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The Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence Essay

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The Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WSCADV, n.d.) provides training for advocates of domestic violence (DV) survivors and their families. This paper reflects my experiences as I worked through the first three sections of training: the history of the DV movement; the key requirements of DV advocacy; and safety planning. The primary thread throughout the training sections is the importance of providing advocacy based on survivor-empowerment and meeting clients where they are. In this paper, I also explore my role as a mental health counselor in an interdisciplinary response team working with survivors of domestic violence.
History of the DV Movement
The first section of the WSCADV (n.d.) training discussed the background and history of the DV movement. This section began with an audio interview (Bell & Coontz, n.d.) with Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College. Coontz discussed the effect that women entering the workforce over the past century has had on the stability of marriages and families. In the fifties, the middle-class family in the United States was structured around women’s economic dependence on men. Women’s entrance into the workforce destabilized marriage for a time, but in the 1980’s, increasing divorce rates leveled off and began to decrease, and women in the workforce became (and continue to be) a marriage stabilizer. This finding, however, does not necessarily apply to low-income couples who experience more

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