Intimate Partner Violence: A Glimpse From Italy’s Largest Domestic Violence Center

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Domestic violence is defined by the U.N. as the kind of violence perpetrated by intimate partners such as physical, psychological and economic abuse (U.N. 1993). The center for domestic and sexual abused victims has been founded in 1996. At the beginning the main task was to help the sexual abused victims in the province of Milan; a decade later the domestic violence offences have been included in the activities of the center. The present study is going to describe the data retrieved during its lifetime, showing the change in the trends and focusing on the analysis of the years included between 2012 and 2014. MATERIALS AND METHODS The staff of the center has retrieved raw data since its foundation, which have been analyzed in order to define the features of these events. A report is filled out for each victim including all the variables relevant to the comprehension of the phenomenon, such as the sociological, psychological and medico legal aspects of the crime. RESULTS The preliminary evaluation of the data shows a clear trend towards a constant rise in the requests for supporting help for both types of violence with an increase of 409% from 1996 to 2015 related to sexual violence and a 124% increase in domestic violence between 2008 and 2015; it has also been observed a growth in the spontaneous recover by the victims. Throughout the evaluation it appears that the number of males reporting domestic abuse might be constantly increasing from 1 case to 13 between 2012 and 2014. This may also be due to an increased conscience by the abused males. Other interesting trends have been detected related to child witnessing domestic violence, showing an increasing trend from 5,5% to 16% that might be also related to the increase of abuses perpetrated by both parents which varied from 4% to 16%; moreover, it appears that the most victimized age group is 31 – 40 firmly standing between 33% and 37%. We were not able to detect significant difference between domestic violence and sexual violence, in fact the overlap between those two kinds of violence is very weak, it ranges from 0,6% to 1,6%. CONCLUSIONS In summary, the information retrieved during this initial analysis leads to an improved understanding of the phenomenon, and reinforces our idea that the final purpose of the study on the development of prevention policies may be achieved. We shall further analyze the relationship between different variables such as the most victimized nationalities and the revictimization trend. REFERENCES U.N. (1993), “General Assembly: Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women”