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Presentations from the 2024 VISION Annual Conference

The presentations from the 3rd VISION annual conference are now available for downloading.

The event was held at Kings College London, Strand campus, on 11 June. The theme was Violence prevention in research and policy: Bridging silos. Keynote speakers, Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno (World Health Organisation) and Professor Katrin Hohl (City, UoL) considered the changes needed for effective violence prevention from the perspectives of health and justice. Three symposiums highlighted interdisciplinary research from the VISION consortium and partners on:

– Violence against older people: Challenges in research and policy;

– Learning across statutory review practices: Origins, ambitions and future directions; and

– Responding to experiences and expressions of interpersonal violence in the workplace

Approximately 80 academics, central and local government officials, practitioners, and voluntary and community sector organisations attended from a range of health and crime / justice disciplines.

All the slides that could be shared are available below. Please feel free to download.

Photo caption: Symposium 3, ‘Responding to experiences and expressions of interpersonal violence in the workplace’. From left to right: Chair, Dr Olumide Adisa (University of Suffolk) and Panellists Dr Vanessa Gash (City, UoL), Dr Alison Gregory (Alison Gregory Consulting), Catherine Buglass (Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse) and Dr Niels Blom (City, UoL)

Professor Gene Feder, VISION Director – Welcome – 1 download

Welcome_VISION-Annual-Conference-2024Download

Keynote Speaker, Dr Claudia Garcia-Moreno – Violence against women: From research to policy and action – 1 download

Keynote-Speaker-2_Research-to-policy-and-action_2Download

Symposium 1 – Violence against older people: Challenges in research and policy – 4 downloads (Hourglass, Office for National Statistics, Public Health Wales & VISION)

Symposium-1_Older-people-and-violence_HourglassDownload
Symposium-1_Older-people-and-violence_ONSDownload
Symposium-1_Older-people-and-violence_PHWDownload
Symposium-1_Older-people-and-violence_VISIONDownload

Symposium 2 – Learning across statutory review practices: Origins, ambitions and future directions – 1 download

Symposium-2_Statutory-Review-Practice_AllDownload

Symposium 3 – Responding to experiences and expressions of interpersonal violence in the workplace – 3 downloads (Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse, and 2 from VISION)

Symposium-3_Violence-and-the-workplace_VISIONDownload
Symposium-3_Violence-and-the-workplace_EIDADownload
Symposium-3_Violence-and-the-workplace_VISION-2Download

Unleashing social media potential to research violence against women and girls in Iran

Researching violence against women and girls (VAWG) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) presents unique challenges, primarily due to various contextual factors that hinder conventional survey methodologies. These challenges include limited funding, political obstacles, and safety concerns for both researchers and participants. Consequently, traditional survey approaches may prove unfeasible or inadequate in capturing the complex realities of VAWG in these settings.

VAWG is a particularly pressing issue in Iran, a Middle Eastern country marked by its patriarchal structure and systematic and pervasive gender discrimination. The patriarchal and legal structure of the country perpetuates gender inequalities and reinforces societal norms that tolerate or even condone violence against women. Yet, understanding the full scope of VAWG in Iran remains hindered by a lack of robust data.

In a recently published study, VISION researchers, Ladan Hashemi and Sally McManus, collaborated with counterparts from Bristol University (Nadia Aghtaie) and Iran (Fateme Babakhani) to explore the effectiveness of social media in recruiting victims of violence in Iran, shedding light on their experiences and the potential of social media as a research tool.

The findings revealed valuable insights into the manifestation and context of VAWG in Iran. Social media recruitment proved to be effective in reaching a diverse sample of victims and provided crucial insights into the dynamics of violence, the identities of perpetrators, and the settings where violence occurs. Victims often reported experiences from more than one type of perpetrator, spanning both public and domestic spheres. While social media recruitment offers broad reach and a safer environment for data collection, it also presents challenges such as sampling biases which affect the generalisability of findings.

