Final Report Summary - IPVPUBEXP (Promoting change in approaching intimate partner violence through the analysis of public media and health experts knowledge)
The overall objectives of the project were: to investigate public knowledge of intimate partner violence through the analysis of media representations of the issue; to explore expert perspectives of intimate partner violence through the analysis of health providers’ understandings and practices. Implementation, therefore, consisted of two separate components: media analysis and a survey with health practitioners. The former was undertaken over the first year, the latter over the second.
In the course of the first year, the fellow built an extensive dataset of 430 news from the Italian and British press. This drew on two major national newspapers per country sampled for, and balanced as to, their capacity to inform the public discourse and influence policy debates: La Repubblica and Il Corrieredella Sera in Italy, and The Guardian and The Daily Mail in the UK. The selection criteria were: the most influential and widespread at the national level; social-ideological-political orientations and positioning with respect to readership; a balance between case reporting and policy discussions. In order to sustain a diachronic analysis and explore changes over time, news stories were collected for three single years - 1990, 2000, 2010- through the electronic database Lexis-Nexis and the Senate library in Italy.
The lexical analysis sought to unravel the nature, explanations, social context, and consequences of intimate violence in the press reporting along with the gendered actors involved and their relations. The quali-quantitative analysis focused on both headlines and content. The fellow built a content analysis coding frame, which included the following variables: focus of the article; naming and framing of violence; type of violence addressed; social context and history of violence; explanatory frameworks; social characteristics and psychological traits of the actors involved; consequences of violence. These data were inputted into an analysis grid to create a dataset for textual analysis using a computer-based programme (SPAD-T) designed to enable thematic and discursive analysis.
Results concern representations of domestic violence, differentiated also by year and by gender of the journalist. The analysis brought to the fore two different media contexts with the British daily press being dichotomised into ‘quality’ newspapers providing policy oriented information and populist newspapers prioritising sensational topics, with two papers occupying a middle ground. The Italian press is more homogeneous, mostly characterised by internal heterogeneity, with variations within the same newspaper as to the use of different forms of communication and target audiences.
Results from the media analysis demonstrate that intimate partner violence tends to be represented as an individual concern, an isolated event, through a filtering process which ignores the social context and prior histories of violence. Through lay psychological lenses, reports are anchored to extreme and sudden mental breakdown, while the discourse is imbued with dangerous passions, like jealousy. In this way, violence is domesticated, as its ordinary forms are skewed and turned into its extraordinary manifestations, thus distanced from society into an othering space. Yet, in both countries increasing public attention is accorded to the phenomenon, with a significant growth in overall coverage over the last decade. The focus, however, remains on exceptional individual cases, with a continuing emphasis on domestic homicide. Unless one of the parties is a celebrity, more common forms of domestic violence rarely garner the interest of newspapers, thus remaining invisible in mass communication. This produces a murder-centric focus, which misrepresents the issue. At the same time, media discourse has gradually been touched by a feminist perspective, which emphasises the gendered nature of violence, alongside an international human rights-based discourse: articles discussing national and international policy and gender debates increased progressively over the decades. The gender of the journalist seems relevant here, as it is mainly female journalists engaging with this debate. Additionally, depending on the type and focus of the news, these stories are constructed differently and deploy different language. While policy oriented news names the issue domestic violence, this framing does not appear when the phenomenon is located within a specific criminal event.
The second component of the project concerned a survey of health practitioners, exploring their understandings of, and knowledge about, domestic violence, its causes and dynamics, and related practices. While the extent of domestic violence and its long-term impacts on women’s physical and mental health have been recognised, research has shown that health services, though having a potential for playing a unique preventive role, have lagged behind in developing effective responses in Italy and the UK, though the latter has taken the lead over the last decade.
In order to set up a comparative study on health clinicians, the fellow established collaboration with a research group at the University of Bristol, which has been studying health sector responses to domestic violence for a decade. The fellow adapted a research tool - PREMIS (Physicians Readiness to Manage Intimate Partner Violence) - which was initially validated in the US and then revised and adapted to the UK by the Bristol group to collect data on British general practitioners and mental health practitioners. The fellow designed and undertook a further adaption to the Italian context, on the basis of the national literature and characteristics of the health services. The fellow designed and added relevant questions, such as exploring the perception of professionals’ remit with domestic violence cases or the use of psychological explanatory frameworks; translated the survey into Italian; set up a back translation to ensure accuracy across languages and conceptual consistency across cultures.
