Page 206 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS131 Roberta C. et al.
identified six clusters of anti-violence centres corresponding to six different
organizational models.

Keywords
Domestic Violence; Specialized services; Istanbul Convention; Shelters;
Cluster Analysis.

1. Introduction
The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence
against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention, 2011) recognize
a key role to the "specialized services” for a well-timed and productive support
for each victim of any act of violence that falls within the scope of the
Convention. The types of support that these services provide are shelters and
safe accommodations, telephone helplines, sexual violence services, legal
support, counselling centres, and specific services for children as victims or
witnesses.
This document and the explanatory report (1) underline that the support
for victims of violence against women should be rooted in a “gendered
understanding” and focused on “the human rights and safety of the victim”.
Victims’ human rights include dignity, privacy and bodily integrity. There are a
number of further aims/principles for support, such as avoiding “secondary
victimisation”– this should include not blaming victims or making them feel
responsible for what has happened to them.
For long time in Italy the available information on this kind of services was
fragmented, based only on partial investigations. The national Agreements
between Government, Regions and Autonomous Provinces (signed in 2014)
established the minimum requirements of anti-violence centres and shelter
houses to guarantee homogeneous criteria at national level and supported
the implementation of a more systematic and extensive data collection.
In 2018 Istat carried out for the first time, in collaboration with the
Department for Equal Opportunities (DPO) at the Presidency of the Council
and the regions and the National Research Council (Cnr - Irrps), a national
survey on the services provided by the anti-violence centres to victims of
violence.
This paper presents the results of a multivariate statistical analysis that
took into consideration, on the one hand, the services provide to women, on
the other, the organizational strategies adopted to respond to users' needs.

2. Methodology
The survey is aimed at providing a representation at national level of the
services offered and the features of public and private anti-violence centres in
order to guide policy interventions.

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