Why, on the global scale, gender mainstreaming and public policies against gender-based violence are still weak and defective? Why, despite the several awareness-raising campaigns, the reporting rates of partner and domestic violence continue to be low ? Particularly for countries which are the target of development aid, these questions are generally addressed by demographic investigation and by an applied research funded by transnational stakeholders. Yet, these studies often propose traditionalist explanations of gender-based violence, using notions of culture and gender which are not adequate to reflect the reality of local social dynamics. Moreover, these kinds of inquiry privilege survey and quantitative data and do not elaborate in-depth understanding of the implementation gaps in the everyday life of public policies. Further, these approaches do not discuss that the institutions do not have the monopoly in responding to gender-based violence. Other unformalised patterns for giving repair for gender violence exist in the local settings and survivors do operate an evaluation on which kind of help seeking.
Under these presumptions, the INRES research project proposed to understand the socio-political stakes in responding gender-based violence through a grounded-based research able to account for the multiple ways through which domestic gender-based violence is tackled in the Senegalese urban life. INRES consisted in an anthropological ethnography drawn on an original articulation of theoretical questions pertaining to the anthropology of kinship, development and law, combined with the suggestions of gender studies.
In spite of taking for granted the institutional and transnational explication for gender-based violence, INRES wanted to identify and analyse the multiple situated definition of this phenomenon, by understanding the multiplicity of voices on this subject and their frictions in the interpretation of the violence. Accordingly to the anthropological literature on public policies, INRES intended to ethnographically understand the conditions of access to legal assistance and welfare support in cases of gender-based violence, by considering those practical norms that are deployed in divergence from official ones. Finally, INRES was aimed at understanding how, outside the institutions and within households, kinship webs and neighbourhoods, the situations of injustice and violence against women have been discussed and mastered by the past generations, and are discussed and mastered nowadays.