The fellow administered the questionnaire, in Italy, to a sample of 160 health practitioners including general practitioners, specialised doctors, and mental health professionals. Most of the respondents were linked to a national pilot programme funded by the Department of Equal Opportunities to address the National Health System’s capacity to deal with the problem more effectively in terms of prevention and care and, ultimately, to assist victims of gender-based violence. This linkage ensures that the results will feed into policy development in Italy.
Overall, the findings show that health care providers recognise domestic violence as a major public health issue and a priority for the national health system. However, a gap emerges between recognition and the capacity of professionals to respond. Whilst sympathetic to abused women’s unsafe situations and willing to offer them specialised support, health professionals express a need for additional knowledge and resources to enhance their assessment and intervention abilities, as well as to fully understand their professional role and contribution in these cases. They are largely unaware of the signs of abuse, victims’ needs and the available resources, and most perceive ‘routine enquiry’ (asking directly about violence) as offending patients’ privacy and feel uncomfortable asking. Moreover, results on clinicians’ focus on the psychological underpinnings of domestic violence suggest a tendency to individualise the issue, in contrast to a perspective which integrates the psychological with the gendered, social and cultural context in which domestic violence takes place. In addition, understanding of the patterned dynamic of intimate partner violence is obfuscated and needs further investigation.
While developed in different fields, ranging from public communication to specialised health interventions, both studies have relevant policy implications. The media analysis sheds light on how public representations of intimate partner violence focus on specific aspects, often misnaming and misrepresenting some of the inherent dynamics. While the fellow is planning to publish a book about this topic in a year time, these findings might be the ground for policy guidelines for journalists. In the case of health professionals, the pilot programme of the Italian Department of Equal Opportunities shows that the Italian government is making gender-based violence a priority and taking measures to tackle it at different levels. The linkage of the fellow’s health study with this national plan ensures inclusion in policy development.
Finally, attending the MA on Woman and Child Abuse was crucial for the fellow to enhance her expertise in the field. Also the fellow actively contributed to the MA, by assisting the delivery of teaching and supervising MA students’ final dissertations.
In the course of the first year, the fellow built an extensive dataset of 430 news from the Italian and British press. This drew on two major national newspapers per country sampled for, and balanced as to, their capacity to inform the public discourse and influence policy debates: La Repubblica and Il Corrieredella Sera in Italy, and The Guardian and The Daily Mail in the UK. The selection criteria were: the most influential and widespread at the national level; social-ideological-political orientations and positioning with respect to readership; a balance between case reporting and policy discussions. In order to sustain a diachronic analysis and explore changes over time, news stories were collected for three single years - 1990, 2000, 2010- through the electronic database Lexis-Nexis and the Senate library in Italy.
The lexical analysis sought to unravel the nature, explanations, social context, and consequences of intimate violence in the press reporting along with the gendered actors involved and their relations. The quali-quantitative analysis focused on both headlines and content. The fellow built a content analysis coding frame, which included the following variables: focus of the article; naming and framing of violence; type of violence addressed; social context and history of violence; explanatory frameworks; social characteristics and psychological traits of the actors involved; consequences of violence. These data were inputted into an analysis grid to create a dataset for textual analysis using a computer-based programme (SPAD-T) designed to enable thematic and discursive analysis.
Results concern representations of domestic violence, differentiated also by year and by gender of the journalist. The analysis brought to the fore two different media contexts with the British daily press being dichotomised into ‘quality’ newspapers providing policy oriented information and populist newspapers prioritising sensational topics, with two papers occupying a middle ground. The Italian press is more homogeneous, mostly characterised by internal heterogeneity, with variations within the same newspaper as to the use of different forms of communication and target audiences.
