Navigating El Que Diran: Gossip and Other Social Barriers to Intimate Partner Violence Help-Seeking in Lambayeque, Peru

Background and Purpose: Over 69% of women in Lambayeque, Peru self-report experiencing Intimate Partner Violence, but few access formal supportive services. Much Social Work research on IPV help-seeking quantifies service use but does not explore survivors’ motivations.

My research qualitatively explores how and why survivors make decisions about informal and formal help-seeking, relationships between types of help-seeking, and what options survivors wish they had. It also examines how and why formal and informal helpers make decisions about help-giving and the facilitators and barriers helpers encounter.

Methods: This ethnographic research draws on 18 months of fieldwork in Lambayeque including ethnographic interviews, life history calendars, and participant-observation with mujeres abusadas (local term: abused women), community members, service providers, and policy makers. Participants were recruited through personal contacts and participant recommendations. Data were analyzed using case study and grounded theory methods.

Results: This research suggests that a fear of gossip, victim-blaming, and other social pressures influence and often discourage help-seeking. Mujeres abusadas regularly cite fear of el qué dirán (what people might say) as a primary deterrent to both informal and formal help-seeking. Every participant interviewed in this research cited gossip and social pressure as a major barrier to help-seeking. Connectedness in kinship and social networks is necessary for women’s economic and social survival in Lambayeque. Help-seeking, which makes “personal” issues public, is often treated as a social act more deviant than the violence itself. Gossip, shame, and victim-blaming are expertly wielded by “regular folks” as tools of social control to protect or tarnish individuals’ and families’ reputations and to maintain local socio-political structures, including patriarchal gender norms. Formal service providers –including social workers, psychologists, police officers, medical doctors, and prosecutors– who are gatekeepers to services and resources, also figure in these local social networks and participate in gossip and victim-blaming. Service providers regularly offer or deny support based on victims’ and abusers’ positionalities in socio-political networks, and some ask victims and abusers for bribes to “tip the scales.” Supportive friends try to counter these pressures, telling mujeres abusadas, “you don’t live off of what others say,” but poverty and most women’s economic dependence on men limits the practicality of those words of encouragement.

Conclusions and Implications: Mujeres abusadas have sophisticated understandings of the potential consequences of gossip. They gauge their positionalities against others’ and engage in rational readings of the social terrains they must navigate, often making calculated decisions to not seek help despite wanting access to support and resources. Social pressures hinder Peru’s initiatives to serve mujeres abusadas and reduce violence. This research aims to reveal these dynamics in order to develop informal and formal response systems that mujeres abusadas are more able and willing to access. Many mujeres abusadas expressed relief at telling their stories for the first time as part of this research and offered insightful ideas about how to better serve women in Lambayeque. Service providers regularly expressed frustration with mujeres abusadas who do not seek help and emphasized to me the need for more research like this.