To Care and to Control? Lights and Shadows in Empowerment Processes with Women in Violent Relationships

Care practices are ambiguous arrangements: necessary for society and individuals, they refer to experiences in which the needs and requirements of interdependent subjects are satisfied. At the same time, in care relations the links between vulnerability and its production are closely connected, affecting both those who receive care and those who do it. On the basis of research conducted since 2018 on the Italian system of preventing gender-based male violence against women (VAW), the article discusses some “good practices” of care, namely those framed as “women’s relationship methodologies” by feminist centers supporting survivors. However, even in these care arrangements, dimensions of control and power relations are evident, embedded both in the precariousness of the care-work for professionals, and in some situations of multiple vulnerability experienced by women survivors, particularly when economic precarity and cultural differences are involved.