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BACKGROUND: Intimate partner sexual violence (IPSV) is a prevalent but misunderstood form of gender-based violence with significant impacts women's health and well-being. Research suggests that IPSV has a specific context and unique impacts, but little is known about how to tailor service responses. To address this gap, we explored help-seeking experiences and needs among IPSV survivors after disclosure. METHODS: This study draws on qualitative data from a subsample of women who participated in a cross-sectional survey about the service needs of intimate partner violence survivors. Women who reported IPSV and provided information about IPSV-specific help-seeking needs after disclosure were included in the analysis. Open-ended text responses of 37 IPSV survivors were analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS: IPSV was invisible and silenced in service responses. Three themes suggest potential ways forward. In the first theme, 'Don't dismiss it', women needed providers to take their disclosures seriously and listen to the significant impacts of IPSV on their well-being and safety. In the second theme, 'See the bigger picture', women needed service providers to understand that IPSV fits into broader patterns of abuse, and that psychological abuse and coercive control impacts women's ability to consent. In the third theme, 'counteract the gaslighting', women needed providers to educate them about the continuum of IPSV and help them label IPSV as a form of violence. CONCLUSIONS: Our exploratory findings extend the limited evidence base on IPSV and highlight a need for further in-depth research to explore a tailored approach to supporting IPSV survivors. To avoid contributing to the silencing of IPSV survivors, service responses should recognise the harmful and sexualised nature of IPSV, challenge cultural stereotypes that minimise IPSV, and understand that co-occurring psychological abuse may exacerbate shame and prevent women from articulating the source of their distress.

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El embarazo en la infancia y la adolescencia se define como aquel que se produce en una mujer entre el comienzo de la edad fértil y el final de la etapa adolescente, es decir, entre los 10 y los 19 años.

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Gaslighting is a type of abuse aimed at making victims question their sanity as well as the veracity and legitimacy of their own perspectives and feelings. In this article, we show how gaslighting can operate as a key, yet underexamined strategy of obstetric violence, or the institutional and interpersonal violation of women's rights during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. We draw on forty-six in-depth, semi-structured interviews with mothers who experienced a traumatic childbirth to examine how obstetric providers gaslight mothers before, during and after childbirth when they deny - and thereby destabilize - mothers' realities. We identify and examine four core types of denials: denials of 1) mothers' humanity, 2) mothers' knowledge as valid, 3) mothers' judgements as rational and 4) mothers' feelings as legitimate. All four denials work to render mothers noncredible and their claims illegible within clinical encounters. In explicitly naming, theorizing, and examining obstetric gaslighting, our aims are threefold: 1) to uncover and theorize an underexamined mechanism of obstetric violence through a sociological lens, 2) to offer a typology of obstetric gaslighting's manifestations to aid scholars and practitioners in recognizing when obstetric gaslighting is occurring and 3) to advance a growing research program on gaslighting in medicine.

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A factitious disorder leading to the self-infliction of highly counter-intuitive burns was diagnosed in a middle-aged female. The injuries were otherwise alleged to have been sustained by assault inflicted upon her by an unknown person. The case was diagnosed by medico-legal interpretation of injuries, in spite of a highly deceptive and concocted history by the patient and her husband. The entity was unique in being associated with magnificent primary, secondary and tertiary gains. The exploitation of the morbid sequel to malinger by the patient, and the involvement of the husband for the prolongation of the illness of his wife for financial gains as gaslighting was highly unusual. The self-infliction of injuries over hands is seen in factitious disorder. However, a combination of a guarded self-immersion of the hands and feet in a corrosive by an illiterate female, followed by malingering to earn livelihood is unprecedented in factitious disorders. The delayed presentation which required amputation of all the limbs to save the life of the patient is a glaring highlight of this case.

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Secondary microaggressions refer to the ways in which people of historically dominant groups negate the realities of people of marginalized groups. Gaslighting describes the act of manipulating others to doubt themselves or question their own sanity; people confronted for committing microaggressions deny the existence of their biases, often convincing the targets of microaggressions to question their own perceptions. 'Splaining (derived from mansplaining/Whitesplaining) is an act in which a person of a dominant group speaks for or provides rationale to people of marginalized groups about topics related to oppression or inequity. Victim blaming refers to assigning fault to people who experience violence or wrongdoing and is used as a tool to discredit people of marginalized groups who speak out against microaggressions or any injustices. Finally, abandonment and neglect refer to a bystander's failure to address or acknowledge microaggressions. Although these terms are commonly known among marginalized communities (and frequently used in popular media), there is a dearth in academic literature that substantiates these phenomena and relates them to microaggressions. The purpose of this article is to review these concepts in the psychological literature and to demonstrate the psychological harm caused by these behaviors on interpersonal and systemic levels.

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In recent years, the term 'medical gaslighting' and accompanying accounts of self-identified women experiencing invalidation, dismissal and inadequate care have proliferated in the media. Gaslighting has primarily been conceptualized in the field of psychology as a phenomenon within interpersonal relationships. Following the work of Paige Sweet (American Sociological Review, 84, 2019, 851), I argue that a sociological explanation is necessary. Such an explanation illustrates how medical gaslighting is not simply an interpersonal exchange, but the result of deeply embedded and largely unchallenged ideologies underpinning health-care services. Through an intersectional feminist and Foucauldian analysis, I illuminate the ideological structures of western medicine that allow for medical gaslighting to be commonplace in the lives of women, transgender, intersex, queer and racialized individuals seeking health care. Importantly, these are not mutually exclusive groups, and I use the term bio-Others to highlight and connect how those with embodied differences are treated in medicine. This article indicates the importance of opening a robust discussion about the sociology of medical gaslighting, so that we might better understand what structural barriers people of marginalized social locations face in accessing quality health care and develop creative solutions to challenge health-care inequities.

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