Analysis of Quality and Accessibility of Specialized Long-Stay Social Services for Adult Victims of Domestic Violence
The project, conducted by the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic together with a team of practitioners in the field of social services for victims of domestic violence and RILSA, responded to the need formulated by the Government Strategy for Equality of Women and Men in the Czech Republic for 2014–2020 and the Action Plan for Prevention of Domestic and Gender Based Violence for the years 2015–2018. Its goal was to map the quality and accessibility of long-stay social services for adult victims of domestic violence in the Czech Republic using a research survey, and thus to empirically verify information contained in the Register of social services providers with the aim to critically evaluate the offer of such services in the Czech Republic.
A questionnaire survey was carried among long-stay social services, which in the Register of social services providers declare they serve the target group “victims of social violence”. Its goal was to find out what part of them really reflects the specific needs of this group and to what extent the less narrowly specialized services manage to fulfil these needs. Additionally, the offer of long-stay social services for adult victims of domestic violence covered by the Register of social services providers was mapped. The goal of this task was to compare the number of officially registered available places per inhabitant for the victims of domestic violence in individual regions of the Czech Republic with the findings of the questionnaire survey. Based on this comparison, regions for the consecutive qualitative analysis were identified. The qualitative part of the project verified the information obtained using the questionnaire survey and complemented it with an in-depth analysis of selected services. The research showed that there is only a limited number of services truly targeting the needs of domestic violence victims, and that these are geographically concentrated, primarily in Prague. The offer of specialized services for the victims of domestic violence in the Czech Republic thus by far does not correspond to international recommendations. The project outcome is a final report summarizing the findings of both parts of the analysis.
The role of RILSA’s employees in the project was to serve as research experts, responsible primarily for the quality of the questionnaire survey and the analysis of quantitative data.