Interventions for ending intimate partner violence (IPV) have not usually provided integrated approaches. Legal and social policies have the duty to protect, assist and empower women and to bring offenders to justice. Men have mainly been considered in their role as perpetrators to be subjected to judicial measures, while child witnesses of violence have not been viewed as a direct target for services. Currently, there is a need for an integrated and holistic theoretical and operational model to understand IPV as gender-based violence and to intervene with the goal of ending the fragmentation of existing measures. The EU project ViDaCS—Violent Dads in Child Shoes—which worked towards the deconstruction and reconstruction of violence’s effects on child witnesses, has given us the opportunity to collect the opinions of social workers and child witnesses regarding violence. Therefore, the article describes measures to deal with IPV, proposing functional connections among different services and specific preventative initiatives. Subsequently, this study will examine intimate partner violence and provide special consideration to interventions at the individual, relational, organizational and community levels. The final goal will be to present a short set of guidelines that take into account the four levels considered by operationalizing the aforementioned ecological principles.

Witnessing domestic violence (WDV) is recognized by the Istanbul Convention as psychological abuse that has dramatic consequences on the psychophysical health of children. Therefore, professionals who form the support network for WDV victims play a very fundamental role. In order to draw up useful guidelines for services dealing with WDV, and to give children more awareness of supportive settings, this study analyzes WDV in the perception of health and welfare professionals to enhance their skills and strategies for contrasting gender violence. Sixteen Neapolitan specialists dealing with WDV children were interviewed. A theoretical intentional sampling was used. Narrative focused interviews were carried out, transcribed verbatim and analyzed through the grounded theory methodology, using the ATLAS.ti 8 software (Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany). We assigned 319 codes and grouped these into 10 categories and 4 macro-categories. The analysis of the texts led to the definition of the core category as “The Crystal Fortress”. It summarizes the image of the WDV children as described by the professionals working in contrasting domestic violence. In this structure the parental roles of protection and care (fortress) are suspended and everything is extremely rigid, fragile and always at risk of a catastrophe. It also symbolizes the difficult role of health professionals in dealing with such children and their families. For WDV children, protective factors guarantee solid development and supportive settings help them to learn proper emotional responsiveness and expressiveness and to develop their skills in talking with adults while avoiding negative consequences.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) has been declared a global epidemic by the World Health Organization. Although the attention paid to both the perpetrators and victims of gender-based violence has increased, scientific research is still lacking in regard to the representations of operators involved in interventions and management. Therefore, the following study explores how the representations of operators affect how gender violence can be managed and combatted through an ecological approach to this phenomenon, in addition to highlighting the roles of organizational-level services and their cultural and symbolic substrates. In total, 35 health and social professionals were interviewed and textual materials were analyzed by thematic analysis. The evidence suggests that services contrasting gender-based violence utilize different representations and management approaches. The authors hope that these differences can become a resource, rather than a limitation, when combatting gender-based violence through the construction of more integrated networks and a greater dialogue among different services, in order to make interventions designed to combat gender-based violence more effective.

Gender-based violence is a widespread phenomenon and pandemic that affects women’s lives. Many interventions have been activated for perpetrators, but the dropout rate is still high. In order to draw up guidelines for responsibly and sustainably dealing with the phenomenon, this study is aimed at investigating the professionals’ perception of the perpetrator as a useful element in designing innovative intervention policies. Open interviews were carried out with welfare and health professionals and the Grounded Theory Methodology was used to analyze the collected data. These results detect attitudes of social health personnel and their feelings of impotence towards gender-based perpetrators because of the emergence of an inevitable repetitiveness of the violent behavior, as well as the “normality of violence” in a patriarchal culture and its “transversality”. This reflective knowledge allows for the opportunity to develop best transformative attitudes toward the phenomenon. According to the results, it is urgent to establish an active and convinced alliance with the healthy part of the man, through specific prevention paths, in order to activate an authentic motivation for change and its sustainability.

Social and health professionals facing gender-based violence in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) express feelings and thoughts closely connected to their place of work and the users of their services. However, research on professionals’ reflexivity and their implications has not been closely investigated. Therefore, this article will describe representations of IPV among social and health professionals facing gender-based violence as well as their personal feelings in accomplishing their job. Fifty interviews with health and social professionals were analyzed using grounded theory methodology supported by Atlas.ti 8.4. Five macrocategories will describe this phenomenon, leading to the final explicative core category that summarizes professionals’ attitudes toward it. Being “kept in check” among partners, partners and families, services, and institutional duties is the core category that best expressed their feelings. Therefore, implications for services and training will be further discussed.

Women experience gender violence more than men, in the digital world as well as offline. To understand and prevent this phenomenon, we must consider the continuum between the virtual and the real world and highlight that cyberviolence and offline violence follow the same patterns. Therefore, to comprehend cyberviolence against women, the present study aimed to examine the feelings and emotions of those who have had direct and indirect experiences with it. The research involved 43 young Italians, aged 20–35 and used a narrative approach with a stimulus composed of six questions. The textual material was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and four main themes emerged: Emotional experiences of cyberviolence; the amplification of cyberviolence in the offline world; the role of bystanders; and actions to prevent cyberviolence. The results highlighted the importance of approaching cyberviolence against women from a holistic and multidimensional perspective through an ecological approach that integrates different levels of action: collective, organisational, interpersonal and individual. Cyberviolence against women entails interventions that are complex and multi‐focused on all those who inhabit the virtual dimension, as well as the offline dimension, where the consequences of online violence become evident.