Perpetrators and protectors: Centering family relations in addressing violence in poor neighbourhoods

In this report, we ask ‘How and to what extent do families and kinship relations protect against, perpetrate and/or suffer from violence?’ The concern with understanding how families cope with violence in respectively protective and perpetrative ways emerges out of a partnership between the Liberian Association of Psychosocial Services (LAPS), the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in South Africa (CSVR), the Balay Rehabilitation Centre in the Philippines and DIGNITY-the Danish Institute against Torture. While we have worked with families as a crucial stakeholder in all communities, we have not explicitly explored the ways in which families play a part in protection and
perpetration as well as fall victim to violence. Hence, we designed this research project to try to understand families and their struggles to survive in Liberia, South Africa and the Philippines. Conceptually, the project was animated by two bodies of literature – intersectional analyses and ecological approaches – to understand the relationship between families and violence. Empirically, the analysis is based on experiences from past interventions as well as a systematic data collection project among some of the families involved in the interventions. The ambition is not to compare families and violence across different sites. Rather, it is to enable an inductive process of reflection and innovation by putting different contexts into a structured conversation.