A better approach to intimate partner violence Progress is being made on promoting change in the way intimate partner violence (IPV) is approached. An EU project contributed to this by analysing the public media and the knowledge of health experts. Health © Thinkstock IPV is a grim topic that has gained widespread attention over the past decades. Yet, proper knowledge regarding the dynamics of social understanding and how to provide a means to implement change is fundamentally lacking. In light of this, the EU-funded project IPVPUBEXP examined IPV through a gender perspective and also integrated it with psychological, social and political theories. The goal was to discover how the public as well as institutional perspectives have been formed. Field studies were conducted in Italy and the United Kingdom, as a comparative approach, drawing on two major national newspapers in each country. News stories were collected during the years 1990, 2000 and 2010. The main aim was to examine how intimate violence is covered in press reporting. Findings from the media analysis showed that IPV is portrayed as a private domestic concern. As such, there is an emphasis on homicide and a seeming link to mental and emotional imbalance. In short, this results in the issue becoming misrepresented overall. The second half of the project's work, which involved the exploration of health practitioners' knowledge and understanding in both countries, revealed a gap. Health professionals claimed that while they are sympathetic and want to offer more help, they are in need of further knowledge to better equip them to fully handle such cases. Both areas of the study, media and health care, are useful for policymaking in these areas in order to implement measures for change. Keywords Intimate partner violence, public media, health experts, gender perspective, press reporting, health professionals, health care
