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With this article we question the universality of the popular truism that intimate partner violence (IPV) between adult partners is transmitted from generation to generation. We illustrate how the concept of ‘intergenerational transmission of IPV’ fails to capture the complex social processes that are likely to influence individuals who experience IPV as children and as they grow. Building on a feminist application of ecological systems theory, how multiple systems have evolved to differently influence children who grow up with IPV is considered. This approach offers understanding of perspectives that promote social change and the self-worth and positive agency of children who grow up with IPV. We offer a unique contribution by exploring ways intergenerational transmission of IPV is rebutted in the twenty-first century, and how change is facilitated so that children who grow up with IPV can achieve healthy relationships when supported by all levels of the ecological system.
The aim is to show how digital financial services are used to perpetrate digitally facilitated economic abuse. The article is based on interviews with women in Sweden who are survivors of intimate partner violence and economic abuse.
The use of digital financial services is rapidly expanding and in Sweden they are used by the majority of the population. They are available on smart devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops and have become a part of everyday life. Research on technology facilitated abuse and research on economic abuse have not addressed the risks for economic abuse via digital financial services. To bridge this gap, we suggest a merging of these fields to focus on what we call digitally facilitated economic abuse.
Findings show that digital financial services constitute risks for economic abuse and facilitate abusive behaviours. Smart devices serve as digital bank books, wallets and identity cards, all rolled into one neat little package, opening up for new methods for economic abuse. Abusers use digital financial services to limit and restrict the woman’s access to money, to monitor and control her use of money by breaching her financial privacy, to economically exploit her and to put her in debt.
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a practice that consists in the partial or full removal of the external female genitalia. This article, guided by Glaser and Strauss’ ‘grounded theory’ approach, and based on semi-structured interviews with Eritrean women immigrants in Italy, aims to show qualitatively the process of how migration and a new socio-cultural milieu influences the ideas and attitudes surrounding FGM. Our findings show a clear abandonment of the practice and a refusal of the idea of continuation of it among participants. A newly acquired awareness of sexuality in a new culture was pointed out as important by the majority of the participants. It is however noteworthy that simply moving to and living in a country where FGM is not practised does not ensure abandonment. A great level of integration into a new culture is an answer. That said, participants expressed the need for, and suggested the creation of, anti-FGM sensitisation programmes. This study contributes to qualitative research on this harmful and sensitive practice, and suggests ways to ultimately end it.
This article critically analyses the assumptions and effects of the ‘daring to ask approach’ to gender based violence (GBV), as expressed in the policies that govern social services’ work in Sweden. We show how GBV is constituted as a sensitive issue connected with shame and as something that will not be brought up spontaneously; GBV is something that women who had experienced it carry with them as an ‘untouched truth’ waiting to be discovered by social workers while women’s worries about the consequences of telling are not made intelligible. The very speaking as such is seen as emancipatory, and the social worker is understood as a facilitator. With this approach follows standardised questions, aiming for neutrality and equity. However, these are so wide and unspecific, that the risk is that no one thinks the questions are directed to her. By making the assumptions and effects of a seemingly self-evident strategy visible, we demonstrate areas in need of further research and policy development, such as barriers to help-seeking (beyond stigmatisation) and effects of standardisation. This is an important undertaking since without critical scrutiny of the policies there is a risk that stakeholders assume that merely asking will resolve the problem of GBV.
Digital technologies are increasingly being used within the context of domestic and family violence (DFV) to facilitate coercive and controlling behaviours – also known as digital coercive control (DCC). Drawing on the perspectives of a small sample of nine DFV practitioners and scholarly experts, this article examines the barriers victim/survivors of DCC encounter as they seek help in Victoria, Australia. We find that DCC has distinct impacts on victim/survivors who are socially and geographically isolated. DFV support services also experience a range of challenges in detecting and responding to DCC, including in risk assessment and management, highlighting a requirement for further training of frontline workers to better respond to DCC.
This paper is concerned with the exercise of penal power over families affected by imprisonment, and the implications for legitimacy and inclusion. Imprisonment imposes harms upon families, however theories as to how this shapes attitudes towards the justice system and feelings of citizenship are still developing. This paper brings together insights from prison sociology and Lukes’ radical conceptualisation of power to argue that prison rules are the most ‘solid’ dimension of power which families encounter, and therefore it is the day-to-day decisions of officers which are most likely to be challenged. However, by excluding families from decision-making spaces, and shaping beliefs about what actions are possible and desirable, the justice system also exercises power over families in more diffuse ways which, while they provoke less resistance, are just as damaging to citizenship and inclusion.
Intimate partner abuse (IPA) is a pervasive issue affecting one in three women globally. Although understanding of IPA has increased over time, it is still lacking, and new ways of highlighting the experiences of victims/survivors are essential. This article draws on reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews from two research projects to examine the experiences of women who have experienced IPA and who participated in a digital storytelling workshop. Three themes were developed describing their experiences: Taking back control; Knowing you’re not alone and A healing journey. The results suggest that while digital storytelling was not designed as a therapeutic intervention, participants nonetheless described improvements to their wellbeing. However, the findings also highlight the need for trauma-informed facilitation when running digital storytelling workshops focused on sensitive issues.
The historical evolution of social and legal conceptions of gender based domestic violence in France are the dynamic traces of how social practice, as well as social representations, formed and transformed. However, numerous studies show that the current incident-based conceptions of domestic violence are far from the victims’ experiences, and only partially effective in detecting, criminalising and preventing domestic violence. Understanding the global process by which perpetrators subordinate the victims, mostly women and children, by progressively depriving them of their human rights and liberties, led to a contemporary conceptualisation of domestic violence as coercive control (). Recognising the roots of domestic violence in gender inequality, far from reducing it to some individual, psychological issues, this human-rights based conception of domestic violence is much closer to the victims’ experiences, has led to legal innovation in the ways in which several countries understand, criminalise and prevent domestic violence, and could be at the core of emerging social representations of domestic violence.
Governments worldwide are increasingly engaging service users to reform public policies and services and enhance public value. Survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) are one group seeking to be heard by governments and gradually being engaged to improve policy outcomes. However, the history of the victims’ rights movement and feminist scholarship on political institutions indicate significant risks for survivors in these engagements with the state. This article examines the nature of these risks and how they are experienced and challenged, through a case study analysis of the implementation of the Australian state of Victoria’s Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council. Analysing government reports and interviews with survivors and policymakers, the article investigates how the state asserts control over survivors under the guise of co-production, inadvertently compromising public value creation. Informed by a feminist institutionalist lens, our analysis finds that efforts to address the power imbalances and gendered norms reflected in the informal rules of co-production are likely to better realise public value in terms of improved outcomes for all members of society, especially those experiencing GBV. The co-production risks we highlight and the ways to mitigate them we suggest are also relevant to other areas of co-production with other marginalised service users.
Since its founding, Convict Criminology (CC) has evolved into an international approach, group, organisation, and network with a relatively coherent set of objectives. Although little thought was put into CC’s development beyond the US, the original intent of CC was primarily to develop a network of individuals who were united around its core ideas. Due to both the constraints of international travel for ex-convicts and the financial burden for people to travel, originally it made best sense for people interested in the CC perspective to meet at the local level. Over time, because of advances in telecommunication platforms like Facetime, Skype, and Zoom, members of the CC network realised that meeting face-to-face on a regular basis was not necessary. Thus, the importance of local or even national approaches to CC were not necessary. This paper briefly examines the international components of CC and the authors’ views that, while individual country groups of CC members may have been advantageous in the early stages of CC, it is no longer necessary, if not counterproductive.
