‘I don’t need an eye for an eye’: Women's responses to intimate partner violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities for agency in intimate partner violence (IPV) situations from the perspective of women in Sierra Leone and Liberia using focus group discussions (N groups = 14, N participants = 110) and individual interviews (N = 20). Findings identify multiple interrelated factors influencing the decision-making of women experiencing IPV. At the individual level, emotional factors and women's knowledge of their rights and options influence their decision-making. At the relational level, the role of neighbours, family and friends is crucial, both for emotional support and practical assistance. At the community level, more formal structures play a role, such as chiefs and women's groups, though their effectiveness varies. At the structural level are barriers to effective responses, including a poorly functioning criminal justice system and a social system in which children often stay with fathers following separation or divorce. Strong cultural beliefs operate to keep women in abusive relationships. We identify implications for prevention and response services and make practice recommendations. Since the desire of most women experiencing IPV was to live in peace with their husbands, interventions should respect women's priorities by focusing more on prevention and interventions to end the violence, rather than solely assisting women to leave violent relationships.

Keywords:

• intimate partner violence
• domestic violence
• Liberia
• Sierra Leone
• violence against women

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of IRC staff who worked on this project, specifically: Amie Kandeh (IRC's GBV Coordinator in SL at the time of data collection), Gertrude Garway (IRC's GBV Coordinator, Liberia) and Esther Karnley (IRC Advocacy Manager, Liberia) and also the other members of WPE team: Kristin Kim Bart (the West Africa Technical Advisor during data collection) and Karin Wachter (the Senior Technical Advisor for IRC during the data collection).

Disclosure statement

The lead author (Rebecca Horn) was hired as an external paid consultant for this work, and the other authors were or are currently affiliated with the IRC. Eve Puffer was a former Research and Evaluation Advisor for the IRC, Elisabeth Roesch is a former Advocacy Officer with the IRC and Heidi Lehman is the Director of the Women's Protection and Empowerment technical unit. While this type of partnership does sometimes lead to a conflict of interest, such as in programme evaluations, in this case, the goal of the IRC was to collect data that was as objective as possible to look for both sources of risk and resilience of the women in these communities. The priority was to gather accurate information that was as unbiased as possible, which motivated the hiring of a consultant and the use of rigorous qualitative methods. Further, while Dr Horn was paid for the consultancy, to our knowledge, it is unlikely that the organisation may gain financially from publication of this manuscript. The only possibility may be increased visibility of the organisation to an academic audience, but this is unlikely to lead to funding. In sum, we do not believe these factors influenced data analysis or results presentation.