- What is the difference between abuse, violence, mistreatment, or harassment?
- How can we explain violence between same-sex couples or violence from women towards men?
- What are the early signs that should put me on guard or make me stay away from that person?
- What should I do if I think I am being physically and psychologically abused?
- Does the system protect abused women? I'm worried about being left destitute, about losing custody of my children.
- How does gender-based violence, abuse, and mistreatment affect women's mental health?
- Can a woman who is going through or has gone through this situation recover emotionally?
- Is there any prevention training for women, to learn how to detect the signs?
- What are the protective factors against gender-based violence, with children and adolescents in mind?
- Is the lack of shared responsibility from one of the parents or guardians a risk factor for children?
- What can men do to prevent our daughters from suffering situations of violence and sexism?
- We know of a case of a woman who is being abused, and her children are being raised in an environment of violence. What can we do?
- Do sons and daughters reproduce patterns of gender-based violence in the future when they grow up in a home where this happens?
- How can we help a man who perpetrates gender-based violence to break out of this pattern of behavior?
- Why do women with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience more gender-based violence? We have difficulty interpreting the other person's intentions, and our condition is not taken into account in court (their nonverbal language doesn't match their account). What can we do?
- Could you provide a checklist to keep in mind for the proactive detection of gender-based violence? Professionals have 10 minutes to visit women in person during primary care consultations.
- What can health professionals, social workers, and teachers do to better train themselves in this field and be able to detect and prevent it?
How does gender-based violence, abuse, and mistreatment affect women's mental health?
Our experience and various studies corroborate that male violence is a form of chronic exposure to severe stress that can modify the mechanisms involved in the physiological and emotional response.
These consequences are less obvious than physical trauma, but in the medium and long term, they can lead to mental and physical health problems. The avoidance and hypervigilance responses that women survivors have learned to use to cope with this type of violence are typically characteristic of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Learning these coping strategies appears to be related to the emergence of mental health problems (anxiety, depression and PTSD) and substance abuse (alcohol or psychotropic drugs, among others), but also to a reduction in immunological adaptability and alterations in the immune response (chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia) and in cardiovascular and respiratory health (asthma and heart attacks).
