Interview with visiting professor Tiziana Nazio from the University of Torino

Interviewed by Laura Barragan, November 2024

1. What is the main purpose of your visit to the faculty, and what do you hope the students will take away from your seminar?

I’m here in Brno to give a series of lectures to the students. The purpose is to exchange teaching practices, expose students and faculty to different methods, and foster interdisciplinarity. We are addressing themes in ways that students might not be used to, and we are learning from each other in the process.

I am very grateful for the opportunity, and it’s a special privilege that today coincides with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. I will be giving a lecture on this very subject.

As for what I hope the students take away, I aim to raise awareness and help them recognize the early signs of gender-based violence. Studies show that this phenomenon affects one-third of women—one in three will suffer from gender-based violence at some point in their lifetime. It’s an issue that will impact their lives, directly or indirectly, in significant ways. One of my main goals is to help them become aware of this reality and learn how to identify the first signs of violence.

2. Your research focuses on gender-based violence. Could you briefly explain what factors, in your opinion, make it difficult for victims to leave a violent relationship?

So my research, first, is not strictly on gender-based violence. This is more a service I provide to my students and to students in general because it is such a pervasive phenomenon. My studies focus more broadly on gender-based inequality and the inequality that stems from the family—either the one you are born into or the one(s) you constitute during your lifetime. Gender-based violence is just a tiny part of what can happen and what stratifies your life’s chances.

I also study how opportunities to work and gain income through employment, the risk of divorce, or the risk of unemployment are influenced by family and gender structures. My research examines how these structures shape life opportunities over the life course. Gender-based violence, while significant, is a minor part of this, and it often occurs within families. In this respect, it is only a small part of my work, but I see it as a service to students, which I hope to continue providing.

What makes it so difficult for women to leave violent relationships? I will explain a series of mechanisms and reasons, including unexpected paradoxes or feedback effects, that make solving this issue so challenging. I can briefly mention a few.

One factor is that violence grows over time. It often begins subtly, with minor forms of daily psychological violence, such as control, verbal abuse or harassment, which is so subtle that it may go unnoticed. This violence tends to escalate as the commitment within the relationship deepens. Physical violence, which is often the clearest indicator of being in a violent relationship, typically emerges much later—when the commitment is so strong that leaving becomes very difficult.

I was particularly surprised when I learned that physical violence often starts when women become pregnant. At first, this seemed puzzling to me, but it becomes less surprising upon deeper study. Pregnancy represents a strong commitment, and childbearing often coincides with an escalation in violence, making it even more difficult for women to leave.

Another factor is how women define and perceive violence. What makes women leave is not necessarily what happens to them, but how they interpret and categorize those experiences—whether they acknowledge them as violence or not. Additionally, leaving depends on whether they feel they have the resources and opportunities to exit the relationship.

Research shows that half of violent relationships are not ended within ten years, and even among those who manage to leave, many return. For a significant share of women, the reasons for staying or returning often include sentiments like “I still loved him,” “I did it for the children,” or “I wanted to give him another opportunity.” Women’s primary wish is not to change their partner, but for their partner to change. They have often invested and committed so much to the relationship that they hope for change, despite evidence in the literature suggesting that such change is extremely unlikely to happen.

Violence is not only physical or sexual; it can also be psychological or economic, which makes it very difficult for women to have the resources to leave a violent relationship, even when they begin to recognize that the violence is occurring. One difficulty is recognizing or acknowledging that there is violence. Through the cycle of violence, I will show that it is not about living permanently in a violent environment; rather, there are phases in which episodes of violence are followed by phases of relapse and a so-called “honeymoon.”

Sometimes, before the honeymoon phase, the abuser asks for forgiveness, and things temporarily seem to improve. This creates the belief that each incident is isolated, leading to hope that things might change. In this process, women may assume part of the responsibility for the violence when they forgive, believing they might have played a role in it. Most women, however, fail to see—or struggle to recognize—the recurring pattern of violence.

This struggle is particularly challenging because the violence often grows within the relationship along with the commitment. It becomes difficult to admit, even to oneself, that despite bearing no responsibility, one has ended up in a violent relationship. Recognizing this can be incredibly hard and often accompanied by feelings of shame, which leads to hiding the violence and makes seeking support difficult.

