Battle Cries. Hillary Potter

including that with her current common-law husband, Odell, whose main form of abuse is mental and verbal. Billie began abusing alcohol and other drugs in her twenties, and, though she was able to overcome her addiction to crack cocaine, she continues to struggle with her abuse of alcohol. In fact, a day after I set my interview appointment with Billie and a week prior to the actual interview, she telephoned me in great despair and in desperate need of assistance. She phoned while at her home, where she said Odell and her teenage son were verbally abusing her. I could hear the men yelling at Billie, and her son eventually picked up the phone to inform me that “everything’s all right. She’s OK.” After the phone was handed back to Billie, I found it difficult to understand her, as she slurred many of her words, making incomprehensible statements. I surmised that she was likely under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, but, and more important at that moment, I determined that there was indeed some form of significant discord occurring in the home and against Billie. I asked Billie if she felt her physical well-being was in imminent danger,¹ and she contended that it was not but that I was the only person she knew to call. This declaration by Billie supports other research on Black women that has suggested that they are unaware of or do not feel comfortable in seeking assistance from professionally established sources of support.² It was both poignant and revealing that I, a researcher to whom Billie had spoken on the phone on only one occasion, was her resource for dealing with her victimization.

      I confirmed the happenings in the home at that time with Billie’s adult daughter, Nia, to whom I had spoken the day before when Billie called to set an appointment to participate in the study.³ After Billie again returned to the phone to speak with me, she insisted that she needed to talk to someone. Although it was well beyond the scope of my research (and certainly not approved by the Human Research Committee of my university) to conduct any form of counseling with the women interviewed, I made the decision to simply conduct my interview with Billie that day and provide her with referrals to social service agencies. Billie and I agreed to have Nia drive her to a convenience store near their home, where I would meet them. However, the two did not show, and I was subsequently unable to reach Billie by phone for several days. I had no last name for Billie at that time, no complete address, and only a wireless phone number, so I was unable to even contact police to conduct a welfare check on the home and could only hope that nothing grave resulted from the verbal altercation.

      Fortunately, the day before Billie’s originally scheduled interview with me, she contacted me to confirm the appointment. I verified that Billie was safe, but she did not offer any explanation for the incident or for why she did not meet me at the convenience store. Only once we met did I learn of Billie’s extensive history of drug use and her continued struggles with alcohol addiction. Essentially, even though family and intimate partner abuse were undoubtedly occurring when she called me the week before, Billie had been heavily intoxicated with alcohol. She did not wish for me to provide her with any social services resources to assist her with the familial abuse or her alcohol and drug addictions. Billie expressed that she was proud that she had not drunk since the day of her frantic call to me a week before, and we both wished out loud for her continued strength in combating both her alcohol abuse and the emotional abuse sometimes carried out by Odell and her son. To judge from my time with Billie, perhaps her admonition that she needed “to talk to someone” can be considered in the symbolic sense: She needed to tell her story to someone who would pass it on to others with the hope that transgressions against Black women and the life chances they have been afforded will be placed at the forefront of issues throughout the Black community.

      Medea was another woman from whom I gained much insight. Medea is a 54-year-old who was raised in the southeast United States in upper-middle-class surroundings and who has since fluctuated between class levels but never dropped below the middle class. Her educational and professional pursuits have taken her throughout the United States and out of the country. She earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and currently works in a high-level administrative position with an agency that addresses intimate partner abuse. Like Billie, Medea also suffered abuse during her formative years, though not to the same physical extent as Billie. The abuse suffered by Medea was largely emotional and involved various forms of neglect by her guardians. Medea also shared that she was regularly harassed by classmates about her aspirations to focus on education and not on boyfriends, which was a form of “acting White.” She recalled, “Being smart was not acceptable, at least being smart in the way I was smart. Because that was viewed in the Black community as a White thing. White people have the privilege to be smart. White women could do things. But I couldn’t. There was a boundary there, and I kept crossing that boundary.”

      At the time of our conversation, Medea had been without intimate relationships and had been celibate for many years, believing that because of the string of abusive partners in her life she is better off being alone: “I gradually came to a point where I decided, I’ve really got to learn to love myself. And I can’t do that with anybody else.” Medea’s current employment allowed her to take an active and more far-reaching role in fighting violence against women by helping other women in situations similar to hers. Still, Medea stressed that the intimate partner abuse of Black women remains hidden and ignored within many advocacy circles.

      Although their lives are different in terms of educational, employment, and class standings, both Billie and Medea have made efforts throughout their lives to resist the abuse and violence perpetrated against them. Both women realized the constraints they faced as Black women within general society, the Black community, their families, and their intimate relationships. These factors were unearthed during the time I spent with them and with each of the other 38 women who volunteered to participate in this study and in my analysis of their stories. Like Billie, the bulk of the women wished only to share their life stories of adversity and triumph, which, in and of itself, was a form of continued healing from the hardships in their lives. They wished to call attention to what they and other Black women they knew endured from the men they loved. It was the exploratory and qualitative method of social science research that enabled me to stay true to the women’s motivations for reaching out to me and revealing some of the most painful experiences of their lives. That is, this research method is intended as an open-minded, open-ended, and detailed recounting and examination of personal narratives. While before initiating the project I developed a list of questions that I would ask the women, the list was used only as a guide, and the interviews resulted in more of a conversational style of inquiry (as is typically done in ethnographic research).

      Exploratory and qualitative methods of inquiry into social life do not require that one begin with a theory or premise before entering the field to conduct research. However, individual researchers, including those who are of the ethnographic or qualitative bent, generally still have a point of view. Often, particularly for feminist scholars and scholars of color, this is based on a philosophy developed from personal experiences or activist pursuits. Arguably, it proves quite difficult to enter a research setting without having some preconceived ideas. What is left open to exploration, however, is the opportunity to truly learn from one’s informants. As such, while an interpretive scholar may penetrate a site with some theoretical foundation, she or he may be introduced to unexpected findings. This was true in my case. Although I had not yet connected a name to my overarching theoretical perspective, I entered the research through the lens of Black feminist, critical race feminist, and feminist criminology ways of thinking. In time, I labeled this perspective on crime and violence “Black feminist criminology.”⁴

       Black Feminist Criminology

      Just as there are many types of feminisms and feminists, it undoubtedly follows that no single feminist criminology can exist.⁵ Feminist criminology has aided in a notably improved understanding of gender variations in criminal activity and victimization and of the criminal justice system’s dealings with female and male offenders and victims. Feminist criminology has significantly expanded the foci within the field of criminology beyond simply exploring female criminal offending and female offenders to also examining violent acts against girls and women.⁶ Although gender is certainly important and crucial to considering women’s (and men’s) involvement in crime either as victims or as offenders, for Black women, and arguably for all women, other inequities must be considered principal, not peripheral, to such an analysis. This includes key factors