Women's violence is a widespread phenomenon in the European context, where 62.000 women have reported violence (FRA, 2014)
Violence against women represents a huge social and health problem (WHO, 2016) that threatens the development and respect of the human rights of women (ONU, 1993; WHO, 2012).
The idea promoted by the symposium is to discuss on psychological and community interventions for ending violence against women. The symposium answers the following questions: how the violence is taken in charge by social and health services? What are the possible strategies for ending violence against women? How to involve the perpetrators in the treatment programs? What are the protective measures for women?
The first talk of the symposium by Fortuna Procentese (University of Naples - Italy) will discuss the poor preparation of operators of social and sanitary services in taking in charge women victims of violence is a strong deterrent factor for the reduction of the phenomenon (Francis, Loxton & James, 2017). She will present a research exploring how stakeholders and professional of domestic violence system represented the perpetrators and their adherence to the intervention programs. The data explained a fragmentation and lack of shared representation of the violence and of the perpetrators treatment, highlighting the need of a complex vision of violence favouring the co-construction of capacity building skills.
The second talk of the symposium by Immacolata Di Napoli (University of Naples – Italy) will discuss an emotional and behavioral self-assessment program to facilitate the perpetrators’ recognition of the antecedents and consequence of their violent behaviours. The programm is realized in EU ViDaCS (Violent Dads in Child shoes) project (EU REC-AG-2017/REC-RDAP-GBV-AG-2017); grant 268650. She will present how the serious game induces the perpetrator “in child’s shoes”, assuming that this experimental position of identification in the other body, feelings and cognitions gives to the perpetrators the opportunity to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate behaviours in domestic context.
The third talk of the symposium by Francesca Esposito (University of Oxford – UK), an activist, and advocate and a researcher - focuses on the regimes of mobility control and, particularly, on the detention and deportation systems in Italy, Portugal and the UK. Her experience is related to the lived experiences of women confined inside detention sites, as well as on how detained women try to make sense of and resist the violence and the restrictions imposed on them by border enforcement. She revealed an extraordinary instances of protagonism, agency and resistance, showing how although these women are troubled by the scenarios of violence, uncertainty, and ambiguity they nevertheless struggle in the pursuit of a life to be lived and continued. Her work evidences the failure of security approaches to human mobility, and the necessity to rethink the measures adopted to guarantee women’s protection and rights rather than merely labelling them as “illegal migrants”.