Clinical violence intervention: lessons from battered women.

Attempts to address violence intervention and prevention in clinical practice are hampered by the difficulty of creating definitions and categories that accurately reflect community experience. Current medical and legal paradigms, for instance, do not integrate gendered experience into definitional understanding of domestic violence and, consequently, risk the development of systems of care that poorly address women's needs. A model of women's experience of domestic violence and key elements of clinical intervention are presented. Health and public health agencies need to actively integrate an understanding of gender relations in violence intervention and prevention.