“Body and Soul Pain”: Conception and social support network for women who experienced marital violence

Abstract

Violence is a problem to be understood in an interdisciplinary way. This qualitative study aimed to understand the conception of women who experienced marital violence and structurally analyze their social support networks. Five women who reported their spouses to the Women’s Police Station (DECCM) and were being monitored by the Technical Team of the Women’s Emergency Support Service (SAPEM) were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. A constructive-interpretive analysis was performed to identify the conceptions of experience of marital violence and through the Calgary Family Assessment Model (CFAM) it was possible to make an analysis and a graphic representation of the social support network for the women participating in this study. In general, it was observed that all women understand physical violence as actions that cause damage to the human anatomical and physiological structure. However, their conceptions are not limited to physical injury; they are also related to affective issues. For the participants, conjugal violence is not fragmented into “types of violence”, on the contrary, it occurs “agglutinated”, affecting the body and soul. Regarding the development of women’s social support network, they all have a family member as support – usually sons/daughters or mothers – and most of them count on the SAPEM technical team. The police station/police is also part of the network. Therefore, these tactics used in the social support network structure have different mechanisms by which the women reorganized their stories, electing some people and/or institutions, excluding others, highlighting this or that person and/or institution to make them agents for minimizing threatening behavior to themselves and their families. These people, when called in, seem to act either to curb violence and to strengthen the couple’s marital bonds or to break these bond

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