- Title
- Long-term recovery from intimate partner violence: recovery paradigms
- Creator
- Carman, Mary Jean
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global and Australian epidemic. It is experienced in various forms by 1 in 3 Australian women. Despite efforts aimed at prevention, prevalence rates have not abated. Therefore, it is important to support women who have left abusive partners, by designing interventions that will assist them to recover. Valid and reliable measurement tools are needed by the sector to investigate the effectiveness of these interventions. This PhD aimed to investigate how women perceive and make sense of their experiences of long-term recovery from IPV. The research aimed to provide a definition of recovery from IPV based on empirically derived recovery-related factors. These factors could inform the design of service interventions to promote recovery and assist in the future development of a multi-dimensional scale measure of women’s long-term recovery. The research project employed three separate studies to produce the required information: a scoping review of the IPV recovery-related literature, a phenomenological in-depth study of women from the Hunter Valley, NSW, in long-term recovery (n=21), and an online survey of Australian women dispersed across the nation (n=1116). Of the long-term recovery survey sample (n=665/1116), half of these women had separated from their abusive partners more than 10 years earlier. The scoping review of the literature identified and explored ten theoretical frameworks that can assist service providers in their support of recovering women. These frameworks exist in the IPV literature in a piecemeal manner, but this review critically explored their positioning within the field and their relative contributions to the review topic, including supportive and non-supportive evidence. Findings from the empirical studies in this research project revealed that the women found recovery to be a long and difficult journey with many twists, obstacles, and backtracks. Conceptually, the themes of recovery were experienced in the women’s lives as threads in a multi-axial continuum woven throughout each woman’s unique recovery journey. It is important to note that even a long time after leaving an abusive intimate partner and establishing a new life for themselves, many women continued to struggle with significant and long-lasting challenges, especially social, financial, and mental health challenges. The findings of the research generated a definition of long-term recovery from IPV based on 22 empirically derived recovery-related factors collated into five superordinate themes or concerns that the women worked on during their recoveries. For the women in the survey, recovery involved ensuring their safety and surviving independently of the perpetrator, while gaining freedom from his control, and healing and moving on from the effects of the abuse, while enjoying a better life. Children’s wellbeing was of primary importance to their mothers and parenting responsibilities complicated their journeys to recovery. Importantly, these five themes were experienced concurrently by survivors, not only sequentially as indicated in other research findings. Women described how they experienced aspects of a better life from the time of separation and how these experiences provided hope for the long and challenging recovery journey ahead. This was important, as complete separation from the perpetrator and healing from the trauma and abuse took decades to achieve, where even possible. Finally, the 22 recovery-related factors identified and explored in the findings were compared with recovery factors proposed by other IPV and mental health researchers. Women’s assessment of their own recovery progress was prioritised in the research and the use of a visual analogue scale for subjective assessments of recovery progress was utilised in the online survey. Some women (15% of the long-term recovery sample) assessed their recovery journey as “ending or had ended”, illustrating that recovery is possible for many survivors (102/665 women). Alternatively, recovery was experienced by most women (80% of the sample) as an ongoing journey with uncertainty about whether they would ever consider themselves “recovered”. Some women (5% of the sample) indicated little progress in their recoveries many years after separation. Further investigation of the experiences of these women is required and may indicate a need for more intense, long-lasting, and uniquely adapted service support. It is hoped that the information provided by this research will assist survivors to experience greater levels of healing and recovery in the future. It is also hoped that the research will assist service providers to design services that are more effective in promoting recovery and include women’s assessments of their own recoveries.
- Subject
- intimate partner violence; domestic violence; recovery; IPV; survivors of IPV; IPV interventions
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1516342
- Identifier
- uon:56969
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Mary Jean Carman
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 4 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 345 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |