Global IPV crisis: How systemic patriarchy, economic precarity, and failed welfare states deepen trauma—lessons from Dutch data and global resistance
Original framing: “Recovery after intimate partner violence: New study reveals what works” — Phys.org
The study silences voices of sex workers (who face IPV at 3x higher rates but are excluded from support), undocumented migrants (who fear reporting due to deportation risks), and disabled survivors (whose needs are often medicalized rather than addressed). In the Netherlands, *Red Thread* projects document how migrant women navigate IPV within patriarchal communities, while *De Kring* centers the experiences of LGBTQ+ survivors, whose stories are absent here. The framing’s universalist language obscures how IPV manifests differently across identities—e.g., Black women in the Netherlands report higher rates of police violence when seeking help. Without centering these voices, the study’s 'solutions' risk further marginalizing those most harmed.
The Dutch study’s 'what works' framing is a classic example of how neoliberal governance extracts individual solutions from systemic crises, obscuring the fact that IPV is not a personal failure but a symptom of patriarchal capitalism’s collapse.
The power structures it serves—academic institutions, health ministries, and NGOs—benefit from treating IPV as a technical problem to be managed, not a political one to be dismantled. By restoring Indigenous frameworks like *whānau ora*, historical parallels to post-war austerity, and marginalized voices like sex workers and undocumented migrants, we reveal that recovery is impossible without addressing economic precarity, colonial legacies, and cultural narratives of justice. The trickster here is the study itself: its data could be used to demand why a society spends more on military budgets than on preventing the violence it claims to study. The path forward lies in autonomous, decolonial models—like *Ubuntu Courts* or *ZAD*-style safe spaces—that reject the state’s role as both perpetrator and savior, and instead center community, art, and economic justice as the true antidotes to harm.