Domestic violence during the pandemic: ‘By and for’ frontline practitioners’ mediation of practice and policies to support racially minoritised women
分析了英格兰和威尔士为少数族裔女性提供家庭暴力服务的一线女性从业者的26次访谈，揭示她们如何利用官僚裁量权应对疫情挑战，增强服务对象安全并挑战政策中的不平等。
This article analyses 26 interviews with frontline female practitioners from domestic violence and abuse (DVA) services for racially minoritised women in England and Wales, exploring how these practitioners – who are from the same racially minoritised communities as the women they support – responded to the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. These specific practitioner perspectives offer valuable insights into the specific ways in which the pandemic exacerbated the intersectional vulnerabilities of minoritised women experiencing DVA. Interpreted through a standpoint feminist lens, the findings reveal how frontline practitioners used bureaucratic discretion both to meet minoritised women’s changed needs during the pandemic in order to enhance their safety and to challenge the exclusions and intersectional inequalities underpinning pandemic policies. The study illuminates the institutional dimensions of frontline practitioner responses to the pandemic and contribute to debates within the street-level bureaucracy scholarship about the nature of bureaucratic discretion exercised by frontline practitioners.