Save “Battered” for Fish Sticks and Chicken Tenders: It’s Time for a Domestic Violence Language Upgrade

Lily Casura, MSW
6 min readJul 24, 2019

It’s so weird to me that in 2019 we still use a word, “battered,” whose first known usage was in 1593, as such a common descriptor within the domestic violence/intimate partner violence space. There are “battered women,” “battered women’s shelters,” offenders who are known as “batterers,” and so on. But what does…

Lily Casura, MSW

Focused on using data as a tool in research & policy decisions. IWMF grantee. NASW-TX and Tableau Public award winner. UTSA, Harvard honors grad. Ph.D. student.