Coping responses to intimate partner violence: narratives of women in North-west Tanzania.

ABSTRACT

This study sought to explore the variety of coping strategies that women employ in response to intimate partner violence. Coping strategies can help women tolerate, minimise and deal with difficult challenges or conflicts in their relationships, such as learning to be independent from their husbands and surviving trauma. Drawing on 18 in-depth interviews conducted in Mwanza, Tanzania, we examined two different coping strategies - engagement and disengagement coping - with respect to how women react to economic, emotional, physical and sexual intimate partner violence. While the choice of coping methods remains a complex issue, most women employed engagement strategies as a response to economic violence and disengagement coping for sexual violence. We explore the implications of gender and societal roles for coping decisions and analyse how access to resources may provide women with the tools to limit future violence.