Doubly Victimized: Housing Discrimination Against Victims of Domestic Violence

Abstract

Over the last three decades, womens rights advocates have made great strides in raising public awareness of domestic violence and developing systems to prevent and punish such abuse. 1As Elizabeth Schneider describes in her comprehensive book, Battered Women & .eministLawmaking, 2 this achievement resulted from a movement of feminist activists and lawyers dedicated to transforming domestic violence from a private problem into a public harm.3 To redress this public harm, legal procedures and court systems have been established to enable battered women to obtain orders of protection and to facilitate criminal prosecutions of batterers. 4In addition to the harms battered women suffer at the hands of their abusers, victims of domestic violence also face discrimination