For further information please see: Social Sciences | Free Full-Text | Using Social Media to Recruit Seldom-Heard Groups: Reaching Women and Girls with Experience of Violence in Iran (mdpi.com)

Or contact Ladan at ladan.hashemi@city.ac.uk  

Photo from licensed Adobe Stock library

Prevalence of physical violence against people in insecure migration status 

VISION researchers from the Systematic Review working group (Andri Innes, Sophie Carlisle, Hannah Manzur, Elizabeth Cook, Jessica Corsi and Natalia Lewis) have published a systematic review and meta-analysis in PLOS One, estimating prevalence of physical violence against people in insecure migration status. This is the first review of its type, synthesizing global data on violence against migrants in all types of insecure status. 

The review finds that around 1 in 3 migrants in insecure status experience physical violence. Violence included physical interpersonal, community and state violence. Insecure status was conceptualised encompassing undocumented status, lapsed statuses, asylum seeking and other pending applications, and any status that embeds a form of insecurity by tying status to a particular relationship (such as spousal or employer-employee). Studies were only included in the review if the violence happened while the victim was in insecure status. 

The VISION team reviewed academic literature published between January 2000 and May 2023, across social and health sciences. The study was global in scope, although data was limited by the English language search.  

Key Findings 

More than one in four migrants in insecure status disclosed intimate partner violence specifically. Spousal visas embed a particular risk of violence because the visa status is connected to an intimate partner relationship, creating an important power disparity. Nevertheless, there was no significant difference in prevalence of violence by gender across the dataset. Prevalence also did not differ meaningfully across geographic region, perpetrator, status type or time frame.  

The most significant findings included that violence exposure is not meaningfully different for people in undocumented status than in other types of insecure status. Physical violence is a concern across all types of insecure migration status types. 

The findings were limited because of high levels of heterogeneity in the data. It was also difficult to consider intersectional identity characteristics such as age, race or ethnicity, nationality, religion, marital status, socio-economic status, education level or motivation for migration because these were not standardised across included studies. This suggests that further and specified research is needed in this area. 

The review is open access and is available to read in full here. 

If you have any comments or feedback for the authors, please contact Andri at alexandria.innes@city.ac.uk  

Photo from licensed Adobe Stock library

VISION/VASC Webinar Series: IPV and the LGBTQI+ communities

This event is in the past.

We are pleased to announce the VISION and Violence & Society Centre (VASC) Webinar Series.

The purpose of the series is to provide a platform for academia, government and the voluntary and community sector that work to reduce and prevent violence to present their work / research to a wider audience. This is a multidisciplinary platform and we welcome speakers from across a variety of fields such as health, crime, policing, ethnicity, migration, sociology, social work, primary care, front line services, etc.

Our first webinar is Tuesday, 20 February 2024, 1300 – 1350. We welcome Dr Steven Maxwell, Research Associate in the School of Social & Environmental Sustainability and Associate in the School of Health and Wellbeing, at the University of Glasgow.

Steven will present his research on intimate partner violence within the LGBTQI+ communities. He is a former mental health nurse and completed his PhD in Global Public Health at University College London in 2021. Steven’s PhD explored HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis uptake/adherence among men who have sex with men who engaged in sexualised drug use. His current interest is researching health inequities/social justices across minority and deprived populations, particularly sexual & mental health, and related substance use.   

To register for the event in order to receive the Teams invitation and / or if interested in presenting at a future Series, please contact: VISION_Management_Team@city.ac.uk

The VISION/VASC Webinar Series is sponsored by the UK Prevention and Research Partnership consortium, Violence, Health and Society (MR-V049879) and the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London.

Webinar: Ontological Security Theory & Migration Studies

Dr Alexandria Innes

This event is in the past.

VISION researcher and City, University of London International Politics Senior Lecturer, Dr Alexandria Innes, will be speaking with Professor Catarina Kinnvall (Lund University) and Dr Marcus Nicolson (EURAC Research) on 23 January 2024 at 1 pm CET about ontological security.

Ontological security refers to a person’s sense of existential safety in the world. The theory was originally used by the psychiatrist R.D. Laing to explain how his patients’ experienced reality in a way that did not conform with normative experiences. Later, the theory was revisited by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991), who emphasised the role of routines, societal trust, and biographical narratives in providing individuals with a sense of security.

The webinar explores the use of Ontological Security Theory in migration studies and political science. Prof Kinnvall will draw on her expertise in the study of minority groups to show how a strong conceptualisation of home is key for individuals to develop feelings of ontological security and highlight the role that state-level narratives play in these processes. Dr Innes will provide insights from her research on the life histories of individual migrants to argue that a strong biographical narrative and sense of trust in their surroundings are necessary to perform security.

