Unearthing Women’s Lost Narratives: Tracing the Roots of Intimate Partner Violence in the Big Bend Region of Florida

Background/purpose

Stigma around intimate partner violence (IPV) refrains women from seeking help. Many women tend not to share their experiences with anyone outside their close social ties, much less any formal sources (e.g., police, shelters). Yet, much scholarship highlights perspectives from those in domestic violence shelters or women’s clinics, thus reinforcing individual onus when it comes to help-seeking from formal sources and inadvertently neglecting survivors who do not seek these services. To gain a holistic picture of the experiences of survivors, it is pertinent to include stories of those who did not or could not seek formal assistance. This study examines childhood experiences of women who had abusive relationships in adulthood.

Method

Eleven women were recruited using an online screening survey, which sought demographic information and administered a shortened version of Hegarty and colleagues’ composite abuse scale. Women were eligible to participate if they were at least 18 years old and had an abusive experience within five years prior to the interview. Women from 19 to 62 years old of ages responded to questions around early childhood, relationship evolution, and the transition through in-depth interviews that lasted between 52 and 177 minutes.

An inductive coding approach was employed for the reflexive thematic analysis. Link and Phelan’s Fundamental Causes Framework (i.e., social position is a function of one’s knowledge, money, power, prestige, and social connections) and Bronfenbrenner’s socio-ecological theory were respectively utilized to analyze and organize the emergent themes.

Results

Broadly, findings were categorized into two major themes: context and problem. First, context highlighted the precarity of women’s socio-demography at the individual level (e.g., low socioeconomic status, low educational attainment, mental health challenges). At an interpersonal level, parental conflict (e.g., abuse between parents), childhood instability (e.g., changes in parental figure) formulated their perceptions of intimate relationships (e.g., violence normalized). At an organizational level, social settings of influence included household (e.g., gendered upbringing of siblings), school (e.g., bullying), and religious institutions (e.g., preachings that reinforced gender roles) during the childhood, further suppressing signs of abuse.

Second, problem encompassed women’s reflections of early stages of their intimate relationship with their perpetrating partner, and how the abuse manifested itself in their companionship. Particularly, women were predisposed to the illusion of stability given their lifelong quest searching for companionship. Women also expressed their own understanding of the perpetrators’ past, at times displaying empathy for the reasons behind their actions. Eventually, violence manifested as physical threat and abuse, sexual and reproductive injustice, mental trauma, deprivation of resources (e.g., social and economic), and exploitation of women’s inability to leave.

Conclusion/implications

This research presents insights into socio-cultural context and adverse childhood experiences of women. There is evidence of intergenerational trauma that increases likelihood of violent relationships in adulthood. From a policy perspective, these narratives underscore the urgency to augment pre-emptive efforts that preclude such adversities. Given lack of interpersonal and institutional supports that are reproduced from childhood into adulthood, exploration of non-help-seeking women’s social systems is warranted to capitalize on their resource capital into intervention delivery.