Living in existential exile: women’s lived experience of intimate partner violence during the breastfeeding period

Int J Qual Stud Health Well-being. 2025 Dec;20(1):2507313. doi: 10.1080/17482631.2025.2507313. Epub 2025 May 20.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: Intimate partner violence is a global health issue with physical, mental, and existential impacts. It affects women throughout their lives, including the breastfeeding period. Gaining an understanding of existential dimensions could potentially inspire individualized, health-oriented care. This study aims to explain and understand women’s lived experience of intimate partner violence during the breastfeeding period.

METHODS: A lifeworld hermeneutic approach guided the interpretative analysis of nine lifeworld interviews and forty-nine written lifeworld stories of women exposed to intimate partner violence during breastfeeding.

RESULTS: The interpretations show that intimate partner violence during the breastfeeding period means to breastfeed under attack in an objectified and provocative female body while feeling abandoned and entrapped in an incomprehensible reality. The interpretations are abstracted into a main interpretation: being forced into an existential exile that entails an ambiguous passive-active resistance.

CONCLUSIONS: Exposure to intimate partner violence during breastfeeding is a forced existential exile in a vulnerable situation. Women are forced into unauthentic lives, where their whole being is questioned, and active resistance is inhibited by limited freedom. Awareness of the lived experience of IPV during breastfeeding is essential for healthcare professionals to help reduce the suffering and enhance the health and well-being of women exposed to IPV.

PMID:40394802 | DOI:10.1080/17482631.2025.2507313