Institutional Violence Research Articles

"You only have one mother!": institutional violence in experiences of double motherhood in healthcare.

The objective was to understand experiences of double motherhood during antenatal, childbirth and postpartum healthcare, using a qualitative method involving individual online interviews and asynchronous, online focus groups of cisgender women, mostly in same-sex relationships. The results revealed how these women's experiences of parenting were marginalised, highlighting institutional violence in Brazilian healthcare services, which are presented here in two thematic dimensions: 1) Cisheteronormativity and its impact on experiences of double motherhood; and 2) Institutional violence in healthcare services: from curiosity to LGBTQIA+phobia. It was concluded that cisheteronormativity hinders healthcare for these experiences, especially by rendering the non-gestational mother invisible. This underscores the urgent need to train healthcare personnel, rethink and challenge cisgender and heterosexual norms and promote inclusive policies to ensure equitable care and combat institutional violence.

Loneliness of PhD-ing: Migrant bodies of colour and Irish neo-liberal academia

This paper will look at loneliness as both an affective and a political reality, rather than simply a subjective individual feeling. Using auto-ethnography, I will look at my own PhD experience as a migrant woman of colour in a largely white male dominated Irish academia. I situate this loneliness of PhDing by looking at (a) loneliness of a migrant body of colour and (b) how this loneliness is accentuated by neo-liberal academia. Irish university spaces provide an ideal context to understand the politics of loneliness of minorities because besides being white, these spaces are also extremely neo-liberal, with the country's austerity politics changing its higher educational spaces forever. While talking about loneliness of migrant PhD students of colour as structural and institutional violence, I also illustrate moments of ‘speaking up'. Finally, the paper understands how foregrounding and weaving care and community as ethics into the everyday can one aim to contend with such loneliness of migrant woman precarious academics of colour, particularly within Irish higher educational spaces.

Obstetric violence and LGBTQIA+phobia: interlaced oppressions and violations.

The cisheteropatriarchal capitalist system has developed by class, racial and sexual oppression and exploitation in establishing unequal, hierarchical power relations. One of these kinds of oppression involves the use of violence against bodies considered wayward and transgressive within this structure. Of the different types of violence, this study focused on obstetric violence, understood as patriarchal gender violence designed to remove the rights, autonomy and agency of trans women and men during the processes of pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum and abortion. This article reflects on obstetric violence and its impacts on homo-parenthood for lesbian women and trans men, on the understanding that the LGBTQIA+ population is one of the most vulnerable and removed from health services, mainly because of the institutional violence suffered by these bodies. Accordingly, the intention is to understand, through social and historical analysis, how these sexist, heteropatriarchal violations, interlacing and reflecting in health care for these people, generate even more forms of oppression against this population.

Inserted Religious Life as a Path to Authentic Consecrated Chastity—The Witness of Non-Violent Solidarity of Alice Domon and José Aldunate Lyon in Latin America 1967–1983

The reception of the Decree Perfectae caritatis in Latin America can be understood in connection with the emergence of the preferential option for the poor and the call for consecrated religious life to the insertion since the 1960s. As part of the existing link between conciliar texts and renewal movements, it is worth highlighting the testimony of religious life lived in solidarity with the poor as a way of practicing chastity and incorporating sexuality. This topic is explored through the life stories of two individuals, Alice Domon in Argentina (1937–1977) and José Aldunate Lyon in Chile (1917–2019), within the framework of related studies on ethnographic ecclesiology and the theology of renewed religious life. Amidst military governments, institutional violence, abuses of power, and human rights violations, the lives of these two consecrated individuals showcase an alternative path marked by self-emptying, unwavering fidelity, non-violent action, and prophetic denunciation. The pursuit of integration between contemplative and apostolic aspects in the love for God and the poor, along with the defense of human rights in solidarity with the victims and their families, are some of the keys that define an adapted understanding of religious life in the Latin American context.

Truth-Telling, Aging, and Healing From Institutional Psychiatric Violence: A Life Story and Mad Studies Perspective

During the last decades of the 20th century, large-scale psychiatric institutions were dismantled. This “deinstitutionalization” was connected to efforts to end institutional violence. Former inmates, however, had institutional violence inscribed into their bodies and souls. This article is written by one of them, 87-year-old Swedish psychiatry survivor, Gunnel Bergstrand, together with researcher Elisabeth Punzi. They explore how Gunnel’s stay at a dismantled Swedish psychiatric institution in 1956 affected her whole life and how she struggled to find a listener. We frame our work in a life story perspective and in the recently developed discipline of Mad studies, which challenges psychiatric terminologies and interventions and reclaims expertise based on the knowledge of those with lived experiences, past and present.

