A Monash University study has found that understanding the ways that young women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) is often overlooked. By using a combination of their voices and visual artworks, young women have shared their experiences with IPV to help other young women to know that experiencing abuse isn’t acceptable and that safety, survival, resistance, recovery and healing are possible.
Lead author PhD Candidate Bianca Johnston, from the Department of Social Work in the School of Primary and Allied Health Care, who was supervised by Monash University’s Associate Professor Catherine Flynn and Australian National University’s Associate Professor Faith Gordon, said it is hoped that by understanding and providing visibility to what young women are already doing to keep themselves safe, recover and heal in the face of IPV that the findings of this research can inform youth-informed strategies in direct social work practice.
“This research that is in zine format, which provides key findings, shares artwork and recommendations in a youth-friendly way, found that at different points in their IPV journeys, the young women used many different forms of resistance, survival and safety strategies to keep themselves safe and avoid harm. The young women spoke about how it would be helpful if there were services, workers and programs that specialise in youth IPV which were easy for young women to find and access,” Ms Johnston said.
The 12 young women, aged 16-24 involved in the study had all experienced IPV, often in more than one relationship. Most of the young women first experienced IPV when they were 15-18 years old. The young women were from both metropolitan areas as well as rural and regional areas across Victoria and held diverse cultural backgrounds.
“The abuse and control that occurs in youth relationships hasn’t always had a name of its own in Australia. Youth IPV has sometimes been mixed into the way we understand adult or children’s experiences of family violence. The young women told me that it was important to have a name for this issue and see it as being distinct from adult and children’s experiences of abuse and violence. They felt this was so that their experiences of IPV were ‘taken seriously’ and not dismissed as being ‘soap drama’ because they were young or ‘teenagers’,” Ms Johnston said.
One young woman involved in the study, Abey, described IPV as “Like being controlled, being told what to do, being told what not to do, like being forced to do stuff…being physical. It’s not even just physical, it's mental, emotional, like it’s a lot of stuff involved.”
The study found young women were often unsure of where to seek help and many didn’t know if there were any services that assisted young women who experienced IPV. Since it was difficult to find youth IPV services for the support that they needed, the young women had often relied on themselves to resist the abuse, their actions to stay safe were sometimes misunderstood or misidentified by the people or systems around them.
The study found that when young women experience IPV it occurred as a journey, with a series of different but connected phases. The phases identified by this research included Relationship Onset, Escalation, Survival, Terminating Relationships and Recovery and Healing.
“At each of these phases the young women used different decisions and resistive actions to keep themselves safe, push back against abuse, prevent further harm and try to regain power,” Ms Johnston said.
“The young women’s stories highlight their continued strength, resistance and refusal to be defined by what others did to them. It is the young women themselves who will define who they are and who they will be in the future.”
Read the research report: Johnston, Bianca; Flynn, Catherine; Gordon, Faith (2025). Zine Edition 2: Digital Version "F*ck this, I want to get my life back" A study into young women's experiences of intimate partner violence. Monash University. Educational resource. https://doi.org/10.26180/30422632.v1
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