“Is She Imminently Fleeing?”: How Discursive Practices Shape Crisis Center Service Delivery and Exacerbate Existing Vulnerabilities for Survivors

Within the U.S., the struggle for women's safety from intimate partner violence was brought into the national discourse with the Battered Women's Movement (BWM) of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Volunteer-run “safe homes” would soon become bureaucratized with the concomitant rise of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) and the repression of larger socio-political movements. These forces resulted in today's 501(c)3 crisis centers which are governed by stringent service eligibility requirements that define the parameters of their practice. Informed by eight months of ethnographic field work at a rural crisis center in New England, this article analyzes one part of the nonprofitization of the BWM – that of professional discourse. Drawing on the work of Canadian feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith, I utilize the theoretical and methodological tenets of institutional ethnography (IE) to examine one dominant discursive practice – “Is she imminently fleeing?” This discursive practice reveals how officialdom adversely impacts survivors’ lives. This study contributes to our understanding of how language concretely plays out in the daily operations within the crisis center. This work builds on the literature that exposes the fault lines of the NPIC in the U.S. context and serves to expand the work of IE as a vital investigative research lens.