Cultures of gendered violence: An integrative review of measures of attitudinal support for violence against women

Abstract

National and international research has repeatedly identified the specific gendered nature and context of women's victimisation of violence, whereby women are disproportionately victims of sexual and partner violence and overwhelmingly at the hands of known male perpetrators. As such, violence against women warrants a targeted and substantial focus, within overall violence reduction and prevention efforts. In the Australian policy context, there is an emerging and influential focus on attitudes towards violence against women as key targets for primary prevention and as foci for monitoring progress in reducing this violence. The Australian National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey was established to estimate community-level understanding of and attitudes towards violence against women. It has arguably evolved into an important instrument both for monitoring shifts in Australians' knowledge and attitudes, as well as for directing primary prevention efforts. The purpose of this article is to provide an integrative review in relation to one of the key dimensions of the national community attitudes survey: violence supportive attitudes (see Webster et al., 2014). Here, we seek to identify patterns in defining and measuring attitudes that support violence against women, as well as advance the field by offering recommendations for progressing the measurement of violence supportive attitudes in Australia in the future.

Image-based sexual abuse: The extent, nature, and predictors of perpetration in a community sample of Australian residents

“…Attitudinally, participants who accepted sexual image-based abuse myths and blamed victims of IBSA for the harms they experience were more likely to have engaged in IBSA perpetration. This finding is broadly consistent with the much more developed field of attitudinal research as related to other forms of sexual aggression, including rape myths, as discussed at the outset of this paper (see Payne, Lonsway & Fitzgerald 1999;Pina et al 2017;Powell & Webster 2018).…”

Assessing Victim-Blaming Attitudes in Cases of Intimate Partner Violence against Women: Development and Validation of the VB-IPVAW Scale

“…The development of the VB-IPVAW is a step forward in the study of attitudes towards IPVAW, allowing researchers to extend knowledge about their conceptualization, measurement, prevalence, and the social factors that may influence these attitudes in order to improve prevention and intervention strategies (Powell & Webster, 2018). Addressing attitudes towards IPVAW is becoming a central issue in research and population surveys and, in this regard, both versions of the VB-IPVAW provide psychometrically sound instruments to fill this need.…”

The Willingness to Intervene in Cases of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women (WI-IPVAW) Scale: Development and Validation of the Long and Short Versions

“…An ecological model recognizes that beyond individual and relational explanatory levels, larger contextual and societal factors are central to understand IPVAW ( Heise, 1998 , 2011 ; World Health Organization [WHO], 2002 ; Gracia et al, 2015a ). As Gracia and Lila (2015 , p. 16) pointed out, ‘violence against women is a complex phenomenon that needs to be understood within the wider social context and within the social and cultural norms that permeate it.’ Public attitudes toward IPVAW shape the social context in which IPVAW takes place and play an important role in perpetuating the levels of this type of violence in our societies ( Carlson and Worden, 2005 ; Flood and Pease, 2009 ; Waltermaurer, 2012 ; Gracia and Lila, 2015 ; Copp et al, 2016 ; Powell and Webster, 2018 ). Public willingness to intervene when one becomes aware of a case of IPVAW reflects the level of tolerance and acceptance of this type of violence and can contribute either to deter or facilitate it ( Browning, 2002 ; Gracia and Herrero, 2006 ; Emery et al, 2011 ; Wright and Benson, 2011 ; World Health Organization [WHO], 2013 ; Jewkes et al, 2015 ).…”