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Abstract
Understandings of women's agency in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) have been dominated by an individualistic focus on help-seeking behaviour. The role of children in influencing, enabling and restricting the decision-making processes of their mothers has been largely ignored. We adopt biographical analytical approaches to qualitative longitudinal data collected as part of the Young Lives study to highlight the interdependency of women's and children's agency in contexts of IPV in Vietnam. We illustrate how women's agency is both enabled and constrained by their relationships with their children, as well as by wider structural processes, and examine how gender and generation intersect. In marginalised settings where few formal services exist or strong social norms preclude women from accessing support, understanding these informal coping strategies and the processes by which these are negotiated is essential for developing more effective policy responses.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the children and families participating in the Young Lives study for generously giving their time and sharing their experiences with us. We would also like to thank the team of researchers in Vietnam lead by Vu Thi Thanh Huong. Helpful comments were received on earlier versions of the paper from Gina Crivello, Virginia Morrow and our two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. We adopt the World Health Organization's (Citation2013) definition of IPV as ‘behaviour by an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours’.
2. In this paper, ‘children’ refers to all individuals aged below 18, as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
3. One is the country with the least gender inequality (UNDP, Citation2014, p. 174).
4. The law covers such acts as physical punishment, emotional violence (insults, isolating or shunning behaviour etc.), sexual violence (forced sex) and economic abuses (including destruction of property, forced overwork or control of income to induce financial dependence) and covers married couples, divorcees and unmarried couples living together (National Assembly of Vietnam, Citation2007).
5. Young Lives is an international longitudinal study of childhood poverty which conducts large-scale household and child surveys with 12,000 children and their primary caregivers in four countries – Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam (Crivello et al., Citation2013).