Umeå Centre for Gender Studies (UCGS), Umeå University, SE-901 87, Umeå, Sweden.
Department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden.
BMC Public Health. 2020 May 24;20(1):753. doi: 10.1186/s12889-020-08766-7.
This article focuses on policy and law concerning violence against women as a public health issue. In Sweden, violence against women is recently recognized as a public health problem; we label this shift "The public health turn on violence against women". The new framing implies increased demands on the Swedish healthcare sector and its' ability to recognise violence and deal with it in terms of prevention and interventions. The aim was to describe and discuss the main content and characteristics of Swedish healthcare law, and national public health and gender-equality policies representing the public health turn on violence against women. Through discursive policy analysis, we investigate how the violence is described, what is regarded to be the problem and what solutions and interventions that are suggested in order to solve the problem. Healthcare law articulates violence against women as an ordinary healthcare issue and the problem as shortcomings to provide good healthcare for victims, but without specifying what the problem or the legal obligation for the sector is. The public health problem is rather loosely defined, and suggested interventions are scarce and somewhat vague. The main recommendations for healthcare are to routinely ask patients about violence exposure. Violence against women is usually labelled "violence within close relationships" in the policies, and it is not necessarily described as a gender equality problem. While violence against women in some policy documents is clearly framed as a public health problem, such a framing is absent in others, or is transformed into a gender-neutral problem of violence within close relationships. It is not clearly articulated what the framing should lead to in terms of the healthcare sector's obligations, interventions and health promotions, apart from an ambivalent discourse on daring to ask about violence.
本文聚焦于将针对妇女的暴力行为视为公共卫生问题的政策和法律。在瑞典，最近将针对妇女的暴力行为确认为公共卫生问题；我们将这种转变称为“针对妇女的暴力行为的公共卫生转向”。新框架意味着对瑞典医疗保健部门提出了更高的要求，要求其具备识别暴力行为并针对预防和干预措施加以应对的能力。目的是描述和讨论代表针对妇女的暴力行为的公共卫生转向的瑞典医疗保健法、国家公共卫生和性别平等政策的主要内容和特点。通过话语政策分析，我们研究了暴力是如何被描述的、被认为是什么问题以及为解决问题而提出了哪些解决方案和干预措施。医疗保健法将针对妇女的暴力行为表述为一个普通的医疗保健问题，将问题界定为向受害者提供良好医疗保健服务的不足之处，但未具体说明问题或该部门的法律义务是什么。公共卫生问题的定义相当宽松，建议的干预措施也很少且有些模糊。对医疗保健的主要建议是例行询问患者是否曾遭受过暴力侵害。在这些政策中，通常将针对妇女的暴力行为标记为“亲密关系中的暴力”，而不一定将其描述为性别平等问题。虽然在一些政策文件中，针对妇女的暴力行为被明确界定为公共卫生问题，但在其他文件中则没有这样的表述，或者被转化为一种性别中立的亲密关系中的暴力问题。除了对敢于询问暴力行为的模棱两可的论述外，并未明确说明这种框架应如何转化为医疗保健部门的义务、干预措施和健康促进。
