Using Text as Data to Reveal Changing Organizational Perspectives on Violence Against Women in the United States

Public understanding of violence against women, and appropriate solutions to tackling gender-based violence, have changed enormously over the past 50 years. In this paper, we study how violence against women is practically understood through organizational efforts to frame and combat it in the United States. We use topic modeling and dictionary-based content analysis to explore the missions and programming of 918 service and advocacy nonprofits directly involved in anti-violence work between 1998 and 2016. We find that, in contrast to earlier foci on direct crisis intervention, anti-violence organizations increasingly understand violence against women as a multifaceted problem that must be addressed by comprehensive programming. We also find that nonprofits increasingly use medicalized, criminal-legal, and bureaucratic language to describe their work, underscoring the tensions of institutionalization.