caused by public and social environment. It is possible to achieve emancipation by different ways; one of them is help rendering.

Scientific literature (Hamby, 2014, Noughani, 2011, Chomentauskas, Dereškevičiūtė, Murauskienė, 2017, Gilligan, 2002, Dirsienė and Reikertienė, 2008, etc.) distinguishes the following ways of the help: social, legal, psychological, and educational. If the first three aspects are analyzed at length both in theoretical and practical approach, it is not enough attention paid to educational help, especially to woman’s educational empowerment in concrete phases, in which the decision-making ‘to live differently’ takes place; that leads to emancipation.

Educational assistance is usually provided for women at support institutions that are governmental organizations or NGOs. However, following questions have not been adequately discussed: what are the characteristic features of educational environment developed at those institutions; are these environments efficient for empowering women; can educational environments cause secondary victimization as a reverse effect and thus disempower rather than empower? The above questions define the research problem of the article.

First of all, the article analyzes the constructs of domestic violence and battered woman and then presents a model for empowering battered women. This model is used to provide rationale for the methodology that is based on the following theoretical constructs: empowerment (Ruškus et al., 2013, Jucevičienė et al., 2010, Thorlakson, Murray, 1996, Douglas and Zimmerman, 1995), decision-making model (Cismaru, Lavack, 2010) and three pillars of empowerment (Kasturirangan, 2008). The results of the semi-structured interviews are discussed. Ten interviews were carried out with specialists and heads of support institutions. Content analysis was applied to the interview data that were also processed by MaxQda software, which allowed us to identify the most frequent categories. The article also provides a discussion and recommendations.

Keywords:

Domestic violence, battered woman, educational empowerment, disempowerment, support centres.