Combatting Intimate Partner Violence: Representations of Social and Healthcare Personnel Working with Gender-Based Violence Interventions

Exploring the Perspectives of Professionals on Providing Intimate Partner Violence Services to Women With Disabilities

This study explored the experiences and perceptions of professional service providers offering services to women with disabilities exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV). Eighteen in-depth interviews were conducted with service providers working in health care, social work, the police, women's shelters, and the Centre for Violence Against Women. Our findings suggest that providing adequate IPV services to women with disabilities requires coordination and collaboration. IPV services were organized around five overarching themes: finding services; assessing the risk; identification; protection and care; and becoming independent. This approach was helpful for women who faced disability-related challenges in accessing IPV services.

Improving learning in the management of gender violence. Educational impact of a training program with reflective analysis of dramatized video problems in postgraduate nurses

BACKGROUND

Most gender-based violence victims who sought help in Spain did so through health services. Training on gender-based violence with active learning methodologies promotes the management of knowledge, reflection, and adaptation to change. Nurses, along with an educator, can construct knowledge with the same strategies they will use professionally.

PURPOSE

To evaluate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes associated of postgraduate nurses on gender-based violence before and after a reflection-based training program with dramatized problem-videos. The secondary objectives were to evaluate the knowledge in the activation of protocols, skills, and attitudes in the management of women who are victims of gender-based violence, the consolidation of learning, and the applicability to the workplace.

METHODS

Pre-post quasi-experimental study without a control group. A specifically validated and designed instrument was utilized to evaluate the dimensions of knowledge, skills, and attitudes when facing gender-based violence, before and after the training sessions, along with additional questions to assess if the participants possessed better tools to address gender-based violence.

RESULTS

The difference between the pre and post-tests was statistically significant for the dimensions knowledge, skills, and attitude (p < 0.05), with a smaller effect size in the dimensions skills and attitude. Also, high scores were observed in the consolidation of learning and applicability to the workplace.

CONCLUSION

Reflection-based training with dramatized problem-videos improved the acquisition of tools necessary for the detection and management of gender-based violence of nurses.

"Kept in Check": Representations and Feelings of Social and Health Professionals Facing Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Social and health professionals facing gender-based violence in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) express feelings and thoughts closely connected to their place of work and the users of their services. However, research on professionals’ reflexivity and their implications has not been closely investigated. Therefore, this article will describe representations of IPV among social and health professionals facing gender-based violence as well as their personal feelings in accomplishing their job. Fifty interviews with health and social professionals were analyzed using grounded theory methodology supported by Atlas.ti 8.4. Five macrocategories will describe this phenomenon, leading to the final explicative core category that summarizes professionals’ attitudes toward it. Being “kept in check” among partners, partners and families, services, and institutional duties is the core category that best expressed their feelings. Therefore, implications for services and training will be further discussed.

Downside: The Perpetrator of Violence in the Representations of Social and Health Professionals

Gender-based violence is a widespread phenomenon and pandemic that affects women's lives. Many interventions have been activated for perpetrators, but the dropout rate is still high. In order to draw up guidelines for responsibly and sustainably dealing with the phenomenon, this study is aimed at investigating the professionals' perception of the perpetrator as a useful element in designing innovative intervention policies. Open interviews were carried out with welfare and health professionals and the Grounded Theory Methodology was used to analyze the collected data. These results detect attitudes of social health personnel and their feelings of impotence towards gender-based perpetrators because of the emergence of an inevitable repetitiveness of the violent behavior, as well as the "normality of violence" in a patriarchal culture and its "transversality". This reflective knowledge allows for the opportunity to develop best transformative attitudes toward the phenomenon. According to the results, it is urgent to establish an active and convinced alliance with the healthy part of the man, through specific prevention paths, in order to activate an authentic motivation for change and its sustainability.

"Dreaming Undreamt Dreams" in Psychological Counseling with Italian Women Who Experienced Intimate Partner Violence: A Phenomenological-Interpretative Analysis of the Psychologists' Experience

In psychological consultations with women who survive Intimate Partner Violence, it is essential to work on elaboration of the trauma as a complex trauma within the context of a relationship. We consider dreams to be a symbolic-representative process, which requires the right psychic, relational and contextual conditions to occur, and that is hindered when trauma is present. The objective of the present study is to investigate the meanings that psychologists working at anti-violence centers attribute to the clinical intervention with women victims of IPV, with a focus on the area of sleep and dreaming in a traumatic experience, and in the clinical work on the trauma. Twelve female psychologists were interviewed using the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology. From the analysis of the interviews, three main themes emerged: (1) Day and night, neither awake nor asleep, (2) Anti Violence Centers: setting as a container of emotion? and (3) dreaming undreamt dreams. The study highlights the importance of dreams as an indicator not only of psychic and mental functioning but also of the psychological relationship within a specific context.