Inquiring gaps, discrepancies and contradictions in response to domestic gender-based violence. Gender relationships, practical norms and public services in Senegal.

Objetivo

Preventing and responding to domestic gender-based violence is a socio-cultural and political stake. Various public policies, including development ones, address this subject but if we consider their implementations several discrepancies, gaps and contradictions emerge. Focusing on Senegal, INRES is aimed at exploring the socio-cultural dynamics on which this phenomenon is grounded by sizing: a) the different representations of gender-based violence and of injustice in men’s behaviours towards women that circulate among pertinent distinct social actors (i.e. state officers, lawyers, NGOs personnel, women and, in a broader sense, citizens); b) how legal procedures and guidelines are effectively implemented in this domain, considering the practical norms that are deployed in divergence of official ones; c) which uninstitutionalised patterns of handling domestic gender-based violence are spread in the social arenas and the meanings that legitimate them. From a theoretical point of view INRES proposes an approach that combines in a seminal fashion different research fields of anthropology (of development and public polices, of law and of gender and kinship), integrating social history and gender studies and being committed with the purposes of a public anthropology.