The Risk Screener Violence (RS-V): retrospective prediction of violent and aggressive incidents within the prison setting.

Physical and verbal violence toward staff or other detained individuals is a reoccurring problem within correctional facilities. Screening for violence risk within the prison setting could provide a valuable first step in the prevention of institutional violence. The brief and compact Risk Screener Violence (RS-V) has shown to be an efficient new method for assessing concerns regarding post-release violent offending for incarcerated persons. This study aimed to find out whether the RS-V is also able to predict future violent and aggressive incidents during imprisonment. The predictive validity of the RS-V for future violent and aggressive incidents during a follow-up time of 4 months within prison was analyzed, using a file-based design. Violent incidents toward staff and other inmates (physical violence and violent threats), other aggressive incidents (aggression toward objects and verbal disruptive behavior), and both categories combined, were included as outcome measures based on disciplinary reports. The RS-V showed medium to large predictive values for both violent and aggressive behavior during prison stay. In particular, good predictive values of the RS-V were found for violence toward prison staff. This study shows that, besides post-release violent recidivism, the RS-V is able to accurately predict future violent and aggressive incidents during prison stay. By correctly differentiating between low concern and high concern individuals, the RS-V aims to contribute to more personalized interventions and risk management and, subsequently, to improved prison safety. Future studies using prospective prison practice data are needed to further support the validity of the RS-V regarding institutional violence.

Drawing Ambivalence

Abstract This article reflects on the significance of Melilla, a Spanish enclave and southern border of the European Union (EU), in the migratory experience of the Moroccan youth on the move to Europe who call themselves harraga. The methodology combines a multisited ethnographic approach (Marcus 2001), from Casablanca to Paris, with a multimodal one (Westmoreland 2022), collecting information through in-depth interviews, life stories, participant observations and a drawing workshop. Although the institutional violence in the governance of the mobility of this youth makes Melilla resemble a city-prison (Khosravi 2021), in my reflections I argue that this border has an ambivalent impact on the whole migratory experience of the harraga youth. On the one hand, frustration, everyday violence, and racism appear; on the other, friendship, autonomy and networking.

Women's High-Conflict Divorce Experiences and Access to Statutory Social Services in Turkey

High-conflict divorce proceedings in Turkey typically span 2 years but can extend to 6, reinforcing the perception that institutional violence against women has been widespread under the conservative Justice and Development Party’s 20-year rule. This study poses two primary research questions: (1) What are the legal, sociocultural, financial, and psychological experiences of high-conflict divorced women? (2) Which statutory social services could women access during and after the high-conflict divorce process? Employing a feminist qualitative research approach, this study draws on 20 semi-structured interviews with women in Istanbul who have undergone high-conflict divorces. The goal is to understand these women’s experiences and pinpoint the disparities between their needs and the support available from statutory social services. The findings illuminate the challenges women face while dealing with patriarchal norms within societal, cultural, and financial realms amid the divorce process. Additionally, the study reveals the inadequacies of current family-oriented services and emphasizes the urgent need for women’s rights-based support, including psychosocial, legal, and financial assistance.

Masculinism, institutional violence and #MeToo: understanding Australian University responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of data from the project Sexism, Higher Education, and Covid-19: The Australian Perspective. The authors argue that the gendered impact of the pandemic in Higher Education Institutions constitutes a form of institutionally perpetrated sexist harassment, and that raising awareness of the ways in which institutions themselves enable and perpetrate such harassment is consistent with the aims of the #MeToo movement. This article is intended to act as testament to the ways in which Australian universities function as masculinist institutions that, during this time of crisis, deployed tactics that were experienced by women and minority-identifying research participants as sexist and violent. The article illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and university responses to it, are evidence of the everyday sexual violence that women and gender-diverse academics experience due to inherent norms about the labour that ‘counts’ in the masculinist, neoliberal academy.

Nurse Empowerment through Violence Prevention

Since emergency departments (EDs) are known to be high-risk environments for occupational violence, violence against hospital emergency department (ED) nurses is a serious concern worldwide. A systematic literature review of the variables influencing nurse aggression in emergency departments was the main objective of this study. Ten English-language studies that were published between 2008 and 2022 were included in the review of the literature. The researcher used SpringerLink, Science Direct, Google Scholar, ERIC, and Academic Search Elite to conduct a thorough literature review on the research problem as it was defined. The literature review revealed several factors that affect violence towards nurses in emergency rooms. Rarely have prior research examined all aspects of nurse hostility as well as efficient preventative strategies across different medical wards. The study looked at the prevalence, kinds, causes, and effects of workplace violence in emergency departments. It also looked into themes like the origins of violence, incident management, and institutional violence prevention measures, as well as population and occupational risk variables related to workplace violence in EDs. This thorough assessment is essential since it will increase nurses' professionalism, career advancement, and confidence, ultimately resulting in patient satisfaction.

