Violence and Mental Health in South Asia (VAMHSA)

Project Summary

Women survivors of violence in South Asia face substantial harms to their mental health, but advocates and care providers lack guidance on how best to support women’s wellbeing and address common mental disorders. This multidisciplinary group developed four context-specific, but adaptable support packages to guide improvements in the mental health of survivors of Violence Against Women (VAW), modern slavery, and civil conflict in resource-constrained settings in India, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan.

Our Global Health Research, funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), aimed to:

Identify candidate component interventions
Understand survivors’ mental health needs
Develop mental health and psychosocial support packages to fill existing service gaps
Determine the feasibility, acceptability, and transferability of care package components

Important commonalities exist between the mental health needs of survivors of VAW, modern slavery and conflict, with known implications for mental distress, particularly in the forms of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and risk of self-directed violence.

VAW describes physical, sexual, emotional, or economic intimate partner, domestic, and non-partner violence. Modern slavery describes forced marriage, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. It affects 40 million people worldwide with the greatest burden in Asia. Lastly, conflict - amidst discriminatory gender norms - has exposed a majority of women to abuse, trauma and poor mental health in countries worldwide, including Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. These forms of violence are gendered, culturally and generationally reproduced.

To develop our support packages, we:

reviewed existing guidelines
examined and undertook literature reviews
engaged with survivors of violence and modern slavery, service providers, and academics
convened multidisciplinary consultations
examined routine service data on perceived support requirements
reviewed findings against published theory, and
developed a programme theory for support

This programme theory was then articulated as a support package tailored to the needs of each context. Each version of the package can be found in Resources, alongside publications related to the primary and review-based evidence generated by our group.

Resources

Peer-review publications

Improving the mental health of women intimate partner violence survivors: Findings from a realist review of psychosocial interventions

Mental health of women and children experiencing family violence in conflict settings: a mixed methods systematic review

Cultivating capacities in community-based researchers in low-resource settings: Lessons from a participatory study on violence and mental health in Sri Lanka

Developing a support package for the mental health of women survivors of domestic violence and modern slavery in South Asia (under review)

What women want: Mental health in the context of Violence Against Women in Sri Lanka – a qualitative study of priorities and capacities for care (under review)

Support packages