‘I could have just done with a little more help’: an analysis of women's help-seeking from health visitors in the context of domestic violence

Abstract

Domestic violence is a serious issue that adversely affects large numbers of women and children. Despite having an adverse impact upon health and welfare, women experiencing domestic violence face a number of difficulties seeking help about their situation from statutory health and welfare agencies. The present paper is based upon a study of British health visiting in relation to women experiencing domestic violence. Drawing upon interview data from 16 women who experienced domestic violence and were the mothers of small children, this paper explores their accounts of contact with the health visiting service. All of the 16 women who participated in this research described difficulties in seeking help about domestic violence. These included practical concerns such as fears for their own safety, lack of knowledge regarding appropriate sources of support and protection, and concerns about losing custody of their children. Given these concerns, some women concealed their experiences of domestic violence from their health visitors. For those who disclosed the domestic violence to their health visitors, they did not always receive appropriate support or protection. Of particular concern was the absence of information about accessing more specialist services. The research findings suggest that there is considerable scope for practice development in order to ensure that women experiencing domestic violence are able to receive safe and appropriate responses from health visitors.

Why health visiting? Examining the potential public health benefits from health visiting practice within a universal service: A narrative review of the literature

“…Barlow et al's (2005) study showed the importance of health visitors having the skills and willingness to work collaboratively with women who feel unheard, unable or unwilling to trust service providers, along with the service flexibility required to meet different sets of expectations. Peckover (2003) showed that health visitors often lacked understanding or knowledge of available services for domestic violence, so women did not always disclose their experiences. (Hanley 2007;Baldwin and Griffiths, 2009;Edge, 2010Edge, , 2011Almond andLathlean 2011, Wittkowski et al 2011), with health visitors acknowledging a need for more education for these, and many other, areas of practice.…”

Experiences of emergency care by the women exposed to acute physical intimate partner violence from the Finnish perspective

“…Further, women's fear of escalating violence, shame, their economic dependency, loneliness, concern about losing custody of their children, long waiting times, possible police involvement, lack of knowledge regarding appropriate support and protection have been reported as factors affecting the woman's willingness to seek and receive care (Rodriguetz et al, 1996;Yam, 2000;Peckover, 2003).…”

“…Losing custody of children may be a real concern for women (Dowd et al, 2002;Peckover, 2003). However, IPV is also a great risk factor for child abuse (Augustyn and McAlister Groves, 2005;Hornor, 2005).…”

Encountering ethics in studying challenging family relations

“…We claim that applying rigid ethical regulations may yield data and participants that are highly selected, and, as happened in our study, fewer interviews and less data that was planned. For example, several domestic violence studies indicate that only a small proportion of victims seek help (Bacchus et al, 2003;Garcia-Moreno, 2002;Krug et al, 2002;Peckover, 2003). This means that studying victims of domestic violence who are already in helping systems only manage to 25 reach the tip of the iceberg.…”