Understanding Formal Responses to Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Resistance Processes: A Scoping Review

Intimate partner violence (IPV) literature addresses the ways in which women oppose violent male partners through acts of “everyday resistance.” There is a limited understanding, however, of the relationship between women’s resistance and their formal help-seeking in the context of IPV. Our scoping...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Trauma, violence & abuse Vol. 23; no. 5; pp. 1405 - 1419
Main Authors: Osborn, Max, Rajah, Valli
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.12.2022
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects:
Aggression
Domestic violence
English language
Female
Help seeking behavior
Humans
Individual differences
Intimate partner violence
Intimate Partner Violence - prevention & control
Literature
Locus of control
Male
Resistance
Responses
Sense of control
Survival
Survivor
Survivors
Violence
Women
perceptions of domestic violence
intervention/treatment
battered women
intimate partner violence
domestic violence
cultural contexts
scoping review
ISSN:1524-8380, 1552-8324, 1552-8324
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Intimate partner violence (IPV) literature addresses the ways in which women oppose violent male partners through acts of “everyday resistance.” There is a limited understanding, however, of the relationship between women’s resistance and their formal help-seeking in the context of IPV. Our scoping review, which includes 74 articles published in English-language journals between 1994 and 2017, attempts to help fill this gap by developing systematic knowledge regarding the following research questions: (1) How are formal institutional responses discussed within the literature on resistance to IPV? (2) How does institutional help-seeking facilitate or obstruct IPV survivors’ personal efforts to resist violence? We find that institutions and organizations succeed in facilitating resistance processes when they counter victim-blaming ideas and provide IPV survivors with shared community and a sense of control over their futures. However, they fall short in terms of helping survivors by expecting survivors to adhere to a rigid narrative about appropriate responses to violence, devoting insufficient attention to individual-level factors impacting survivors’ vulnerability and ability to access help, and replicating abuse dynamics when interacting with survivors. Policy and practice implications are discussed.
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ISSN:1524-8380
1552-8324
1552-8324
DOI:10.1177/1524838020967348