Shelters in Denmark for Battered Women

The first Danish crises centres were part of the women’s move-ment back into the 1970’s and were originally based mainly upon female volunteers, who saw the volunteering as part of their engagement in the movement. The centres were created upon and ran according to the principles of sister solidarity. With the growing public in-volvement in the running and financing of the centres this has slowly changed, so that now the centres are considered in the same way as other welfare services. And as a consequence we can see the same development here as elsewhere: more trained staff coming in as the users of the centres are considered to be more and more difficult to deal with, requests for quality standards, requests for statistics.
The recent focus upon domestic violence can’t be seen as a revival of a feminist approach. It is part of the general trend in crime policy where the focus is upon the victims in general. Victims of violence attract the attention of the politician and among those victims of domes-tic violence.