Ending Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Locating Men at Stake: An Ecological Approach

Interventions for ending intimate partner violence (IPV) have not usually provided integrated approaches. Legal and social policies have the duty to protect, assist and empower women and to bring offenders to justice. Men have mainly been considered in their role as perpetrators to be subjected to judicial measures, while child witnesses of violence have not been viewed as a direct target for services. Currently, there is a need for an integrated and holistic theoretical and operational model to understand IPV as gender-based violence and to intervene with the goal of ending the fragmentation of existing measures. The EU project ViDaCS—Violent Dads in Child Shoes—which worked towards the deconstruction and reconstruction of violence’s effects on child witnesses, has given us the opportunity to collect the opinions of social workers and child witnesses regarding violence. Therefore, the article describes measures to deal with IPV, proposing functional connections among different services and specific preventative initiatives. Subsequently, this study will examine intimate partner violence and provide special consideration to interventions at the individual, relational, organizational and community levels. The final goal will be to present a short set of guidelines that take into account the four levels considered by operationalizing the aforementioned ecological principles.