Confronting Violence

Developing a Measure of Harassment in Abusive Relationships, 1996

While working towards his doctorate in nursing at Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, Daniel Sheridan wrote this paper that outlined the need for a new patient screening tool that would measure potential violent behavior towards women who were in the process of leaving abusive relationships. Sheridan reviewed existing measures that quantified intimate partner abuse—including the newly emerging understanding of psychological abuse—and then described the screening measures that worked and those that did not. His HARASS (Harassment in Abusive Relationships: A Self-Report Scale) tried to identify the behaviors of abusers during the most potentially lethal time in a violent relationship.

Courtesy National Library of Medicine