Norwegian Shelters for Victims of Domestic Violence in the COVID-19 Pandemic – Navigating the New Normal

Journal of Family Violence - This study elucidates the responses of shelters and their adaptations to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects on their services to victims of violence, as well as how...     

Redesigning health information systems in developing countries: the need for local flexibility and distributed control

Despite widespread aims to strengthen the Health Information System (HIS) as a tool for decentralised health care, there is a strong tendency in most developing countries that the HIS continues to reflect the central level's needs and requirements. The traditional design approach with little or no end user involvement results in a centralised HIS with an extensive, somewhat inappropriate, but also inflexible set of standards. Consequently, the HIS is not very useful for the wished‐for decentralisation of health services, and there is an urgent need to redesign the existing HIS in order to make it locally relevant and appropriately decentralised. Based on a comparative case analysis of the HIS in Tanzania and Ethiopia, we offer practical recommendations on the way to achieve this redesign. A central design goal should be to achieve a balance between centralised control and local autonomy. Some degree of control over a decentralised HIS, including budgets and the use of resources, should be delegated to the district administration. In order to achieve the aim of a locally relevant, well‐working HIS, it is necessary that appropriate authority, capacity and decentralised allocation of resources for HIS will be developed at the district and sub‐district levels. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The social dynamics of revictimization and intimate partner violence: an embodied,gendered, institutional and life course perspective

This article offers a qualitative, institutional analysis of the dynamics of revictimization as the accumulation of disadvantages over time and across different institutional contexts, and its multiple gender dimensions. It draws on 37 qualitative interviews with victims of intimate partner violence, detailing the institutional causal pathways to victimization and revictimization over the life course, through the in-depth analysis of one case. Drawing on the vulnerability approach, developed by Martha Albertson Fineman, the analysis demonstrates how victimization and revictimization have been facilitated, tolerated, and even produced by particular institutional contexts, illustrating how the risk of revictimization is not a characteristic of the individual, nor is it destiny. The article contributes to a constructive social science, elucidating how victimization is contingent on social and institutional contexts, and how at several critical points, better institutions and better institutional responses to particular events might have prevented or interrupted the dynamics of accumulating victimization. Focusing on embodied, gendered subjects and the role of institutions in producing as well as remedying inequalities has far-reaching implications for research and prevention of violence. In contrast to a risk-factor approach targeting particular groups and individuals, a vulnerability analysis calls for a responsive state and universal institutional solutions.