Gendering Responsibility: Work Practices and Institutional Responses to Intimate Partner Violence in Finland and in Russia

This paper examines how the highly gendered phenomenon of intimate partner violence (IPV) is encountered in various institutional settings of social and health care services in Finland and in Russia.  The empirical data comprise (1) 16 focus group interviews with staff members (n=73) in various social and health care units in Finland and (2) 74 interviews with staff members (n=56) and services users (n=14) in three public crisis departments and one NGO crisis center in Russia. Based on the analysis of this data corpus, it seems that one of the dominant institutional discourses is that of making the female victims responsible for dealing with the problem of IPV.  According to the interviewed professionals, it is difficult or even impossible to address the topic of the responsibility of male perpetrators due to various reasons, e.g. inadequacy of existing work practices or insufficient legislation. This paper takes a closer look at the ways in which the above-mentioned discourse operates to organize work practices that result on “gendering responsibility” at the level of local activities. Following the ideas of institutional ethnography (Smith 2005), the basic assumption of this paper is that institutional discourses organize the ways of "seeing" and "knowing" the solutions to the problem of IPV in institutionally actionable ways. Of special interest here are the interconnections between the institutional processes carried out locally and those organized at state, national and even international level. In addition, this paper addresses some cultural differences between Russia and Finland in the ways in which the female victims are made responsible for dealing with the problem of IPV in the everyday work of the institutional settings under investigation.