”Sin fars rareste patent”

This article analyzes Lars Saabye Christensen’s novel Maskeblomstfamilien (2003) with a particular focus on uncovering how the novel portrays and addresses the shame and stigma associated with deviating from established gender norms. Drawing on Judith Butler’s works Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, the article investigates the social regulation that the novel’s protagonist undergoes in 1960s Norway within the framework of the heterosexual matrix. While Butler’s theoretical texts do not provide extensive descriptions of how the regulation of the heterosexual matrix operates in practice and how it feels to be subjected to it, an analysis of Maske­blomstfamilien offers a more comprehensive understanding of how these regulations function in relation to the allocation of shame, acts of violence and hatred, institutional violence, and social exposure. Concurrently, the novel highlights the protagonist’s resistance to these regulations through strategies such as hyperbolic misquotation.

Institutional Violence: The Road to Genocide in the Former Caisse Sociale du Rwanda

Scholarly works on the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis have been too generic with minimal focus on institutional violence in the former state institutions, corporate organizations, and administrative units. Therefore, this paper addresses this knowledge gap by focusing on the former state institution— Caisse Sociale du Rwanda (CSR) as a case study. The research adopted a qualitative approach, with primary data being collected through structured and semi-structured interviews, which were administered to 62 participants, and data collection methods were structured and semi-structured interviews, observation methods, and secondary sources. Findings show the institutionalization of violence through different political periods. Legitimizing exclusion in CSR was inseparable from the state’s ethnic divide between the Hutu and Tutsi.

“You only have one mother!”: institutional violence in experiences of double motherhood in healthcare

“You only have one mother!”: institutional violence in experiences of double motherhood in healthcare

Academic Freedom and Institutional Violence

ABSTRACT Academic freedom is typically understood as a means of protecting faculty rights against the violence—physical or intellectual—of the state or of the institution’s administration. This article argues that academic freedom may be seen as a form of violence, insofar as it is potentially threatening to the methodological and institutional stasis of colleges and universities.

The Missing Person in a Story about Kashmir: A Reading of Madhuri Vijay’s <i>The Far Field </i>

This article examines the trope of the ‘missing person’ in the literature about Kashmir and argues, by taking Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019) as an example, how the trope allows the examination of a multilayered history of violence. The article problematises the idea of visibility and invisibility of the missing/abducted/hidden/underground people during conflict and suggests that these figures can be read as metaphors for personal and collective trauma and loss. By triangulating three coordinates in Kashmiri context – violence, trauma, and invisibility – the essay argues that a missing person can be emblematic of memories of trauma, negation of humanity, violation of body, and public complicity in institutional violence. By foregrounding Shalini’s journey to recover the missing people, the novel underpins the “rot remains” of a society afflicted with violence and state apathy. Within the framework of trauma theory in the postcolonial context, the essay shows how the focus of Vijay’s narrative of Kashmiri people’s trauma is shifted from speech to body. The emphasis on the body contributes to a compelling narration of trauma by conflating land and people.

When the ward is the patient: Using the PRISM protocol to understand and reduce violence in an inpatient intellectual disability setting.

Violence in inpatient settings is recognised as a worldwide issue, with inpatient intellectual disability services having higher rates than other mental health settings. Violence results in injury and illness, lack of confidence in the organisation and staff burnout. These combined effects have a negative impact on the ability of services to provide therapeutic environments. Attempts to manage violence tend to focus on the individual. This is only one part of the solution. Situational risk factors for violence within secure settings can be identified and modified to reduce violence rates. The role of situational risk factors in rates of institutional violence requires consideration in addition to individual patient risk assessment and management. To discuss an illustrative case study of a ward experiencing high levels of violence, resulting in staff burnout and low morale. To describe how assessing and addressing the relevant situational risk factors led to demonstrable reductions in violence and improvements in the service provided. This case study demonstrates the practical application of assessing and managing situational risk factors for violence in a locked intellectual disability ward in order to effectively reduce levels of violent incidents. A description of the violence and critical issues faced by the ward is provided, noting key elements of the timeline of events and the application of the Promoting Risk Intervention by Situational Management (PRISM) process to address these. The PRISM protocol enabled a comprehensive assessment and understanding of situational factors relevant to the violence rates in the ward. The recommendations following the analysis enabled the management team to identify areas for immediate and long-term action. Practical steps to address issues such as improving soundproofing were implemented quickly whilst other issues required changes over the longer term. Significantly, reduced levels of violence were observed within a 2-month period of immediate steps being taken, with further gains achieved over the longer term. This paper provides the only example of the use of the PRISM protocol in an intellectual disability inpatient setting. The reduction in violence seen in this unit provides 'real world' evidence that addressing situational factors for institutional violence can be effective in intellectual disability inpatient settings, with beneficial outcomes for patients and staff. Whilst individual patient risk assessment and risk management are key components of forensic mental health care, situational risk factors for violence are highly relevant to rates of violence within secure care settings. Structured assessment of situational risk factors should be considered when inpatient settings experience persistent high levels of violence. Further research on the impact of assessing situational risk factors in forensic mental health settings (including intellectual disability services) would help to develop the existing evidence base.

