"Not an Either/or Situation": The Minimization of Violence Against Women In United Kingdom "Domestic Abuse" Policy

An Integrative Literature Review of Interventions to Protect People with Disabilities from Domestic and Family Violence

PURPOSE

While domestic and family violence against people with disabilities is an ongoing and crucial public health concern, and awareness of the extent of violence against people with disabilities is growing, research on the field is still limited. Thus, the present review aims to systematically identify and synthesize evidence and effectiveness from intervention strategies to increase the awareness and skills of those with disabilities to reduce and prevent domestic and family violence against them.

METHOD

PRISMA guidelines were followed to perform a systematic search of seven scientific databases to identify the peer-reviewed literature.

RESULTS

A total of 17 eligible studies were identified (14 evaluations and 3 descriptive studies), with most taking place in developed countries. Children and women are the most frequent victims, and they were therefore the most common target audience of the included studies. Sexual, physical, and verbal abuse were the most reported types of abuse, while financial abuse and neglect were studied less often. Interventions also focused on a diversity of disabilities, including learning, intellectual, mental, and physical impairments. Overall, the intervention strategies reflected a substantial homogeneity: focus on training and education as well as setting up channels and facilities for victims to seek help. Nine studies yielded significant positive outcomes using various strategies and techniques, while five studies had mixed results, and three studies only reported on the intervention strategies but did not evaluate the results.

CONCLUSIONS

This review confirms a significant gap in the literature on domestic and family violence against people with disabilities and how to prevent and address the violence through evidence-based interventions. Several recommendations to improve future research and practice are proposed.

Constructing Fatality Review: A Policy Analysis of the Emergence of Domestic Homicide Reviews in England and Wales

In England and Wales, Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) examine domestic abuse-related deaths to identify lessons to be learned. However, their emergence as a policy initiative has been little considered. To address this gap, a thematic discourse analysis of policy documents to 2011 was undertaken, examining the justification for, and conceptualization of, DHRs before their implementation. It is argued that DHRs were constructed as a taken-for-granted good, through which multi-agency partners would generate learning while the (gendered) subject was silenced. Attending to aspirations, contradictions, and tensions in the emergence of DHRs has implications for their understanding and operationalization in the present.

Domestic violence and abuse in local child safeguarding policy: How is the problem represented?

Within the United Kingdom, domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is the most commonly identified factor within child in need assessments, with rates increasing in recent years in addition to 'lockdown'-related spikes. This article examines the representation of DVA in local child safeguarding policies using Bacchi's (2009) 'What is the problem represented to be?' approach. Policies were collected from the websites of all the child safeguarding partnerships of England in July 2021. In total, we identified 59 policies. These policies are designed to guide local responses to DVA across services and thus have potential for substantial impact on practice across health and social care. Our results suggest that local DVA policy in England exists within a conceptual framework which spotlights the individual and lacks attention to their context. We argue that these policies focus on adults, neglecting attention to children within their own safeguarding policies. This is through children being peripheralized within the conceptualisation of 'victim' and the assessed adult risk being used as a proxy measure for the risk to child. Demographic discussions build an image of DVA as an issue that can affect anyone, but with little acknowledgement of the vulnerabilities facing proportions of the population and their complexities - when such vulnerabilities are discussed, they are individualised and viewed in absence of their societal causes, potentially eclipsing critical elements of a child's experience of DVA. The implications of our results are wide-ranging but suggest a need to refocus on children and their context within local DVA policy.

Is gender-based violence a confluence of culture? Empirical evidence from social media

Gender-based violence (GBV) has been plaguing our society for long back. The severity of GBV has spurred research around understanding the causes and factors leading to GBV. Understanding factors and causes leading to GBV is helpful in planning and executing efficient policies to curb GBV. Past researches have claimed a country's culture to be one of the driving reasons behind GBV. The culture of a country consists of cultural norms, societal rules, gender-based stereotypes, and social taboos which provoke GBV. These claims are supported by theoretical or small-scale survey-based research that suffers from under-representation and biases. With the advent of social media and, more importantly, location-tagged social media, huge ethnographic data are available, creating a platform for many sociological research. In this article, we also utilize huge social media data to verify the claim of confluence between GBV and the culture of a country. We first curate GBV content from different countries by collecting a large amount of data from Twitter. In order to explore the relationship between a country's culture and GBV content, we performed correlation analyses between a country's culture and its GBV content. The correlation results are further re-validated using graph-based methods. Through the findings of this research, we observed that countries with similar cultures also show similarity in GBV content, thus reconfirming the relationship between GBV and culture.