Gender Sensitivity Among Social Workers Handling Cases of Domestic Violence

Abstract

This article examines gender sensitivity among social workers in different service settings, who handle domestic violence cases and its implications for social workers' professional development in Hong Kong. The findings of in-depth interviews with both social workers and survivors of domestic violence revealed that the major difference in the handling of domestic violence cases by social workers in family settings and those working in shelters or with survivors' groups is that the former perceive women's problems as family problems that require mediation and adjustment, whereas the latter consider them to arise from an imbalance in power relations between men and women, thus leading them to focus on enhancing women's well-being in their practice. Helping social workers to recognize structural inequality between men and women is the starting point for the development of gender-sensitive practice in domestic violence cases.

When Wife-Beating Is Not Necessarily Abuse: A Feminist and Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Concept of Abuse as Expressed by Tibetan Survivors of Domestic Violence

“…Rather than viewing themselves as victims of abuse perpetrated by others, they believed themselves to have equal responsibility as their husbands for the conflicts that occurred. This is, therefore, a view that does not utilize the “feminist perspective” and is instead in line with Leung’s (2011) “family perspective” on domestic violence, described above.…”

“…7 However, burden-of-labor abuse may be found in those parts of the world where women live under a larger burden of manual labor than men, as the Food and Agriculture Organization found was the case in rural areas of a variety of developing countries (Doss et al, 2011). Moreover, to my knowledge, although an in-depth exploration of survivors’ conceptions of abuse has not been previously undertaken in the literature, studies from areas such as Eastern China, Kenya, South Africa, Kuwait, and Egypt indicate that in many parts of the world, wife-beating is often considered acceptable in the event of a wife’s “transgression” (Fisher, 2013; Kim & Motsei, 2002; Lee, 2014; Leung, 2011; Nayak et al, 2003; Odero et al, 2014; Yount & Li, 2009). This suggests that parallels between the Tibetan setting and other areas of the world are likely.…”

“…Lai Ching Leung describes two main perspectives by which domestic violence has been viewed in Hong Kong—the family perspective and the feminist perspective. As Leung (2011) states,According to the family perspective, domestic violence has no single cause but rather results from the psychological problems of an individual, situational factors, poor anger management skills, or frustration with the responses and feedback of other family members. Individual problems are seen as a manifestation of a dysfunctional family unit, and each family member has a part to play in creating conflict and violence.…”

“…The feminist perspective, however, focuses on power imbalances between men and women, both in society and within the family, and tends to view intimate partner violence as a process by which “men use violence as a means to maintain their authority and control within the family and to keep women in a subordinate position” (Leung, 2011, p. 293). In the study setting, as we shall see, interviewees’ views fell largely in line with the above-mentioned family perspective, regardless of whether the interviewees in question were victims, perpetrators, or onlookers.…”

Understanding the help-seeking decisions of sexual assault survivors: Implications for social work practice in Hong Kong

“…These few cases reveal that not all social workers possess adequate knowledge or sensitivity in handling sexual assault cases, especially those not working in a crisis center. Under the influence of Confucianism, maintaining the family as a unit has long been the basic approach of social workers in Hong Kong (Leung, 2011). The social workers in this study focused more on the interest of family than the right of the survivors.…”