La pandemia come shock esogeno nel campo del contrasto alla violenza sulle donne

PANDEMIC AS AN EXOGENOUS SHOCK IN THE FIELD OF FIGHTING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. Violence against women has strongly increased during the Covid-19 pandemic and especially during the lockdown. The aim of the paper is to explore how the field of organizations involved in contrasting the violence, in Italy and in Turin in particular, reacted to this exogenous shock. Combining an analysis of the measures introduced during the pandemic and fifteen qualitative interviews conducted with different institutional actors, some interesting results emerge. On one side, the pandemic acted as a force of institutionalization of the organizational field especially at a local level, both enhancing the cooperation of ‘traditional’ actors (such as women’s shelters and law enforcements) and broadening the number of actors involved in contrasting violence against women. On the other hand, this crisis showed all the weaknesses and the structural holes of the antiviolence organizational field, calling for a reflection upon the institutionalization of the best practices implemented during the pandemic in order to make them routinary instead of episodic.