Los Terceros Salen Sobrando? Are Third Parties Superfluous?: How the Sociocultural and the Structural Shape Help-Giving Relationships for Intimate Partner Violence in Lambayeque, Peru

This paper uses data gathered through 24 months of intensive ethnographic participant observation to explore the many ways in which socio-cultural and structural factors impact help-giving relationships in instances of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Lambayeque, Peru. This research examines how mujeres abusadas (abused women: a local term that does not suggest an evaluation of individual agency, unlike “victim” and “survivor” in US English) and potential help-givers navigate complex social, political, and economic lifeworlds, and how being located in those specific lifeworlds shapes the ways in which they navigate and live the experiences. This paper highlights how and why it is misleading to assume that informal helpers (family, friends, neighbors, etc.) can or will help in response to IPV. It examines who potential informal help-givers are and what their relationships (and corresponding social expectations) are to mujeres abusadas, what kinds of help are asked for or expected, and how help is offered and/or denied.

This paper uses a decolonial and intersectional feminist analysis to examine how local power structures shape help-giving relationships, making some successful and others unsuccessful. It examines how the intersectional positionalities of mujeres abusadas, abusivos (abusers), and potential informal help-givers interact and shape help-giving relationships, and explores how embeddedness in local power structures, including kinship and social networks that often control access to material resources, makes some helping relationships successful and others unsuccessful. It troubles the treatment of barriers and facilitators as discrete categories, identifying the contextual and interactional nature of informational, relational, material, and experiential barriers and facilitators, and highlights the complexity of social embeddedness and the need for intersectional analysis. Importantly, this paper also describes what mujeres abusadas and potential help-givers wish were different (e.g., a desire for community-based and community-driven violence education and prevention), a dimension that is absent from much help-seeking literature.