Susan Schechter

SCHECHTER, STEINBERG, HOFFMAN

Posted By: Tara (email)
Date: 7/6/2009 at 09:28:09

Susan Schechter, 57, died at her home Tuesday morning, February 3, 2004, of endometrial cancer surrounded by her family and close friends.

Susan Schechter was a visionary national leader in shaping society's response to violence against women and children. Her strength lay in her ability to challenge the domestic violence community and the child welfare community to work through their distrust and differences and find ways to collaborate on behalf of battered women and their children. Last year she won the Leadership in Public Child Welfare award from the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators. Schechter founded the first program in the country to address child abuse in families that were also affected by intimate partner violence, Advocacy for Women & Kids in Emergencies (AWAKE) at Children's Hospital in Boston. Since 1991, as Clinical Professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Iowa, she expanded the range of solutions for the intersecting problems of domestic violence, poverty, child abuse and substance abuse. She wrote national curricula on domestic violence and trained thousands of students, social workers, judges and health care professionals in their implementation. The University of Iowa Celebration of Excellence Among Women awarded her its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002.

Susan Schechter was the author of Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement (1982), a pathbreaking first book that chronicled the history of the early grass-roots domestic violence movement. The book framed issues of intimate violence in a way that helped shape every subsequent analysis of domestic violence, its causes and solutions. Her analytical skills and intellectual ability are unmatched in the battered women's movement, said Merry Hofford, family violence director at the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. She also co-authored When Love Goes Wrong (with Ann Jones, 1992) and many other publications, including Effective Intervention in Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment, colloquially known as the Greenbook, which serves as a roadmap for child abuse and domestic violence professionals throughout the country who develop programs that serve children and their mothers. Schechter's work was supported by major grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, and among others the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She was a member of the National Advisory Council on Violence Against Women of the U.S. Department of Justice and consultant to the Family Violence Prevention Fund of San Francisco.

Most people have no idea how truly critical Susan was to our understanding and development of many issues, across so many years and so many problems, said Loretta Frederick, Legal Counsel for the Battered Women's Justice Project. It is hard to adequately describe the incredible impact she and her work have had on the world's movement to end violence against women.

She is survived by her husband, Allen Steinberg, a member of the Department of History at the University of Iowa, and their son, Zachary, a senior at West High School; a niece Teri Hoffman and a nephew Ronald Hoffman, both of St. Louis.

Memorials may be sent to the Iowa Women's Foundation, Susan Schechter Memorial Fund, 220 Lafayette Street, Iowa City 52240; the Family Violence Prevention Fund, 383 Rhode Island St. #300, San Francisco, CA 94103; and the Gynecologic Cancer Foundation, 401 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.