‘Our courage has grown’: a grounded theory study of enablers and barriers to community action to address violence against women in urban India

Abstract

Transforming communities into supportive environments for women facing risks of violence requires community members to play an active role in addressing violence against women (VAW). We did a grounded theory study of enablers and barriers to community response to ongoing violence, sampling from programme areas of a non-governmental organisation (NGO)-led community mobilisation intervention in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. We held 27 focus group discussions and 31 semistructured interviews with 113 community members and 9 NGO staff, along with over 170 hours of field observation. We found that residents responded to violence in diverse ways, ranging from suicide prevention to couple mediation to police and NGO referral. Enabling and constraining factors fit into a social ecological model containing intrapersonal, immediate social network, and wider societal levels. We identified four themes interlinking factors: legitimacy of action, collective power, protection against risk and informal leadership. Legitimacy of action was negotiated in the context of individual disputes, making community members question not only whether VAW was ‘wrong’, butwhowas ‘wrong’ in specific disputes. Collective power through neighbourhood solidarity was key to action but could be curtailed by violent gang crime. Interveners in incidents of VAW turned out to need significant physical, social and legal protection against reprisal. However, repeat interveners could become informal leaders wielding influential prosocial reputations that incentivised and facilitated action. Our model integrates multiple perspectives on community action into one analytical framework, which can be used by implementers to ensure that community members receive encouragement, support and protection to act.

Violence in childhood and community contexts: a multi-level model of factors associated with women's intimate partner violence experience in Samoa

“…Understanding community contexts is important for intervention development, particularly given the move over the past decade towards implementing community-based interventions for IPV prevention in LMICs, and the knowledge that communities play a pivotal role in responding to and reducing violence. 14 , 15 , 16 While to the best of our knowledge no such studies have been conducted in the Pacific region, there is a small but growing evidence base emerging across LMICs. Nationally-representative data from Tanzania found that a higher acceptance of wife beating among women at the community level was associated with increased risk of experiencing IPV, 12 consistent with findings from Bangladesh, 17 the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 18 and Nigeria.…”

Policy Perspective on Governmental Implicit Debt Risks of Urban Rail Transit PPP Projects in China: A Grounded Theory Approach

“…During this stage, qualitative data are broken up into meaningful themes that closely resemble the original content's meaning. The relevant data are condensed through continuous comparisons and classification, while highly interconnected concepts are merged at a more theoretical and abstract level, ultimately leading to the conceptualization of the data [47]. The data for this study are from 20 urban rail transit PPP projects from mainstream media and related official websites in China (see Appendix A).…”