Evaluation of the project for the legal and emotional empowerment of women who have survived gender-based violence or are at risk of violence

Title ELENA – Empowerment Legale ed Emozionale per la Non violenza e l’Autonomia

Location Eastern neighbourhoods in Rome, Italy

Partners  INTERSOS  e CREG – Centro di Ricerche Economiche e Giuridiche dell’Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata

Funding Fondo di Beneficenza di Intesa Sanpaolo

 

Context

The project ELENA – Legal and Emotional Empowerment for Non-violence and Autonomy – has been implemented to help reduce vulnerability and promote legal protection and psychosocial wellbeing amongst women who have survived, or are at risk of, gender-based violence, with a particular focus on migrant women.

Within the project, integrated and cross-cultural services have been set-up at the INTERSOS24 multi-purpose centre, located in the neighbourhood of Torre Spaccata. I24 is designed as a safe, low-threshold space where women can safeguard their rights and find emotional support and a listening ear.

The project involved women, both foreign and Italian, facing complex situations of violence, legal precariousness, economic dependence and social isolation, adopting a community-based, cross-cultural, intersectional and survivor-centred approach.

Alongside the individual legal support service – which focused on international protection, residence permits and family law – the beneficiaries were supported through group-based psychosocial programmes (emotional support and self- and mutual-help) aimed at facilitating trauma processing and the restoration of self-esteem and decision-making power.

Alongside direct support, the project has also invested in specialist training for local practitioners, third-sector professionals and university students (focusing on gender-based violence, migration law and intercultural issues), in strengthening the local multi-stakeholder network (through collaboration with CPIA, reception centres and local services) and in group legal information sessions aimed at raising awareness amongst women and the community about their rights and the protection services available.

 

General Objective

The M&E and Impact Assessment Unit was tasked with carrying out the project evaluation and establishing learning pathways.

 

Our contribution

To evaluate the project, the ARCO research team employed mixed-methods approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative methods.
The evaluation drew on feminist participatory research methods, ensuring that the beneficiaries’ stories were actively listened to through the accounts of the project workers or their direct involvement (where possible), as well as through questionnaires on multidimensional well-being, direct observation by the evaluator and the analysis of secondary data.
The integration of these different sources made it possible to reconstruct not only what changes had taken place, but also how and through which mechanisms the project had helped to bring them about.

The analysis is based on a conception of empowerment as an individual and collective process, which concerns women but also the system of relationships and the context in which they are embedded: the family, the community and, more generally, society.
This perspective aligns with Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach, according to which agency and freedom of choice are central to expanding the opportunities actually available to people to pursue what they value. In the case of women, this means, for example, being able to lead a healthy life, look after themselves, access knowledge and decent work, build relationships, participate in social and public life, and live a life free from violence.

To analyse these changes, ARCO applied its own framework for analysing multidimensional empowerment, structured around three closely interlinked dimensions: Potential empowerment (power within), which concerns the inner resources that enable women to recognise themselves as agents capable of taking action; Individual functioning (power to and power with), which concerns the translation of these resources into concrete opportunities for choice and action in everyday life; and collective and territorial functioning, which concerns the contextual conditions that may foster or hinder empowerment.

In this way, the assessment made it possible to view empowerment not as a single outcome, but as a process: from the growth of awareness and confidence in one’s own abilities, to the possibility of translating these into concrete choices and actions, right through to the local conditions that make such possibilities effectively realisable.

Finally, particular attention was paid to ensuring the ethical conduct of the data collection process, guaranteeing that methods used were safe, respectful and non-invasive. Specific precautions were put in place to avoid any risk of secondary victimisation, including careful wording of the questions, a thorough selection of participants and constant attention to their safety – both physical and emotional – as well as to the potential triggering of potentially traumatic situations or memories. The entire process was characterised by an empathetic, non-judgemental approach based on active listening, treating the women as individuals with rights rather than as subjects of investigation.

 

analisi territoriale sviluppo locale umano sostenibilitàLa valutazione femminista parte dal presupposto che il genere conta.