Healing in the Midst of Chaos: Nah We Yone's African Women's Wellness Group

This article discusses the creative use of the group treatment modality to provide psychosocial support to African women refugees and asylum seekers with a history of refugee trauma, war, and human rights abuses who have fled to the United States. In particular, this article describes the African Women's Wellness Group developed by Nah We Yone, Inc., a small grassroots organization in the New York City area. This women's group draws on the tenets of traditional Western group psychotherapy while using African cultural awareness to provide healing. The rationale for this type of treatment, group design, specific techniques used to provide healing, along with various group-related themes and challenges are described. This type of treatment provides an example of the usefulness of group therapy technique with traumatized displaced women struggling to survive in a new cultural setting.     

Women–Focused Treatment Agencies and Process Improvement: Strategies to Increase Client Engagement

Behavioral health treatment agencies often struggle to keep clients engaged in treatment. Women clients often have additional factors such as family responsibilities, financial difficulties, or abuse histories that provide extra challenges to remaining in care. As part of a national initiative, four women-focused drug treatment agencies used process improvement to address treatment engagement. Interviews and focus groups with staff assessed the nature and extent of interventions. Women-focused drug treatment agencies selected relational-based interventions to engage clients in treatment and improved four-week treatment retention from 66% to 76%. Process improvement interventions in women-focused treatment may be useful to improve engagement.     

Women in Inpatient Facilities

No abstract available for this article.     

Psychosocial correlates of emotional distress and risk behavior in african-american women at risk for hiv infection

We examined a model of stress and coping in 749 African-American women at risk for HIV infection. Women in the sample were either homeless, intravenous drug users (IVDUs) sexual partners of IVDUs, or prostitutes. A model was hypothesized based on stress and coping theory and research. Antecedents studied were personal resources, specifically self-esteem and available support. Mediators were threat appraisal and coping efforts. Outcomes studied were emotional distress and HIV risk behaviors. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to test hypothesized pathways between these variables. Forty-five percent of the variance in emotional distress in these women was explained by the model with self-esteem and avoidant coping the strongest predictors. Ten percent of the variance in risk behavior was explained by the model with emotional distress the strongest predictor. Direct and indirect pathways predicting risk behavior and distress are discussed. Implications of results for intervention and theory building are considered.     

Victim-Defendants in Mandated Treatment: An Ethical Quandary

Battered women are being arrested and convicted of domestic violence-related crimes in higher numbers than ever before. In addition, battered women are being sentenced to treatment as primary perpetrators even though their aggression was in response to the violence perpetrated against them. Many service providers are presently ill-equipped to offer treatment and/or other services that will effectively serve these women in a manner that will truly reduce violence and is not re-victimizing. This article will present key issues surrounding the problem, and provide suggestions for effective advocacy and intervention approaches.     

Childhood Sexual Abuse and Adulthood Parenting: The Mediating Role of Intimate Partner Violence

This study examined the role of intimate partner victimization in mediating the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and adulthood parenting in a community sample of mothers reliant on public assistance (N = 483). Baron and Kenny's (1986 Baron, R. M. and Kenny, D. A. 1986. The moderator–mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51: 1173–1182. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) method for establishing mediation was used to address this question. A recent history of intimate partner violence mediated the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and psychological aggression; however, a lifetime history of intimate partner violence did not. Depressive symptomatology was found to mediate the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and parental warmth. The impact of childhood sexual abuse on corporal punishment was indirect through its association with childhood physical abuse and witnessing domestic violence. Implications for research, theory development, and practice are provided.     

Maltreated Adolescents

Abstract

The authors review literature on the developmental tasks of adolescence and the unique problems faced by adolescent victims of maltreatment. The developmental domains addressed include cognition, identity, behavior and affect regulation, family and peer relationships, and sexuality. Research on the co-occurrence of multiple types of victimization is discussed. The relationship between multiple victimization and violent crime, with a focus on parricide, is examined. The authors call for greater attention to the assessment and study of multiple forms of maltreatment and its outcomes in adolescence, since adolescence is one of the least researched developmental periods in terms of single or multiple victimization.     

French secularism as a ‘guarantor’ of women's rights? Muslim women and gender politics in a Parisian banlieue

This paper considers contemporary discourse in France that positions secularism (laïcité) as a guarantor of Muslim women's rights. In the first section I sketch a socio-historical genealogy of this discourse focusing on key shifts in its articulation. I suggest that the current identification between secularism and Muslim women's rights has its main expressions in recent public policy commissions and, as an example on the ground, in the positions taken by France's largest feminist organisation, Femmes Solidaires. Informed by one another, these commissions and this organisation (a) conceptualise Islam as overtly political and patriarchal and (b) define secularism as the primary way to ‘liberate’ Muslim women. The second section examines the impact of this discourse on Muslim communities in Petit Nanterre, a Parisian suburb where I conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork. Significantly, Muslim women in this suburb are uninterested in headscarf-related debates on secularism and more vividly engaged in the 2005 Pork Affair, a locally oriented controversy in a public school. I conclude that the religious concerns of the Muslim women positioned at the centre of the secular debate are expressed in certain forms of activism, efforts ignored by commissions and women's advocacy groups.     

How Race Matters and Does Not Matter for White Women in Relationships with Black Men

SUMMARY

Drawing on a qualitative research study, this article provides a beginning exploration for how race both matters and does not matter in white women's relationships with black men. As a means of protecting themselves and their families from pathologizing stereotypes about interracial couples, women make claims that race does not matter. At the same time, they describe ways that stereotypes impact their self identities and their couple interactions. Different situations and relationships create shifts in racial interpretations, and contact with extended family members can change racial meanings. The article offers suggestions for how to create a therapeutic space for discussing race without over-determining its significance.     

Pray erformance

Abstract

Female prisoners in recovery may anticipate defeat when projecting possibilities for their future hopes and dreams. These clients often identify with and attach to the role of prisoner and addict. This article describes a 12-week group treatment program, titled by the author as “Prayerformance.” In this work, female prisoners in recovery have an opportunity to connect spiritually and psychologically by using techniques like role play, improvisation, spontaneity training, storytelling, character development, mask work, and movement.