Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a major public health concern in Botswana. Estimates suggest up to 62% of women have experienced IPV over their lifetime, yet far fewer – less than one percent by some estimates - seek help for IPV when they need it. Little is known of how best to support women experiencing IPV to mitigate the impact of violence on their agency to seek help.

The University of Botswana (UB) and the Botswana GBV Prevention and Support Centre (BGBVC) (https://bgbvc.org.bw/) jointly propose a partnership to investigate the role of IPV stigma and other barriers to seeking help for women who have experienced IPV. We will also develop and validate culture-salient scales to measure IPV stigma.

Initial key informant interviews (KII) with IPV care providers and managers will gather service perspectives on help-seeking behaviour and what enables and/or deters female IPV survivors from seeking help, including culture influenced barriers like IPV stigma. Those results will inform the finalization of focus group discussion (FGD) and in-depth interview (IDI) guides. Four FGDs and 40 IDIs, with both women who have and have not experienced IPV, will gather views of how stigma stereotypes and norms about IPV in their communities affect a female IPV survivor’s engagement in various aspects of daily life. The FGDs and IDIs will also pre-test an adapted version of stigma scales developed in other settings to assess IPV stigma stereotypes locally.

A qualitative analysis of the FGD and IDI transcripts will follow, using a thematic analysis approach to derive a preliminary set of culturally attuned, IPV stigma scale items. Local IPV intervention experts will carefully review the preliminary set of items to flag the best-worded, culturally attuned items, to refine before validation testing.

Our team will then interview 200 women (50 urban, IPV survivors; 50 peri-urban IPV survivors; 50 urban non-IPV survivors; 50 peri-urban non-IPV survivors). We will ask them questions from the newly developed IPV stigma scale and also about other attitudes, experiences and behaviours – including seeking help for IPV. We will then perform two analyses. First, a quantitative psychometric analysis will confirm the new IPV stigma scale works, by checking how it performs compared with other scales, and if those who feel more IPV stigma are also more likely to feel the consequences of IPV stigma – depression, anxiety, fear, etc. Second, structural equation modelling techniques and path analyses will improve our understanding of what factors increase the risk that a woman experiencing IPV feels stigmatized and how this affects seeking help.

This project, generously funded by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI - https://www.svri.org/), emphasises research capacity development via regular in-person and virtual training sessions with BGBVC staff throughout. A stakeholder workshop will present study findings to key off responsive planning discussions. We envisage new, testable interventions will emerge, stimulating future collaborative research.

For more information, please contact Ari Ho-Foster (Tel: 355-4553; Email: hofostera@ub.ac.bw).