Dr. Lenore E. Walker Featured in the Conversation
Article Title:
Doris Day was a sunny actress and a domestic violence survivor; are there lessons?
In a seminal paper written in the late 1970s, psychologist Lenore Walker coined the phrase “battered women” and proposed that learned helplessness was the psychological rationale for why these women became targets. She explained that like animals in a cage who repeatedly endure painful electrical shock from which they are unable to escape or avoid, people who experience repetitive violence lose their power and control and understandably give up trying.