Women’s Protection or Patriarchal Control by the State? Institutional Ethnographic Exploration of Domestic Violence Services in Taiwan

After implementing the Domestic Violence Prevention Act (DVPA) in 1998 in Taiwan, standardized protocols were implemented to provide social services to survivors of domestic violence (DV). This article examines how DV services have become institutionalized in Taiwan through a feminist method of inquiry, Institutional Ethnography (IE). Firstly, through interviews with social workers in the outsourcing organization, the IE journey leads to the way institutional texts coordinate social workers’ everyday work. Practices have shifted from empowerment (“women's work”) to risk management (“protection work”), which deprives survivors of their autonomy. Secondly, tools like the Taiwan Intimate Partner Violence Danger Assessment (TIPVDA) and digitized case monitoring systems now structure the case management process. Outcomes are oriented toward a bureaucratic risk-management agenda instead of clients’ needs. Thirdly, the expert-NGO-bureaucrat complex dominates policymaking, excluding survivors’ experiences and workers’ voices. The DV prevention network's ruling relations have strayed from feminist origins toward state control in a patriarchal way that excludes the participation of both survivors and frontline workers. Through the IE lens, this article demonstrates how depoliticised “protection work” embedded in the expert-NGO-bureaucrat complex can paradoxically disempower the survivors it aims to serve. The limitation of this research is its data collection from one outsourcing organization and cannot fully reflect the experiences of DV survivors.