Book review: Becoming Strong: Impoverished Women and the Struggle to Overcome Violence
| Author | Monica Summers |
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758019862685 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
a legitimate interest in participating in the criminal justice process and the exclusion of victims in
criminal justice systems is no longer acceptable.
Just because legal theories cannot accommodate victims does not mean that the law cannot
accommodate them. Braun highlights the importance of protection and victims’ right to protection
in the criminal justice process. She argues that a lawyer, acting on behalf of a victim witness, could
contribute to ensuring access to, as well as compliance with, already existing victims’ rights and
standards (p. 284). Braun’s argument is compelling. It recognizes the importance of victims’ need
for safety and security as well as their fundamental right to protection. Moreover, maybe once
lawyers become comfortable with victims’ procedural rights in practice, criminal justice theory
will finally catch up and evolve to recognize victims as persons before the law.
References
Brienen M and Hoegen E (2000) Victims of Crime in 22 European Criminal Justice Systems. Nijmegen: Wolf
Legal Productions.
Wemmers J (2017) Victimology: A Canadian Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Laura Huey and Ryan Broll
Becoming Strong: Impoverished Women and the Struggle to Overcome Violence
University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2018; 151 pp.: ISBN 9781442626850 (pbk).
Reviewed by: Monica Summers, California State University, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0269758019862685
There are over 225,000 homeless women in the United States on any given day, with women and
families being the fastest growing segment of the homeless population. Women’s pathways to
homelessness are numerous, but violence is a commo n predictor as these women are oft en fleeing
abusive partners or family members. Unfortunately, homeless women who have experienced
past violent victimization face a substantial likelihood that they will continue to experience
violence on the streets, making resilience an important skill to develop. A substantial amount
of research examines the relationship between resilience and trauma recovery, with recent efforts
focused on assessing the personal and social factors that contribute to resilience. Most of the
research, however, looks at the larger population rather thanevaluatingresilienceamong subsets of
the population, such as homeless women. Huey and Broll’s recent publication examines resilience
among homeless women who have experienced violence in Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
The authors describe the cumulative traumatization experienced by many homeless women, and
identify and define two distinct components of the resilience process: resilience determinants
and coping mechanisms. The primary theme of this book focuses on the personal and social
factors that serve as resilience determinants for homeless women, and identifies the ‘hidden
resilience’ that these women show through the use of coping strategies that are traditionally
perceived as maladaptive.
The authors explore the process by which homeless women develop resilience through theore-
tical thematic analysis of 182 in-depth qualitative interviews. The introduction provides the pur-
pose of the research—comparing homeless women’s stories of resilience with available resilience
376 International Review of Victimology 25(3)
To continue reading
Request your trial