Jóvenes tuteladasel capital social un recurso empodarante frente a las violencias machistas y otras formas de vulnerabilidad / foster care girls: social capital as empowerment resource against male chauvinist violence and other kind of vulnerability

Abstract

Young women in foster care are a group of people whose specific social and educational needs, as well as their social and emotional needs, are unknown, as there is limited research focused on their reality, even more so from a feminist perspective. A remarkable element of the general foster care population is the lack of a supportive and consistent social network (Bravo Arteaga & Fernández del Valle, 2003). Before this dissertation, there were no studies on the presence of a social network linked to these girls. The lack of a social support network means that the transition to adult life is a source of additional stress, especially after leaving the institution. The fragility of the support network—in terms of family and friends—increases the emotional worry these girls already experience due to abandonment, family separation, or violence. In addition, it is widely known that a supportive social network can provide protection in general for women when facing vulnerabilities (Hackman et al., 2017; Semahegn et al., 2019). For all the above and based on research on feminist mentoring among peers in which young foster care women participated as “mentees” and young women not in foster care were the “mentors”, we developed a specific line of research that would provide the basis for this dissertation. The methodology used for the study has a predominantly qualitative approach; the design is qualitative, but the data analysis is mixed. The population were 59 young women (29 foster care girls and 30 non foster care). The quantitative approach for data analysis is based on frequency analysis, and the qualitative approach follows a topic-based analysis. The analysis was carried out with the qualitative data analysis application Nvivo12. The main results show that the perception of gender-based violence is quite similar among the participants of both groups. Depending on the degree of knowledge they have about the fundamental aspects of male chauvinist violence in the romantic couple, they consider one or the other type of violence as more or less serious. In this sense, four very clear strategies for coping with male violence in sexual and affective relationships are identified, which are used according to the perception of danger and the degree of social acceptance of violence. Moreover, social capital would have a relationship with the strategy for coping with violence. From the point of view of the social network, it is important to highlight that girls in foster care would have a low or no perception of the support they can receive from their social network, so they would feel quite lonely in the face of adverse situations such as running out of economic resources in comparison with those who were not in foster care, who seem to feel very secure because of the people who make up their emotional, leisure, and economic resources. Likewise, there are notorious differences in the life purpose of the two groups, which are very much determined by the experience of having been, or not, in foster care. However, it is important to note that it is not possible to homogenize both groups since there are also intra-group differences that must be considered to understand the reality of each group in a more complex way.