Daring to ask about violence? Analysing and improving social services’ question-centred responses to gender-based violence

The Swedish Gender Equality Policy aims to end men’s violence against women by 2030. Swedish social services hold responsibility for ensuring that this aim is achieved.

This responsibility is embedded in the Guidelines ‘To want to know, to want to see and to dare to ask’, that stress the role of social (and healthcare) services in identifying gender-based violence through ‘daring to ask’.

In following these and similar guidelines to ask women clients about gender-based violence, social services elicit what we refer to as ‘question-centred responses’.There is a higher prevalence of gender-based violence among women who use social services compared to those who do not.

However, research shows that in Sweden gender-based violence is not routinely identified and addressed within social services.

There are also large variations between municipalities and individual social workers in their use of question-centred responses.

Despite this, there is a lack of empirical research analysing question-centred responses within social services.In order to fill this research gap, the current proposal aims to analyse social services’ question-centred responses to women subjected to gender-based violence in Sweden, and to propose how their diverse needs could be better addressed.

The study comprises three phases.

In the first we will analyse policies related to social services’ question-centred responses using Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach.

In the second, we will conduct interviews with social service professionals and women subjected to gender-based violence to analyse their experiences with question-centred responses within the context of social services.

In the final phase we will engage social service professionals and other relevant professionals in a concept mapping study.

We will here develop strategies to improve and complement question-centred responses in order to better address the needs of women subjected to gender-based violence.