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It is well established that women face multiple barriers accessing treatment for problematic and unhealthy alcohol use, but less is known about how their interconnected problems affect how they seek help from, and access, alcohol-treatment services. This study aims to explore the dynamic nature of women’s help-seeking for problematic and unhealthy alcohol use and how this can be compounded by unsuitable treatment services, especially when women present with complex needs.

Thirteen semi-structured interviews with women who had accessed alcohol-support services were conducted, audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically using the complexity theory.

For women with complex needs, the process of seeking help may trigger unpredictable behaviours, health or social problems and intermittent serial access to treatment. Current services do not always address women’s holistic needs. Unless services focus on addressing interconnected problems – including historic trauma – they may compound the complexity of women’s problems. Complexity theory offers novel insights into this process, a concept not applied to problematic and unhealthy alcohol use treatment previously.

Services should adopt the complexity-focused perspective featured in this study. While the authors acknowledge the increase in gender-responsive provision, the limitations of this study include a small sample size, the self-selecting nature of the sample and retrospective reporting. Participants were recruited and selected by service staff resulting in gatekeeping and possible sampling bias.

Services should adopt non-linear approaches to treatment. Implementing complexity approaches to treating women’s problematic and unhealthy alcohol use should capture the dynamics, complexity and non-linear nature of women’s help-seeking journeys as well as their internal and external responses that may result in relapse. The authors recommend complexity-focused, multiple-component and integrated collaborative strategies to address not only addiction but also all components of women’s needs, including past trauma.

Applying complexity-thinking to help-seeking experiences for alcohol treatment and recovery services is novel and proved useful in understanding the variety of women’s experiences and how these interact with their help-seeking behaviours, including treatment environments.

We use Canadian data to examine the help‐seeking strategies of women dealing with the consequences of violent victimization. Consideration of the help‐seeking strategies of victimsmay provide insight into other decision‐making processes. The analytic framework integrates research on police reporting and intimate partner violence with the wider help‐seeking literature. This integration allows for an examination of the effect of the victim’s relationship to her offender on decisions to seek help from family, friends, doctors, social service agencies and the police. The research has two objectives. First, we aim to determine whether help‐seeking exists as isolated choices or whether there is a discernable set of help‐seeking strategies used by crime victims. Although many victims do not call the police, they often rely on family, friends, social service and mental health interventions.We find that those victims who report their victimizations to the police also seek support from family and friends. Second, we examine the correlates of these help‐seeking decisions. In doing so, we explore the effects of the offender relationship on decisions to seek help. We explore differences in help‐seeking across attacks by strangers, spousal offenders, dating offenders, and other known offenders. Our findings suggest that women victimized by a spousal offender are more likely than others to use a substantial help‐seeking strategy that includes disclosure to the police, doctors and social service agencies.

The purpose of this paper is to identify barriers to seeking help among abused Iranian women.

This qualitative research was carried out using content analysis approach. The participants were 24 married women who were selected from health care centers, recreational centers, and two universities in Tehran, Iran. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data.

During data analysis, four themes emerged that explained barriers to seeking help in the participants: “fear of negative consequences of help-seeking,” “lack of resources,” “beliefs and attitudes,” and “indirect experiences of not being supported.”

This study has practice and policy implications for promoting help-seeking among abused women. Based on the results, to promote help-seeking, intervention plans must focus on empowering women to improve their education and employment, eliminating attitudes and beliefs hindering help-seeking, and fortifying formal and informal support systems for abused women.

Domestic abuse victimisation is a common experience among women with problematic substance use, but support provision for both issues is siloed within the UK. Research on the topic focuses on practitioner responses, dominating women’s voices within research, policy and practice. As such, knowledge about women’s experiences of help-seeking is missing. This study therefore aims to fill a gap in knowledge by exploring the lived experiences of supporting seeking among women impacted by domestic abuse and substance use.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 women who had a history of co-occurring problematic substance use and domestic abuse. Influenced by interpretive phenomenological analysis and feminist research praxis, the study explored how women with dual needs navigated support and help seeking and the barriers they faced.

The women reported the biggest barrier was the disconnect between substance use and domestic abuse support, including a gap in the communication of information. This resulted in them having to choose which of their needs to seek support for. None of the women received support for their combined experiences, and most of the women never received support for their domestic abuse experiences alone.

This is the first piece of research from the UK to explore, in-depth, women’s journey through support for their co-occurring substance use and domestic abuse victimisation. Previous research has not consulted with women to understand how they navigate the complex support systems available. This paper is, therefore, important, because it demonstrates the journeys to services these women take and the barriers they have to overcome.

This paper attempts to recognize the informational needs of women who suffer from intimate partner violence (IPV). It then presents a model of a web site that may answer to these needs.

First, the paper defines the phases women suffering from IPV go through. This is done by surveying the literature that describes the stages these women experience. In order to clarify the proposed model, the paper then describe our own set of phases based on the above literature. Once the phases mentioned above are understood, the needs of these women become evident, thus allowing us to define and specify them. The model of the web site is then described and the paper shows how it relates to the various aforementioned needs.

