Self-help groups for women survivors of intimate partner violence: an Italian experience

Internationally, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a serious social problem whose extent is difficult to quantify, being generally underestimated. In Italy, the only national survey on violence against women, dating back to 2007, highlighted that 14% of the women between 16 and 79 years living in Italy who are or have been in a relationship have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or previous partner. The pervasiveness of this phenomenon is also reflected in the growing number of cases of femicide (134), and attempted femicide (83) perpetrated by partners, spouses, or former partners during 2013. In order to tackle this situation, feminist associations have been providing medical, psycho-social, and legal support to the victims, for many years. Individual-centered interventions are fundamental in the early stages of the process, when the woman is breaking the cycle of violence while starting to elaborate the feelings of pain, loss, and impotence. Afterwards, the promotion of woman’s self-esteem and self-efficacy, the reconstruction of her social network, the promotion of the access to community resources, and the development of relations able to offer them various forms of social support become priority goals to achieve. In this view, it is useful to promote forms of self help among survivors. Self-help groups allow women to break the social isolation to which they have been confined, rebuild their social network, contextualize their experience in a wider sociopolitical and cultural dimension, reduce their self-perception as “victims”, and promote the development of an identity as “survivors”. Despite their potential, self-help groups are rare in Italy, while more common are the support groups facilitated by a professional. This contribution presents a self-help experience under way since January 2011 in an anti-violence service of Rome. In addition to describing the experience and its transformation over time, the results of a collaborative research developed with some group's members are illustrated. The research aimed at understanding members’ subjective view of the self-help group process (along its longitudinal development), their consideration of the efficacy factors; their perceptions of the self-help experience in terms of impacts on their quality of life. To this end, members’ narratives were collected and analyzed through a thematic content approach, focused not on the frequency of representative keywords or phrases, but on the emotional significance of the narration, and its centrality in terms of meaning or identity. Some themes and sub-themes were identified. The results confirmed our idea about the importance of promoting self-help contexts for women who survived IPV. These contexts are effective in strengthening the women’s ability to overcome the traumatic experience represented by the violence they have been subjected to while developing resiliency (passing from “victims” to “survivors”). The sense of community fostered by the group makes members feel stronger, safer, more confident, and, above all, not alone anymore. However, the results highlighted how selfhelp strategies should always be integrated with individual multi-level interventions.