Can Women Shelters Help Reduce Symptoms of PTSD and C-PTSD? Trajectories of PTSD Symptom Development Following Partner- and Family-Related Violence

Background: To protect women from Intimate partner violence (IPV), women’s shelters should not only provide emergency safety from IPV exposure, but also prolonged support that empowers women to build a life free from violence. The present study aims to investigate individual symptom development in association with residency at a women’s shelter. Method: Data were collected at four different timepoints, that is, enrolment (T1, N = 150), 3-months residency (T2, = 110), 6-months residency (T3, N = 68) and after relocation (T4, N = 63). Women were included from four Danish women’s shelters. The International Trauma Questionnaire (ITQ) was applied to test for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and Complex-PTSD (C-PTSD) at all timepoints. A paired sample t-test was used to test the mean symptom development, and a Latent Class Growth Analysis (LCGA) was applied to test for different classes of PTSD-trajectories. Logistic regression was applied to predict class membership from shelter-related variables and symptom severity, that is, length of residency, psychological counselling, revictimization and key symptoms of C-PTSD. Results: The prevalence of PTSD (31%) and C-PTSD (37.9%) was high at enrolment. Although t-tests suggested a significant decline in symptoms at follow-up, the LCGA revealed different classes of symptom development. The two-class model was found to be the best representation of data with low-symptom- and high-symptom profiles, respectively. Overall, the largest decline in symptoms occurred within the first 3 months of residency. Revictimization was high and was further found to predict class membership. However, when included in a multiple regression only symptom severity predicted the high-symptoms profile class. Discussion: Psychological treatment focussing on PTSD and C-PTSD is important for the women’s future well-being and safety. Reports on revictimization was alarmingly high, which emphasises a continuing need to protect women from psychological violence within the shelters. These findings should be replicated in larger samples before we can draw any conclusion.

Planning Shelter Service Spaces and Structures for Resilience: A Spatial Analysis of Women’s Shelters During COVID-19

Objective: Globally, domestic violence against women increased in severity over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shelters supporting women experiencing temporary homelessness due to violence had to make major changes in service delivery to accommodate pandemic protocols, including how many families could stay in shelter, where they were allowed to reside, and how they were, and were not, able to interact with shelter staff and the outside world. The present study used a novel approach to spatial analysis to understand how pandemic protocols affected shelter space use. Method: Floor plans and written pandemic protocols were submitted by 15 women’s shelters in Ontario, Canada. Each pandemic protocol was analyzed and mapped onto its respective floor plans to determine how much space was lost under different modes of operation: normal (pre-pandemic), physical distancing (using pandemic protocols), and quarantine (using pandemic protocols during an outbreak). Three types of shelter space were analyzed to understand what types of spaces shelters were losing: Primary (bedrooms, bathrooms, and laundry areas), Secondary (community areas and staff offices), and Tertiary (hallways and storage). Findings: All 15 shelters lost space, with an average of 27% of net area lost overall (range 7%-56%). Within the three types of space, 18% of Primary, 48% of Secondary, and <1% of Tertiary space was lost. Key factors influencing space loss were the type of protocol used and the existing layout of the shelter space. Conclusions: Recommendations for shelter space planning in the context of rapidly evolving public health requirements are provided.

The Resilience of Unwed Pregnant Teenagers: A Preliminary Survey at Malaysian Women’s Shelter Homes

Unwed pregnant teenagers tend to experience various problems. Apart from that, they also receive negative perception from community. For that reason, most shelters are provided to assist and protect the teenagers involved. However, only those who can adjust to hardships or resilient can survive the worse. This preliminary survey aimed to identify the level of resilience among unwed pregnant teenagers (UPTs). The study involved 34 UPTs from four women’s shelters under the supervision of the government and private organizations in Peninsular Malaysia. The respondents were selected using the purposive sampling technique. This study used a quantitative approach, and the instrument of this study was a questionnaire named Tahap Resilien Remaja (TReR), which was administered based on the Ego-Resiliency Scale (ER89) and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). The items in the TReR were validated by five expert evaluators in the psychological and social fields. Study data were analyzed descriptively using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) Version 25.0. The findings of the study showed that UPTs in women’s shelters had a moderate level of resilience (Mean[M] = 3.40, Standard Deviation [SD] = 1.010). The UPTs in this study showed good progress in the shelters. Therefore, the shelters are expected to maintain and improve the quality of existing services from time to time. Other shelters can also utilize the findings of this study to provide better services to their residents to recover from psychosocial problems resulting from cases of unwed pregnancy.

Family Matters: Immigrant Women’s Activism in Ontario and British Columbia, 1960s -1980s

This article uses oral history interviews to explore the ways in which different attitudes towards family and motherhood could create major tensions between mainstream feminists and immigrant women’s activists in Ontario and British Columbia between the 1960s and the 1980s. Immigrant women’s belief in the value of the family did not prevent immigrant women from going out to work to help support their families or accessing daycare and women’s shelters, hard fought benefits of the women’s movement. However, these women demanded access to job training, English language classes, childcare, and women’s shelters on their own terms, in ways that minimized the racism they faced, respected religious and cultural values, and respected the fact that the heterosexual family remained an important resource for the majority of immigrant women. Immigrant women activists were less likely to accept a purely gender-based analysis than mainstream feminists. They often sought to work with men in their own communities, even in dealing with violence against women. And issues of violence and of reproductive rights often could not be understood only within the boundaries of Canada. For immigrant women violence against women was often analyzed in relation to political violence in their homelands, while demands for fully realized reproductive rights drew on experiences of coercion both in Canada and transnationally.

Othering Honor-Based Violence: The Perspective of Antiviolence Operators in Northern Italy

In recent years, so-called honor-based violence has become a major issue for the operators of the women's shelters in South Tyrol (Northern Italy) that support women who have suffered from domestic violence. The antiviolence operators who work in the women's shelters generally relate this form of violence to the experiences of young migrant-origin women. In this article, we discuss the operators' definitions of honor-based violence, which present a variety of dichotomous categories that reveal a process of othering and evoke the lexicon of the international conventions on gender discrimination and gender-based violence. Indeed, some traces of an essentialist understanding of culture are still recognizable in this lexicon, most of all in the relationship of culture with the concept of honor. We conclude by identifying possible ways to overcome the risk of essentialization in the antiviolence operators' practices, suggesting how to redefine them by incorporating the migrant-origin women's perspectives and stressing the significance of this study for a wider understanding of the women's empowerment in the advocacy work of the women's shelters.

Integration of Primary Health-Care Services in Women’s Shelters: A Scoping Review

Women who have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) have significant detrimental physical and mental health consequences associated with the violence as well as numerous barriers to health-care and social service utilization. Service integration offers a solution to help support women who have experienced violence overcome negative health consequences as well as barriers to system navigation and use. The purpose of this scoping review was to examine research activity pertaining to IPV and primary health-care and women’s shelters integration. Namely, the aim was to determine the extent, range, and nature of research related to the effects of integrating primary health-care services and women’s shelters. Nineteen sources were identified as potentially relevant from four electronic databases, with four articles meeting the inclusion criteria of integration of primary health-care and women’s shelter services where outcomes were presented related to the efficacy of primary health-care received and integration. Numerical analysis revealed considerable homogeneity among articles in terms of methodological approaches, patient populations, and type of integration. Inductive thematic content analysis revealed three themes that resulted from integration: (1) increased access to and acceptability of services, (2) bridge back to health-care, and (3) decreasing future health-care burden. The findings from this scoping review represent a first attempt to summarize the literature, indicate a need for additional research, and suggest implications for practice.