Ending Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Locating Men at Stake: An Ecological Approach

Abstract

Interventions for ending intimate partner violence (IPV) have not usually provided integrated approaches. Legal and social policies have the duty to protect, assist and empower women and to bring offenders to justice. Men have mainly been considered in their role as perpetrators to be subjected to judicial measures, while child witnesses of violence have not been viewed as a direct target for services. Currently, there is a need for an integrated and holistic theoretical and operational model to understand IPV as gender-based violence and to intervene with the goal of ending the fragmentation of existing measures. The EU project ViDaCS—Violent Dads in Child Shoes—which worked towards the deconstruction and reconstruction of violence’s effects on child witnesses, has given us the opportunity to collect the opinions of social workers and child witnesses regarding violence. Therefore, the article describes measures to deal with IPV, proposing functional connections among different services and specific preventative initiatives. Subsequently, this study will examine intimate partner violence and provide special consideration to interventions at the individual, relational, organizational and community levels. The final goal will be to present a short set of guidelines that take into account the four levels considered by operationalizing the aforementioned ecological principles.

Minority Stress and Mental Health in Italian Bisexual People

“…Furthermore, women and younger participants resulted in being higher in anticipated binegativity than men and older participants. Higher levels of expectation of rejection in women may be explained through the evidence that women who are not conforming to societal heteronormative expectations are less stigmatized than male counterparts (Habarth 2015); as a result, the lesser visibility of women living in a sexist and heteronormative society, such as the Italian one (Di Napoli et al 2019;Lingiardi et al 2012;Pacilli et al 2011;Procentese et al 2019a;Di Napoli et al 2019;Lingiardi et al 2012;Pacilli et al 2011;Procentese et al 2019b), may lead them to expect that, once their bisexual identity becomes visible, they may be rejected, heightened vigilance to social rejection. Instead, regarding the higher levels of anticipated binegativity in younger participants, it is plausible to hypothesize that older bisexual individuals have had more time to integrate their identity within the self-concept, developing competencies that allow them to buffer the negative effects of stigma on health (Van Wagenen et al 2013).…”

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

“…In Italy, among the 133 women killed in 2018, 81.2 percent were killed by a very close person and the term attributed to this crime is femicide [ 8 ], and Istat’s investigation [ 9 ] Stereotypes about Gender Roles and the Social Image of Sexual Violence presents data on the number of people reported, the victims of persecutory acts, abuse in the family, beatings, and sexual violence, but in the social reality of everyday life the phenomenon is actually still invisible [ 10 ]. In fact, most of the violence against women occurs in the home [ 11 ], causing physical, psychological and economic damage [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ].…”

“…There is extensive literature on IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) victims [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 18 ], while the studies on the authors of violence and their treatment are still to be investigated. Moreover, recent studies have focused on the symbolic and valuable universe of professionals involved in the treatment of violence, as a fundamental dimension in dealing with the phenomenon [ 10 , 19 , 20 ]. Indeed, in the Italian context [ 21 ], a high rate of dropout of treatments directed towards men, the frequent breakdown of dedicated services, the scarcity of dialogue and the inadequate training of health and welfare professionals further perpetrate the pain and the suffering of direct and collateral victims and actors [ 10 ].…”

“…Hearn [ 41 ], conversely offers a more inclusive approach that defines the causes of men’s violence against women considering three levels: The first is the individual level, the second focuses on the family and other relationships, such as socialization and learning within the family, and the last level focuses on the wider socio-cultural aspects related to power. In the same vein, international organizations propose an ecological model [ 42 ] and recently Di Napoli, et al [ 10 ] according to a wider ecological approach, proposing an operational model that expresses the interaction of individual factors together with organizational and relational issues. The following Figure 1 summarizes the reciprocal interactions of individual, social and organizational issues: patriarchal cultural prescriptive and stereotyped role, individual feelings acting in women, children, and men, and the protective action of an institutional service system.…”

“…Therefore, a debate about the needs of gender-based violence helplines to have supervision and support and specific training has been opened and studies exploring the perspective of staff working for helplines, including managers and policy makers, are increasing [ 10 , 19 , 20 , 43 , 55 , 56 ].…”