A cooperative-education project in college led Angela Browne to a realization that would change the course of her life. "Behaviors that I had always associated with prisoners of war and hostages were actually happening in homes in the United States to people of all walks of life," reflects Browne, associate director of the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center and Senior Soros Justice Fellow. The project, a national study of battered women based at the University of Colorado, would inspire in Browne a need to understand the realities of violence between partners in this country. "I went to the library and looked for social responses and solutions to violence in homes," she recalls. "That was in 1979. There were a few shelters, but there were almost no legal provisions yet for women faced with threat and violence at home." At that time, husbands perpetrating violent attacks only received misdemeanor charges, and the justice system was just beginning to apply the self-defense plea to women protecting themselves or their children. The profound need for solutions and responses, coupled with the strength and hope of the women she interviewed for the project, led Browne to spend the next 20 years studying violence in families and helping develop viable solutions to prevent its devastating effects.

In her early research, Browne found that women and children living in poverty had much greater rates of victimization than women and children in the general population, both by intimates at home--including childhood caregivers and adult partners--and by strangers in the community. A poor woman may have no area that's safe; she may be surrounded by violence and drug dealing in her community and even in her home. Moreover, the helplessness and exhaustion caused by not having sufficient resources to meet a family's basic needs make getting out of her situation nearly impossible. "That sense of futility and fatigue works strongly against making long-range plans or coming up with creative solutions to somehow escape the condition that you find yourself in," Browne says. In addition, the costs of moving to a safer environment--rent, food, child care, clothing, health care, taxes--may be prohibitive, usually much more than a woman can make at a full-time, minimum-wage job. "This inability to escape is one reason that we have such high levels of violence inside homes," Browne attests.

Browne spent most of the 1980s helping to pioneer the application of the self-defense plea to battered women who killed their abusers, and, since 1988, has served as consulting psychologist at Bedford Hills Maximum Security Prison in New York State, where she has been studying the trauma histories of women prisoners. In recent years, her research at the prison has centered around how exposures to violence and other early childhood traumas may put a woman on a path to "extreme circumstances," such as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder or severe depression, drug or alcohol addiction, severe poverty, a violent mate, and/or imprisonment. In a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Browne and her colleagues interviewed incarcerated women and found a strong association between a history of family violence and the development of alcohol and drug problems in survivors. They also found that children who suffered severe child abuse or neglect were at much higher risk for arrest in adolescence and adulthood; over 85 percent of the women in the study had been severely attacked physically or sexually abused at least once in their lives prior to incarceration.

For her most recent endeavor, a book that aims to increase understanding of these aftereffects of violence, Browne is using in-depth interviews with women in prison to "wrap flesh around the statistical skeleton of the numbers." Building on the empirical evidence she and her colleagues have amassed, Browne spends one week each month at the Bedford Hills facility collecting life histories from incarcerated women in day-long sessions. While their individual stories must remain behind prison walls for privacy reasons, Browne offers a general picture of the women with whom she works: they are 34 years old on average, 33 percent have been given a life sentence, and one-third are in prison on their first arrest. These women also have much in common with female prisoners across the country. According to Browne, only 25 percent of the women imprisoned in the U.S. are charged with violent crimes; the worst offense for 62 percent was a drug-related incident. Many women are in prison because they were present when someone close to them--a friend or intimate--committed a violent act; although they took no part in the event and were often unaware it would occur, these women were charged as if they had executed the crime themselves.

While still engaged in the formal analysis of the life-history interviews, Browne has already identified some emerging themes in the data. Within individual families, she has observed "the interweaving of love and violence as family models in early childhood; the lack of safety or protection at home, forcing teenage girls into early marriages, group homes, or out on the streets as runaways; and the stunning importance of parenting--especially mothering--to women's futures and their well-being." On a societal level, the lesson seems to be: "If it's not safe inside your home, and you flee outside, the streets aren't safe either."

When asked how we should address the problem of violence, Browne answers from a historical, public-policy perspective."Over the past 15 years, we have moved increasingly to a criminal justice model as far as responses to social problems," she says."For women and children who live in poverty, we have almost dropped an emphasis on safety in their communities and homes from the national agenda." Although the U.S. makes up only 5 percent of the world's population, it now accounts for one-quarter of the world's prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the total prison population doubled in the last decade to two million and the number of women in prison quadrupled, in large part due to an increase in arrests and long sentences for drug violations; but Browne believes this judicial approach is very costly and has had limited success in preventing violence.

"Many of the big problems now would be best ameliorated by returning to a public-health model of prevention and intervention," Browne says. She cites smaller class sizes and emphasis on education, enriched after-school programs, prenatal and post-birth home visits for mothers living in poverty, and the availability of above-minimum-wage jobs for basic-skills workers as some of the practical methods proven to forestall violence. Compared to incarceration, these programs are far less expensive and reach a greater number of people. Yet, despite the unmatched economic abundance our country has enjoyed in recent years, the government has significantly reduced the amount spent on health services, education, and community-based programs during this period.

As far as interventions for those who are already in prison, research has found that on-site programs for survivors of family violence are effective in cutting the recidivism rate, as are substance-abuse treatment programs and educational classes that provide usable job skills. Unfortunately, Browne notes, at Bedford Hills and many other prisons around the country, these programs have been drastically cut since 1994, replaced in state and federal budgets with funding for additional jail space.

"Educated, compassionate, mature citizens in this nation are often uninformed about the practical dynamics of violence and of people living in poverty," remarks Browne. "Yet they--because of their positions in society and their education and background--can have very effective voices. They are the people policymakers and politicians listen to." Browne's upcoming book is a call to action aimed at this group. "As long as we wait for extreme things to happen and then deal with those extreme events, as long as a fifth of our nation's children now live in poverty during the longest period of prosperity our nation has ever experienced," she reflects, "we will never solve the problem of violence or drug use--on the streets or in people's homes."

Kimberley Spire-Oh