Violence against Deaf Women from an Intersectional Framework in Mexico

This research aimed to analyse the association between violence with linguistic knowledge in Mexican Sign Language (LSM) and sociodemographic data of Mexican Deaf women. To collect data from an intersectional framework, this study applied an opportunistic and chain sampling of 46 Deaf women from different areas of Mexico. Methods included in-person and remote interviews. Forty-one per cent of women indicated that they had been victims of abuse by their partner. In comparison, 73.9% of women had suffered some abuse in schools, and 39% of women had been victims of sexual abuse. The analyses with Spearman bivariate correlation showed that as the LSM learning age of the Deaf women increased, the levels of labour abuse (rs = .50, p < .0001), violence in a bank (rs = . 51, p < .0001), violence in school (rs = .56, p < .0001), and violence by an interpreter (rs = .45, p < .01) increased too. Results also revealed that a more excellent LSM family knowledge of LSM is moderately related to less labour abuse (rs = -.53, p < .0001), violence in a bank (rs = -.45, p < .01), violence in school (rs = -.43, p < .01), violence by an interpreter (rs = -.39, p < .01), and with lower magnitude to institutional violence (rs = -.37, p < .05).

Criminal thinking as a bipolar dimensional construct: Testing the risk-promotive status of the PICTS proactive and reactive criminal thinking scales.

This study sought to assess whether two scales from a criminal thinking inventory displayed bipolar properties such that high scores on these scales reflect a risk effect and low scores a promotive effect. To test this hypothesis, the proactive criminal thinking (PCT) and reactive criminal thinking (RCT) scales from the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) were organized into three categories-top 25% of scores (high group), the middle 50% of scores (intermediate group), and bottom 25% of scores (low group)-and crossed with preincarceration (prior convictions and age at first conviction), peri-incarceration (total and aggressive institutional infractions), and postincarceration (revocation and rearrest) outcome indicators. Participants for this study were 3,039 male inmates who completed the PICTS while confined in a medium-security federal prison. Results showed that the PCT and RCT each achieved a mixed (risk and promotive) effect for four out of six outcomes. Of the four unipolar effects, PCT achieved a promotive effect but not a risk effect for the two preincarceration outcomes, whereas RCT produced a risk but not promotive effect for the two postincarceration outcomes. These results provide support for the notion that PCT and RCT are primarily bipolar dimensional constructs in which high scores are associated with negative criminal justice outcomes and low scores with positive criminal justice outcomes, although there may be unipolar aspects to each scale as well. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A Post-Socialist Residential School and the Continuum of Violence

Abstract This article* discusses the tolerance of violence. Specifically, it explores the way violence is enacted and perpetuated in residential education in Latvia. The article explores the perception and experience of violence in these schools by combining ethnographic fieldwork and autoethnographic data. Violence within the institution coalesces around three main aspects of experience: violence as necessary for regulating relationships, the embodiment of violence, and the expression of institutional violence. I illustrate how the application of violence is often justified as developing independence in students and by offering opportunities that mask the role of the school system in the reproduction of inequality in society. I conclude with an exploration of how the tolerance of violence arises from reproduction of an unequal social order that is maintained through the duplicitous position of the residential school as simultaneously necessary and unnecessary, closed and open, violent and nurturing.

Black Femicides Matter: Conceptualizing the Killings of Black Girls and Women as Structural and Cultural Violence

Although men of color are disproportionately the victims of violence in the United States, Black women face a substantial risk. This work presents a layered commentary on the growing epidemic of Black femicide. First, hypervisibility and invisibility within institutions is explored. Second, using feminist victimology and intersectionality frameworks, four forms of Black femicide are analyzed: gun violence, intimate partner violence, targeted violence, and institutional violence. Third, topics of missing and insufficient information on Black femicide are probed. Fourth, procedural limitations and recommendations for future works are proposed. This essay seeks to improve discussions surrounding Black femicide in research and practice.