As the violence escalates, women often develop feelings of helplessness and powerlessness, as if they have learned that no matter how much they strive or struggle, they are unable to leave. This learned helplessness persists even when conditions change and leaving becomes possible because beliefs formed during the abusive relationship remain deeply ingrained.

This is particularly difficult to address because people act based on their beliefs, not necessarily their actual circumstances. The shame, coupled with the overwhelming feeling of being trapped, makes it incredibly hard for women to leave—even when they begin to recognize the violence, which many might not.

3. From your perspective, what role do public policies and legislation play in preventing gender-based violence, and are they like any countries that you consider a model in this regard?

There is a lot that law can do, but also agents, and also we as citizens. We can raise awareness. Laws can protect and enable victims to leave violent relationships by offering them safety nets and resources. Often, part of the violence is economic. Violence is depriving women of the fact, from the capacity to leave, to earn an income, and to leave. And so, economic resources, housing—most often, victims live with children for the reason I said before. So providing housing, economic resources, protection, having legal procedures that are not blaming the victims, that put the help as well, and mostly making sure that the procedures—like the police officers, social workers, everyone involved—keep track of what’s happening.

Because often, the reality is very different from the reality being shown, that you can document, that you can prove, that really will work in a trial. So, as things happen in a family and they are hidden from sight, most victims don’t keep track, don’t keep evidence and proof of what has happened, and this makes it very difficult later down the line if it goes to the very tiny minority—less than 5%—that eventually make it to court. And even then, the likelihood of gaining a case against gender-based violence is very little, and when the perpetrators leave, the risk of retaliation is even higher.

So it’s a very risky thing to do, for now, to leave a violent relationship. There is a lot that the law can do in protecting victims, in allowing them to leave violent relationships, and the raising awareness of police officers and all the structure and infrastructure that allows the process to detect cases. The overwhelming majority goes unreported and undetected, and this, I will show in the lecture, has a lot of intergenerational consequences because there is intergenerational transmission of violence. I will show the mechanisms by which this works and some empirical evidence.

So allowing violence to thrive, let’s say, in society means increasing the likelihood that violence will perpetrate further down in new generations. Therefore, it’s really important that we do something about it, not only on the side of the law but as citizens, training, informing and empowering women.

Which country does it best? Difficult to say. Certainly, the Nordic countries in Europe are the ones that are more advanced in gender equality, but they also, I will show, are the ones where gender-based violence is the highest, which is known as the Nordic paradox. And it is not a paradox in itself. It looks like one only because it is where the sensitivity is highest, which means that the likelihood to report and acknowledge any act—even abusive talk or small acts, you know, before it gets to really physical and sexual violence—is higher.

So you’re more sensitive to acknowledge, to recognize the acts, and to report them. And that’s why we have higher levels of reported violence in this country, you know, in the Nordic countries, because women are simply trained not to accept, not to tolerate, because the climate is one of more gender equality, more power to women. And so they simply compromise with much less.

4. What areas of gender-based violence do you think requires more research and attention in the current European context?

That’s a difficult one, because, especially now, with the world order in which we are living and all these threats that young people especially feel and experience, there is, to my judgment, a tendency to return to adherence to traditional norms as a safe place to look into. And this can be very dangerous. So I would say that informing, raising awareness, and resisting this push towards traditionalism and getting women back home without an income and without an education is something that should be prioritized; to resist this push backwards.

There are areas of gender-based violence that would require more research. Certainly, we need updated data to see how the trends are going, because there was a huge effort at the European level to collect representative data, yes, from women, to understand the incidence of the phenomenon, because it’s a phenomenon that is mostly covered. And so we need repeated measures of incidence to see whether this is reducing or increasing over time, for example, and also to evaluate whether any policies are effective.

We need measures of the phenomenon—the incidence, the prevalence. And for this, we need data. We need to keep collecting data, representative data, and comparative data across Europe. We need to train first-line officers to recognize violence because women will hide, will feel ashamed, and will feel vulnerable. And so it’s very hard to get them to report an incident, but it’s very important to trust their judgment.

So not to impose on them, but to give them the opportunity to ask for help should they feel that it is safe enough to ask for help and support the victim. Early detection measures and believing victims—that’s another tricky part because most victims don’t have hard proof that would go in a court. And so very often, victims are simply not believed because their partners tend to be powerful men.

And the victims have probably been subjected to psychological abuse for many years and so are probably not very self-assertive, which makes their credibility even lower. So, this is another issue we might want to work on in the future and research.