The web site would offer a variety of information, such as: names of organizations that offer support, chats, and forums that provide emotional support and advice from women who experienced abuse in the past as well as from professionals.

Security issues of this model need to be researched before applying it to use, as they are beyond the scope of this paper. Such issues should include techniques for erasing the user's traces and for keeping out “unwelcome visitors.”

This model, if applied, may greatly aid women suffering from IPV, as it would provide them with the emotional support and technical information they need in order to make important decisions regarding their situation. Information, if utilized, may give these women the ability to control their fate and actively improve their quality of life.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the differential use of the Lethality Assessment Program (LAP) – a risk-informed, collaborative police-social service intervention – across female victim-survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) in four police jurisdictions in Oklahoma.

Women visited by the police during the study period participated in semi-structured telephone interviews. Logistic regression was utilized to examine what factors impacted implementation of the LAP.

There was differential use of the intervention based on the following: jurisdiction, severe violence at the incident, perpetrator’s use of a weapon ever in the relationship, PTSD symptomology, and women’s prior protective actions and utilization of domestic violence advocacy services.

Future research should examine the decision-making process of survivors and police officers to better elucidate the meaning behind these statistical relationships.

PTSD education should be an integral part of police training on domestic violence. In addition, officers should be trained to recognize less injurious, but also damaging, forms of IPV, such as verbal abuse and coercive control.

While police contact can provide accountability for the offender, the social service system is best equipped to provide safety options for the victim-survivor of violence.

Previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of the LAP. It is important to understand how the intervention is applied in order to better understand who is most assisted by the intervention and what training or education could be beneficial for officers providing the intervention.

Workplace bullying is a prevalent and costly form of abuse influencing women's health. The purpose of this study is to expand knowledge of how women care for their health after experiencing workplace bullying and to explore variation in that process.

A qualitative feminist grounded theory method was used to study a community sample of 40 adult women across three Canadian provinces.

Experiencing workplace bullying causes a disruption in women's health and this was identified as the central problem for women in this study. Women address health disruption using a three‐stage process the authors named “managing disruption” that involves protecting, mobilizing, and rebuilding. Women's efforts to care for health which they define broadly as including control over their lives are influenced by formal and informal support and by personal factors such as past experiences, perception of employability, values and beliefs, and relationship patterns.

Longitudinal study would be useful to understand long‐term consequences and potentially helpful resolutions of workplace bullying. Whether men's perspectives on their experiences are similar could also be explored.

Increasing awareness of what workplace bullying is and how to manage it would contribute to diminishing its occurrence and its impact.

Women need support and resources from workplace and healthcare professionals when they have experienced workplace bullying.

Few studies have explored women's experiences of caring for health during and after bullying. Interestingly, women reported adopting more balanced perspectives on work and life after their bullying experiences.

Since female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) entered the wider Western consciousness in the 1970s, feminist debates surrounding these practices have wrestled with the tensions between recognising the specificity of women's experiences of oppression and challenging gender-based violence (GBV) as a global phenomenon. Crucially, although intersectionality is now readily applied to analyses of different forms of GBV, the international anti-FGM/C discourse has been slow in embracing more nuanced analyses of women's vulnerability. This chapter draws from still often-overlooked Black and postcolonial feminist thinking to problematise the radical feminist legacy which continues to prescribe the dominant explanations to women's participation in FGM/C in terms of ‘Third World’ un-educatedness and lack of feminist consciousness. In framing women's participation as a patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti, 1988), this chapter argues that women's complicity in FGM/C takes place amidst complex constraints which inhibit women's spaces for action in FGM/C-practising societies. The chapter reflects findings from qualitative research which has interrogated women's experiences of continuums of interpersonal and structural violence to make sense of women's participation and constrained resistance in FGM/C-practising contexts. In doing so, this chapter problematises the gender and racial binaries which continue to influence decontextualised understandings of women's acts of ‘honour’-based violence.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the needs of men experiencing domestic abuse from the perspective of the professionals supporting them.

An all Wales qualitative study, 20 semi-structured interviews were completed with managers and practitioners of domestic abuse services supporting men. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis.

Analysis identified six themes: against the tide of recognition, a need to recognise and accept domestic abuse, knowledge of provision, low numbers of men, resources (time and funding) and rebuilding. However, against the tide of recognition was central. Domestic abuse is understood as a heteronormative and gendered experience; abused men defy these notions.

Findings cannot be generalised across the UK. This study offers a valuable base on which to build future knowledge. Future research might consider recruiting larger samples or follow up qualitative findings with a larger quantitative survey.

This paper presents the manager and practitioner views of the service needs and solutions for men. They perceive that abused men need to recognise and accept victimisation, have knowledge of provision and know it is acceptable to seek help and receive practical support.

Increasing recognition cannot be achieved in isolation. A shared commitment is required from policy, practice and research to raise the agenda for abused men.

This is an under-researched area. This paper is the first to explore the needs of men through the lens of domestic abuse professionals.