Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2091-8175
Date of Award
8-31-2026
Document Type
Campus Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Global Governance and Human Security
First Advisor
Courtenay Sprague
Second Advisor
Stacy VanDeveer
Third Advisor
Jeff Pugh
Abstract
International human rights norms on intimate partner violence are dense and well codified, yet they do not always reach the health services where endangered women seek help. I ask how international standards become deliverable services as they travel across levels of governance, and I locate the answer in law as a determinant of health. Taking Bogotá, Colombia, as a most likely case, I develop the Translation-Feedback Model, fusing the legal determinants of health framework with norm translation theory to explain how norms are re-authored, not merely received, at each level of the state. In a single-design documentary analysis, I code 89 binding and programmatic instruments spanning 1979 to 2026 across the transnational, national, and sub-national levels along a Rights-to-Services spectrum, the 7Ps framework of state obligation, and an Agent-Tracking Framework of multiple actor types. The corpus shows that norms transform as they travel: instruments grow steadily more service-oriented, and the dominant register inverts, prosecution receding as service provision and partnership climb. Each governance level performs work the others cannot; none is a weaker copy of another. And the travel is not one-way. Bogotá built institutional designs exceeding what national and international law had codified, and some traveled back: the district institutionalized its Casas Refugio shelter network seven years before national law codified the model. Applying the legal determinants of health framework to intimate partner violence and integrating it with norm translation theory, I reframe the compliance gap as a translation gap: the distance between international standards and operational reality is a site where normative content is produced. Cities can be sites of norm origination, and closing the distance from norms to services is a matter of infrastructure, not intention.
Recommended Citation
Pérez-Espitia, Carlos A., "From Norms to Services: How International Human Rights Standards for Intimate Partner Violence Become Operationalized Through Legal Determinants of Health at The Sub-National Level in Bogotá, Colombia" (2026). Graduate Doctoral Dissertations. 1169.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/doctoral_dissertations/1169
Comments
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