Abused women’s experiences of help-seeking from health services

Abstract: This chapter argues that women survivors of domestic violence do not seek out health professionals to disclose abuse or to seek help to deal with abuse specifically. This is largely because they do not see them as a valuable solution to dealing with the abuse. It would seem that some abused women in this study had no notion of how health professionals can assist in resolving domestic violence concerns. This could be due to a lack of knowledge of the role of these professionals in domestic violence or to their actual experiences of inappropriate responses by them. Nevertheless, health services are critical to assisting abused women since they often present at these settings, even though they may not disclose abuse