Ay Amiga, ?Que Puedo Hacer? Oh Friend, What Can I Do?: An Ethnographic Analysis of How Socio-Cultural and Structural Factors Shape Help-Seeking Relationships for Intimate Partner Violence in Lambayeque, Peru

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV), though it exists as a global problem, is enacted and responded to in nuanced and locally specific ways, shaped by socio-cultural ideas and practices, material and structural conditions, and intersectional social identities in local, national, and global systems of power. Social work literature on help-seeking for IPV recognizes the importance of informal help-seeking in facilitating formal help-seeking, but also recognizes how informal helpers sometimes discourage help-seeking. This three-paper dissertation draws on 24 months of ethnographic anthropological fieldwork, including participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and life history calendars. Using grounded-theory analysis informed by anthropological theory, decolonial feminist theory, and social justice frameworks, this dissertation deeply examines how help-seeking relationships for IPV are constructed and shaped by these forces and explores implications for IPV prevention and intervention in Lambayeque, Peru. Paper 1 examines how gossip and other social pressures shape and constrain help-seeking options for mujeres abusadas (abused women) and help-giving options for potential informal helpers. Hierarchical social networks reinforce themselves, creating webs of social and material constraints that are difficult to escape. Highlighting the power of everyday interactions (e.g., navigating family relationships and living situations), it demonstrates the critical importance of deeply understanding the socio-cultural context in which IPV and help-seeking/giving happen to adequately respond to and prevent IPV. Paper 2 explores the many ways in which socio-cultural and structural factors impact help-giving relationships and highlights how it is misleading to assume that informal helpers can or will help. It examines how the intersectional positionalities of mujeres abusadas, abusivos, and potential help-givers interact and shape help-giving relationships, and explores how embeddedness in local power structures, including kinship and social networks that often control access to material resources, makes some helping relationships successful and others unsuccessful. It troubles the treatment of barriers and facilitators as discrete categories, identifying the contextual and interactional nature of informational, relational, material, and experiential barriers and facilitators, and highlights the complexity of social embeddedness and the need for intersectional analysis. This paper also describes what mujeres abusadas and potential help-givers wish were different (e.g., a desire for community-based violence education and prevention), a dimension that is absent from much help-seeking literature. Paper 3 describes and analyzes the roles and activities of an activist group, Ni Una Menos Lambayeque (NUML), in the city of Chiclayo, Peru. This paper shows how NUML activists engage in community-based problem identification, strategy development, targeted actions, and process and outcomes evaluations. NUML’s activism is raising consciousness among mujeres abusadas and the general population and is empowering potential help-givers to create new support systems. NUML’s activism opens alternative routes for help-giving/seeking while challenging existing formal support services and systems of power. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory, this paper reconceptualizes activism as a third, “other” form of help-giving, challenging the commonly accepted binary of informal or formal help typical in the help-seeking literature. This paper argues that this “other” form of help-giving both challenges and augments these more commonly recognized forms of help. Together, these papers emphasize the importance of recognizing IPV as social and systemic problems, rather than just as individualized, interpersonal violence. They highlight the importance of working across micro-, mezzo-, and macro-level factors and systems in a localized context, rather than relying on neat, predetermined categories that fail to capture the complexity of IPV and help-giving.