This doctoral research examines women who engage in or initiate violence in their intimate relati... more This doctoral research examines women who engage in or initiate violence in their intimate relationships. Through qualitative in-depth interviews with twenty-five women who were mandated to undergo treatment for intimate partner violence and participant observation of the support groups, I examined the reasons and justifications used by women to explain why they resort to violence as a strategy in conflict with their intimate partners. An integral part of this study was also the manner in which women reflect on, and shape their gendered identities, specifically as female perpetrators of intimate partner violence. The subsequent comprehensive analysis of the participant's narratives, depicts their experiences of IPV, illustrates how these women view their world and how violence mediates the manner in which they construct and shape their gendered identities. The narratives also highlight the limited discourse within which female perpetrators of intimate partner violence use to frame their behaviour. This study situates itself within a body of literature that is polemical in nature and ideologically divided with respect to women's use of violence in their intimate relationships. On the one hand, intimate partner violence is understood to be heavily gendered and asymmetrical. This paradigm argues that a patriarchal and male-dominated society and culture sustains male violence against women and when women resort to violence toward a male partner, it is either reactive or in self-defence. On the other hand, proponents of gender symmetry consider intimate partner violence to be gender neutral where women are as likely as men to perpetrate violence. Gender is not considered a significant factor and when women commit acts of violence, they use similar motivations and justifications to men. This study situates itself somewhere in between these two perspectives, i.e. that women are as likely as men to perpetrate intimate partner violence but suggest that gender is a mediating factor. I am so grateful to have my "cohort", Dr. Cheryl Macdonald and Margaret Campbell, without whom I would not have got through this. They would never hesitate to lend a critical eye to my writing at various stages of the dissertation, offer words of encouragement, or when necessary, tell me where I could do better. We have become each other's support system and in the process, good friends. Even though we now live in different provinces, we have remained in close contact with some very long phone calls. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE-INTRODUCTION ..
This scoping review aims to map the existing conceptualization of gender in peer-reviewed gamblin... more This scoping review aims to map the existing conceptualization of gender in peer-reviewed gambling scholarship to locate areas of future inquiry for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and gambling. It follows Arksey and O'Malley's (2005) framework for scoping reviews, updated by Levac et al. (2010) and Daudt et al. (2013). We located the relevant literature published between 2000-2020 by searching through eight academic databases using Boolean operators and various key search terms, yielding 31,533 results. After a thorough screening based on inclusion/exclusion criteria and excluding duplicates, we located 2,532 journal publications that addressed gender and gambling. Among them, 53.4% used gender as a descriptive demographic variable, 44.3% explored the comparative analysis between men’s and women's gambling behaviors, preferences, and risks, and only 2.3% focused on gender from a socio-cultural perspective. When articles mentioned gender,...
This doctoral research examines women who engage in or initiate violence in their intimate relati... more This doctoral research examines women who engage in or initiate violence in their intimate relationships. Through qualitative in-depth interviews with twenty-five women who were mandated to undergo treatment for intimate partner violence and participant observation of the support groups, I examined the reasons and justifications used by women to explain why they resort to violence as a strategy in conflict with their intimate partners. An integral part of this study was also the manner in which women reflect on, and shape their gendered identities, specifically as female perpetrators of intimate partner violence. The subsequent comprehensive analysis of the participant’s narratives, depicts their experiences of IPV, illustrates how these women view their world and how violence mediates the manner in which they construct and shape their gendered identities. The narratives also highlight the limited discourse within which female perpetrators of intimate partner violence use to frame t...
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Papers by Lesley Lambo