While most social scientists agree that the outcome of research should be useful in the real world, the idea that research can, and should, be empowering and directly useful to research participants has largely been limited to the margins of a few social science disciplines. While community psychologists and critical sociologists have long embraced participatory research and co-operative inquiry approaches-where the empowerment of research participants is as important as the contribution to knowledge and policy development-criminologists have been slow to adopt more emancipatory research models except for a few notable exceptions. This essay calls for the use of participatory action research by criminologists and for us to have a dialogue about the social value of our research and our obligations to research participants beyond ''simply doing no harm.''To what uses are experiences of suffering put? (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996) I am struggling to finish a paper that I have been working on for some time. It details the life histories of 25 low-income African-American battered women taken from a larger sample of 43 ethnically diverse battered women. I am conflicted about it because I am afraid of further marginalizing or reinforcing negative stereotypes about poor black women. 1 No matter how much I try to humanize the women by focusing on their strengths, detailing their acts of resistance and emphasizing their hopes for the future, as well as placing their stories in a wider structural context, what stands out most about these women's narratives is how downtrodden they are. I have begun to question the utility of exposing sensationalistic stories of abuse, oppression and criminalization of poor black