The author discusses the public perception of battered women, the growth of the battered women's movement, and the attempt to make the phenomenon of abuse generic by insisting that women are as violent as men and that the proper focus of study should be spouse abuse rather than violence against women. She next examines public and private responses to battering and attempts to learn the causes and what will make it stop. Underlying much of the discussion is the ongoing struggle to define the problem, and to ascertain needs. Programs for survivors of domestic violence fall into three general types, some specifically for battered women and others which provide more generic types of assistance: (1) services within institutions, e.g., court-based victim advocacy programs, police precinct programs, and hospital-based programs; (2) residential and nonresidential services, including shelters, offered by the battered women's movement; and (3) multiservice organizations which actually or originally served a particular geographic or ethnic community. There are separate sections on measuring a program's effectiveness and on the future of the battered women's movement. Footnotes