Remembering Activist Ellen Pence
From Wikipedia:
Ellen Pence (1948 – January 6, 2012) was a scholar and a social activist. She was active in institutional change work for battered women since 1975, and helped found the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in 1980.
She is credited with creating the Duluth Model of intervention in domestic violence cases, Coordinated Community Response (CCR), which uses an interagency collaborative approach involving police, probation, courts and human services in response to domestic abuse. The primary goal of CCR is to protect victims from ongoing abuse.
She founded Praxis International in 1998 and was the chief author and architect of the Praxis Institutional Audit, a method of identifying, analyzing and correcting institutional failures to protect people drawn into legal and human service systems because of violence and poverty.
She co-authored two books: Educational Groups for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Model and Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence: Lessons from the Duluth Model.
She died of breast cancer on January 6, 2012 at the age of 63.
During the 1960s, Ellen was an activist in the housing, antiwar, civil rights and feminist movements. In 1975, she became active in the battered women’s movement, which was the primary focus of her work for the remainder of her life. After a time of advocating for funding for battered women’s shelters, Ellen moved from Minneapolis to Duluth, MN, where in 1980, she and a small group of activists organized theDomestic Abuse Intervention Project, commonly referred to as the “Duluth Model.” The model, which has been adapted for use throughout the world, employs an interagency approach to shift responsibility for confronting domestic violence from the victims of the violence to the community, based on the idea that women (and their children) have as much right to be safe at home as all people have to be safe on the street.
Ellen continued to seek an end to violence against women through many other endeavors. She was the founder and director of Praxis International, a non-profit dedicated to helping institutions meet the needs of the people they serve.