This webinar is part of the EURAC Research online series “Diversity Matters”. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the webinar series explores the impact of migrations, diversities and mobilities on increasingly superdiverse territorial realities. The series is a forum for experts to share their work and expertise with an audience of fellow academics, students, decision-makers and practitioners.

To register and for further information please see: Ontological Security Theory & Migration Studies webinar

For any questions or comments, please contact Andri at alexandria.innes@city.ac.uk

Webinar: Hate crime and human rights – Taiwan, UK and global perspectives

This event is over. 28 June 2023, 12:30 – 13:40 BST, online

The Violence & Society Centre at City and the UKPRP VISION Consortium are pleased to invite you to Hate Crimes and Human Rights: Taiwan, UK and Global Perspectives.

Po-Han Lee and Wen Liu are members of TUSHRN, an ESRC funded network of sex, gender and sexuality health (SGS) researchers in Taiwan and the UK, which includes City, LSHTM, and Lancaster. They will be visiting the Centre on 28 June to present their research:

  • Queer Politics in South/East Asia: State-Sponsored Hate and Political Cultural Relativism (by Po-Han Lee)
  • Anti-Asian Violence Amidst US-China Geopolitical Conflicts: The Limits of “Hate” Discourses and Cross-Racial and Cross-National Solidarity (by Wen Liu)

Please register by emailing your interest to VISION_Management_Team@city.ac.uk. An invitation with the Teams link will be emailed to you 28 June.

Please see below for the programme and the presenters’ biographies.

Programme

12:30-12:35 Introductions

12:35-1:00 Queer Politics in South/East Asia: State-Sponsored Hate and Political Cultural Relativism (by Po-Han Lee)

1:00-1:25 Anti-Asian Violence Amidst US-China Geopolitical Conflicts: The Limits of “Hate” Discourses and Cross-Racial and Cross-National Solidarity (by Wen Liu)

1:25-1:40 Overall Q&A and reflections

Biographies

Po-Han (Peter) Lee:

Po-Han Lee is an Assistant Professor at the Global Health Program and the Institute of Health Policy and Management at National Taiwan University. Previously trained in International Law and Political Sociology, he has been studying the construction, circulation and consumption of the right to health discourse in global health policymaking. Po-Han has been a member of the Feminist Review Collective (UK) and a senior editor for Plain Law Movement, the first multimedia platform for legal and human rights education in Taiwan. He recently published the book, Towards Gender Equality in Law (2020), which he co-edited with Gizem Guney and David Davies, and his new book, Plural Feminisms: Navigating Resistance as Everyday Praxis, coedited with Sohini Chatterjee, is being published later in 2023.

Wen Liu:

Wen Liu is an Assistant Research Professor at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Trained as a critical social psychologist and informed by queer and critical race theory, her book project (forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press) investigates diasporic Asian American subjectivities and their geopolitical alignments in times of US-China interimperial rivalry.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Accounting for Inequalities

In this research, Dr Alexandria Innes, Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Co-Investigator within the VISION research grant, draws on a case study of gender-based violence and subsequent responses to argue that Ontological Security Studies – a sub-paradigm of International Relations that focuses on a sociology of security based on identity and social environments – have thus far failed to fully account for intersectional inequalities within social narratives of security. 

She argues that the state is incapable of providing lived experiences of security for all residents, because of inherent inequalities that underlie national identity, affecting services people have access to and the level of support they might receive from state-based agencies such as the police and social services. It is only in attending to those inequalities among the population that we can attend to the biases at the heart of the state. 

Through the case study of the murder of Sarah Everard and the responses, the value and necessity of an intersectional approach to security is made clear: trauma responses that are positioned as transgressive by the patriarchal and White supremacist dominating account are used to undermine the credibility of alternative narratives of security. The state adopts a technique of dividing identity and constructing normatively oppressed identities as transgressive to consolidate the state narrative of security. 

For further information please see: Accounting for inequalities: divided selves and divided states in International Relations – Alexandria Innes, 2023 (sagepub.com) or contact Andri at alexandria.innes@city.ac.uk