Post-Resettlement Intimate Partner Domestic Violence in Afghan and Arab Refugees: A Scoping Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I would like to thank authors for their scoping review. The topic is highly relevant and much discussed in policy forums as well as humanitarian context. I read the draft with interest, and I found it substantively useful for knowledge building. I have a few minor suggestions, including terminology/choice of formulations, and substantively, for your consideration.

Introduction:

54: maybe add something along the lines of  “bringing the total number of Afghans in neighboring countries to 8.2 million - accounting for one of the largest protracted refugee situations in the world” (source www.unrefugees.org/news/afghanistan-refugee-crisis-explained/ )

Additional consideration: maybe add numbers on the displacement within Afghanistan?

Line 59: you mention Syrians “over 6.8 million refugees have also been displaced from the Syrian Arab Republic alone” – while it is correct, usually, when we speak or hear of displacement, we tend  to use it in conjunction with internal displacement within the country. may be another verb is better suited. Just a suggestion.  

63-64: “We used the term refugee for all individuals forced to leave their homes and resettle in Western countries due to war and conflicts, including refugees, Special Immigrant Visa holders (SIVs), and parolees.” – there is a legal definition of a refugee, perhaps you want to align your definition – or change the word choice.

75: “foreign conquerors such as the Soviet Union and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan” suggests that the territory of the country was conquered. Was this the case?  

85: 350 million people refers to 2014, there fresher estimates available, for example, here:  https://www.statista.com/statistics/806106/total-population-arab-league/

238-239 is the same sentence as 254-255.

268 – 271:  This scoping review aims to understand better the impact of culture on Afghan and Arab refugee women's attitudes, help seeking, and decision-making regarding domestic violence and to create a path for future research, strategies for interventions, and policies to support women from refugee communities in their response to DV. – I would suggest to move this up in the Introduction so that the objective of the scoping review is visible early in the draft.

309: We defined refugees as married Afghan and Arab females and males aged 18 years or more resettled in developed Western host countries – again, as mentioned above, there is a legal definition of refugees, an alignment of the language is needed throughout the draft.

 Table 1. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria – it seems that Line 4 is reversed.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you for your feedback! 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The work is a scoping review on the experiences of domestic violence, and the way they respond to it, of Afghan and Arab refugees after they get to their host country.

General aspects to consider.

In this scoping review several pages of the paper – at least five of it – are dedicated to the historical and cultural aspects in the country of origin, which seems to make the work unbalanced with respect to its main goal. I suggest to calibrate this literature review with what happens once they live in their host country.

Moreover, in the introduction the authors state that “we follow with many others and use DV and intimate partner violence (IPV) interchangeably, referring to the abuse between partner”. It should also be pointed out that many other authors and organizations distinguish between DV and IPV: DV, indeed, includes all violence within the home (including children, siblings and other relatives) while IPV is that between partners only.

Using them interchangeably coud be confusing .

Specific suggestions.

·       The title would benefit from the mention of the specificity of analyzing Afghan and Arab refugees.

·       Keywords should be revised – some of them seem to be too generic (behaviours, attitudes) and no mention is given to Afghan and Arab refugees .

·       The text would benefit from a harmonization in the use of acronyms. DV and IPV are sometimes written as acronyms, sometimes they are not (moreover, there is a typo on line 33 – IVP instead of IPV). So is WHO and World Health Organization – both when used in the references and when they are in the main text.

·       Line no. 97. Check for the confidence intervals mentioned and whether they are worth being in the text at all given how large they are.

·       Line no. 334. Check what it says in the text. It seems like a guideline the authors forgot to delete from the text.

·       It should be mentioned that the first three articles included in the scoping review are from the same authors and use the same data.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you so much for the feedback!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf