Between the Professional and the Private: The Meaning of Working With Intimate Partner Violence in Social Workers' Private Lives

• NCJ Number: 226706
• Journal: Violence Against Women Volume: 15 Issue: 3 Dated: March 2009 Pages: 362-384
• Author(s): Hadass Goldblatt; Eli Buchbinder; Zvi Eisikovits; Ilana Arizon-Mesinger
• Date Published: March 2009
• Length: 23 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This qualitative study examined the impact of working with cases of intimate partner violence on therapists’ marital relationships and gender identity, based on interviews with 14 female social workers in Israel.

Abstract

The findings show that working with clients involved in violence in their intimate relationship blurred the boundaries between private and professional attitudes among therapists, particularly regarding gender and power relations. Although in most cases the spilling over of professional experiences into the therapist’s own intimate relationship resulted in the development of a more constructive handling of conflicts, in some cases it became the catalyst for the dissolution of the intimate relationship. Two distinctive groups of social workers were identified based on the ways they related to gender identity. One group of workers came to terms and compromised with the power differential arising from gender differences and searched for ways to cope with it from a conciliatory position. The second group was larger, composed of workers who decided to affirm their new awareness of their gender rights. They were willing to precipitate conflict in order to achieve a more egalitarian approach to decisionmaking, interactive behaviors, and gender-based roles. Recommendations derived from these findings pertain to training in the inevitable blurring of boundaries between workers’ professional and private lives; how to deal constructively with this occurrence; the importance of a self-reflective approach to get in touch with emotional and attitudinal changes; the importance of learning about gender-based relations and inequality; and the necessity of setting one’s professional work and experiences within the context of one’s culture, personal identity, private social life, and personal circumstances. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire and then participated in an indepth semistructured interview that focused on issues related to the experiences and management of professional and personal domains. 71 references