IPOV welcomes the publication of a new chapter on obstetric violence in a major international reference work on gender and violence

Professor Patrizia Quattrocchi, Scientific Coordinator of the project IPOV – International Platform on Obstetric Violence & Respectful Care, has co-authored, together with Daniela Bandelli, the chapter “Obstetric violence” in the collective volume Handbook on Gender and Violence, second edition, an important international reference work in the field of gender and violence studies.

Patrizia Quattrocchi, Professor at the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the University of Udine (Italy), is an expert in medical anthropology and has spent many years studying childbirth and birth policies in different contexts. Within IPOV, she coordinates a broad international partnership made up of 19 academic and non-academic institutions across 9 countries, including 6 European and 3 Latin American countries.

The chapter, authored by Daniela Bandelli and Patrizia Quattrocchi, is included in the Handbook on Gender and Violence, edited by Caitlin Biddolph, Jihyun Kim, Siân Perry and Laura J. Shepherd as part of the International Handbooks on Gender series. This second edition brings together contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines who examine the relationship between gender and violence through conceptual, representational and contextual perspectives.

The inclusion of a specific chapter on obstetric violence in this volume represents an important recognition of a field of study that has gained increasing visibility in international research in recent years. It also helps consolidate obstetric violence as an issue that must be analysed not only through health and legal frameworks, but also through sociology, anthropology, human rights and feminist scholarship.

For IPOV, this publication marks an important step in the international visibility of the work the project is advancing on respectful maternity and childbirth care, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and the recognition of forms of gender-based violence that have historically been minimised or rendered invisible in many healthcare systems.

The volume in which this chapter appears examines how gendered violence is expressed across multiple scales, from interpersonal forms to the wider social, political and cultural structures that sustain it. In this context, the discussion of obstetric violence is especially relevant because it connects debates on inequality, embodiment, power, rights and institutional practices in healthcare.

With this contribution, IPOV further strengthens its commitment to research, international cooperation, and the development of tools that help understand, prevent and transform obstetric violence through a rigorous, comparative and interdisciplinary approach.

Publication reference
Bandelli D, Quattrocchi P. Obstetric violence. In: Biddolph C, Kim J, Perry S, Shepherd LJ, eds. Handbook on Gender and Violence. 2nd ed. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing; 2026.