Families and Gendered Violence and Conflict: Pan-Continent Reach: Social Work

This reference work collates academic discourses and practices around family, gender, and violence in social work. 

A huge body of discourse is available that categorizes and labels acts of violence, and correspondingly practices that pin blame/responsibility for the violence. These have led to evolution of intervention strategies to resolve or address the violence. Some explanations foreground systemic causes; others look at person-centric causes. The two views bring forth the fundamental ontological divide of structuralism and individualism. The question for social workers to debate is what to factor in while working with families experiencing violence and conflict. What amongst the person, the agency, or the structure needs to be addressed to understand the experience of families in conflict and violence? Are these positions supplementary, complementary, or to be understood reflexively? With the inclusion of new families, the parochial understanding of families has long been dislodged and given way to newer, radical, and contextual understanding of families. Similarly, different people, agencies, and states understand violence and conflict differently. Gender, too, has moved from the binaries of male and female to the LGBTQ orientations. 

The book positions the ontological premise on which the epistemological practise is located. Simply put, the person-centric ontology on families and violence epistemologically finds understanding in agency-based approaches in individual agency, whereas the structure-based approaches find the experience of families and violence in society, state, and the world order. The contributors locate their work around identification, definition, an intervention or empirical study, policy analysis, historical evolution of concepts, and ontological and paradigmatic debates to position their individual chapters.

Families and Gendered Violence and Conflict: Pan-Continent Reach provides a paradigmatic prism for practice for social workers who are equipped to interpret context differently. The differing and competing paradigmatic lenses cannot be mediated, resolved, or addressed, but they definitely can be understood and debated to provide a 360-degree lens on the issues of families in violence in the gendered context. The reference work is a useful resource for social work practitioners, educators, academicians, researchers, and other development professionals.