Social workers work with individuals and take into account all of their needs, i.e. housing, employment, food, financial assistance. Most of the time, these requests for assistance are client initiated. System initiated services usually involve a crisis, such as violence against a child or a vulnerable adult. Even in these cases, someone has to have reported that the incident occurred.

With domestic violence, the person responsible for seeking assistance is the battered woman and most of the time she will not identify herself as abused unless she is asked. She will seek other services, but she usually will not raise the subject of domestic violence. Agencies rarely follow a procedure of routinely screening for domestic violence in adult women, even though the statistics would indicate that such screening is appropriate.