Results from the media analysis demonstrate that intimate partner violence tends to be represented as an individual concern, an isolated event, through a filtering process which ignores the social context and prior histories of violence. Through lay psychological lenses, reports are anchored to extreme and sudden mental breakdown, while the discourse is imbued with dangerous passions, like jealousy. In this way, violence is domesticated, as its ordinary forms are skewed and turned into its extraordinary manifestations, thus distanced from society into an othering space. Yet, in both countries increasing public attention is accorded to the phenomenon, with a significant growth in overall coverage over the last decade. The focus, however, remains on exceptional individual cases, with a continuing emphasis on domestic homicide. Unless one of the parties is a celebrity, more common forms of domestic violence rarely garner the interest of newspapers, thus remaining invisible in mass communication. This produces a murder-centric focus, which misrepresents the issue. At the same time, media discourse has gradually been touched by a feminist perspective, which emphasises the gendered nature of violence, alongside an international human rights-based discourse: articles discussing national and international policy and gender debates increased progressively over the decades. The gender of the journalist seems relevant here, as it is mainly female journalists engaging with this debate. Additionally, depending on the type and focus of the news, these stories are constructed differently and deploy different language. While policy oriented news names the issue domestic violence, this framing does not appear when the phenomenon is located within a specific criminal event.
The second component of the project concerned a survey of health practitioners, exploring their understandings of, and knowledge about, domestic violence, its causes and dynamics, and related practices. While the extent of domestic violence and its long-term impacts on women’s physical and mental health have been recognised, research has shown that health services, though having a potential for playing a unique preventive role, have lagged behind in developing effective responses in Italy and the UK, though the latter has taken the lead over the last decade.
In order to set up a comparative study on health clinicians, the fellow established collaboration with a research group at the University of Bristol, which has been studying health sector responses to domestic violence for a decade. The fellow adapted a research tool - PREMIS (Physicians Readiness to Manage Intimate Partner Violence) - which was initially validated in the US and then revised and adapted to the UK by the Bristol group to collect data on British general practitioners and mental health practitioners. The fellow designed and undertook a further adaption to the Italian context, on the basis of the national literature and characteristics of the health services. The fellow designed and added relevant questions, such as exploring the perception of professionals’ remit with domestic violence cases or the use of psychological explanatory frameworks; translated the survey into Italian; set up a back translation to ensure accuracy across languages and conceptual consistency across cultures.
The fellow administered the questionnaire, in Italy, to a sample of 160 health practitioners including general practitioners, specialised doctors, and mental health professionals. Most of the respondents were linked to a national pilot programme funded by the Department of Equal Opportunities to address the National Health System’s capacity to deal with the problem more effectively in terms of prevention and care and, ultimately, to assist victims of gender-based violence. This linkage ensures that the results will feed into policy development in Italy.
Overall, the findings show that health care providers recognise domestic violence as a major public health issue and a priority for the national health system. However, a gap emerges between recognition and the capacity of professionals to respond. Whilst sympathetic to abused women’s unsafe situations and willing to offer them specialised support, health professionals express a need for additional knowledge and resources to enhance their assessment and intervention abilities, as well as to fully understand their professional role and contribution in these cases. They are largely unaware of the signs of abuse, victims’ needs and the available resources, and most perceive ‘routine enquiry’ (asking directly about violence) as offending patients’ privacy and feel uncomfortable asking. Moreover, results on clinicians’ focus on the psychological underpinnings of domestic violence suggest a tendency to individualise the issue, in contrast to a perspective which integrates the psychological with the gendered, social and cultural context in which domestic violence takes place. In addition, understanding of the patterned dynamic of intimate partner violence is obfuscated and needs further investigation.
While developed in different fields, ranging from public communication to specialised health interventions, both studies have relevant policy implications. The media analysis sheds light on how public representations of intimate partner violence focus on specific aspects, often misnaming and misrepresenting some of the inherent dynamics. While the fellow is planning to publish a book about this topic in a year time, these findings might be the ground for policy guidelines for journalists. In the case of health professionals, the pilot programme of the Italian Department of Equal Opportunities shows that the Italian government is making gender-based violence a priority and taking measures to tackle it at different levels. The linkage of the fellow’s health study with this national plan ensures inclusion in policy development.
Finally, attending the MA on Woman and Child Abuse was crucial for the fellow to enhance her expertise in the field. Also the fellow actively contributed to the MA, by assisting the delivery of teaching and supervising MA students’ final dissertations.