Navigating Biases and Distrust of Systems: American and Canadian Intimate Partner Violence Service Providers’ Experiences with Trans and Immigrant Women Clients

ABSTRACT

To date, very little is known about intimate partner violence (IPV) service providers’ experiences serving trans and immigrant women (IPV) survivors and their barriers in reporting and/or accessing formal services. Employing constructivist grounded theory, two vignettes were constructed – one featuring a trans woman and the other an immigrant woman, both seeking IPV services. American and Canadian IPV service providers responded to open-ended survey questions about both scenarios, resulting in several emergent themes including, but not limited to: service provider biases, shelter conflicts, and distrust of systems. Policy implications and future research are also addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate partner violence
• trans women
• immigrant women
• intimate partner service providers
• COVID-19
• intersectionality
• vignettes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Service providers are anyone who provides IPV services, including frontline staff, shelter employees, legal support, advocates, etc.

2. A trans person is someone whose assigned gender at birth does not correspond with their gender identity (Bornstein & Bornstein, 1994). An individual’s gender identity signifies their personal understanding of their own gender (Morrow, 2006).

3. Genderism is classified as the deeply rooted social assumption that only two genders exist – producing structural, institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal systems aimed to marginalize and subordinate gender variance (Bilodeau, 2009).

4. This also is a shortcoming for cisgender men who are seeking IPV resources.

5. A list of the specific sociodemographic questions asked on the survey is available upon request.

6. The current study provides results from three of the five open-ended questions.

7. Vignettes can be developed using previous research study findings and literature reviews (see, Aujla, 2020; Bradbury-Jones et al., 2014; Wilks, 2004). In our case, we used both data sources for the vignette constructions.

8. Ethics approval was received from both the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board and the Indiana University Bloomington Institutional Review Board.

9. Recruitment e-mail is available upon request from the authors.

10. A list of six U.S. and Canadian national hotlines (e.g., suicide prevention, crisis text lines, culturally sensitive helplines, and online chats available 24/7) were provided as resources for participants to access if needed.

11. Importantly, Katrina’s vignette featured a sentence about how she “does not want to involve police, who recently arrived at their home and referred to a fight as a ‘simple misunderstanding.’” This finding, then, is a possible example of the co-construction of knowledge between the researcher(s) and participants.

12. Fear of deportation and child separation was discussed in the vignette. Again, participant responses may reflect a co-construction of knowledge between the respondents and researchers.

13. Social desirability bias is defined as the tendency for research participants to provide responses that are socially desirable instead of giving responses that reflect their true feelings. Examples include giving socially desirable answers to questions around religion, race, politics, etc. (Grimm, 2010).

14. The federal initiative “It’s Time: Canada’s Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence” has three pillars aimed at 1. Prevention of gender-based violence, 2. Support for survivors and their families, and 3. The legal and justice system response.