Nigerian women seeking asylum in England on grounds of sexual violence

This study aims to give voice to the experiences of Nigerian women seeking asylum in the UK on the grounds of sexual violence. It draws upon in-depth narrative interviews with 10 Nigerian women, aged between 27 and 46, seeking asylum on the grounds of sexual violence. Women's accounts were analysed thematically, and the contextual factors that influenced the outcome of their asylum claims were explored. Findings show that women's asylum applications were affected by factors relating to lack of evidence, use of words and/or phrases that do not align with the English language meaning of sexual violence, Home Office's lack of understanding of cultural issues specific to women and peculiarity of women's narrative construction and the decommissioning of legal assistance. Findings also suggest that asylum organisations play a key role in providing holistic support to women. Recommendations are made for the Home Office's policies following these findings.     

Aboriginal Women's Perceptions and Experiences of a Family Violence Transitional Accommodation Service

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative study of Aboriginal women's perceptions and experiences of a transitional housing program in South Australia that was established to assist long-term homelessness and family violence. The aim of the study was to explore the experiences and service outcomes for Aboriginal women and their children and to identify both facilitators and barriers to the effective operation of the program. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 13 Aboriginal women and thematic analysis was used to report their collective stories. The women's stories showed individualised, flexible, and open-ended support as well as practical outcomes of stable, safe housing for themselves and their children were particularly valued. The women reported that these features of the program augmented feelings of strengthened confidence and self-efficacy. The authors argue the domestic and family violence sector has the opportunity to learn from the perceptions and experiences of Aboriginal women, particularly allowing time and commitment to working long-term with families.     

Violence Against Homeless Women: Safety and Social Policy

Abstract

Over the past 20 years there has been increasing understanding of the gendered nature of homelessness in Australia. Most significantly, this gendering has occurred through the acknowledgement of the links between domestic violence and homelessness and this has played out in Australian social policy through the funding of specialist domestic violence services. However, not all women are assisted by these specialist services—either because they are not homeless due to domestic violence, or because they fall through the gaps in the service system. Homelessness exposes these women to heightened vulnerability to violence. This article considers homeless women's experiences of violence and their implications for homelessness policy. Framed by Australian and Victorian social policy and drawing on a qualitative study of 29 women, all of whom had experienced violence during homelessness, the article argues that greater policy attention needs to be paid to ensuring homeless women's safety.     

Listening to Older Adult Parents of Adult Children With Mental Illness

This article uses qualitative research and narrative analysis to examine the experience of women age 55 and older who are parents caring for adult children with mental illness. Knowledge about the conflicts of older parents with dependent children is underdeveloped. In this study, analysis of women's stories about parenting in later life reveal that the women have two sets of feelings: wanting to be free from the responsibility of caregiving and feeling responsible to continue the support and protection of their adult vulnerable children. The women's conflicts are palpable and are found in the ideational themes of the narratives, as well as the structure of how the narratives are spoken. The discussion highlights the relevance of the theory of ambivalence for clinical practice when working with older women who are caregivers for their adult dependent children.     

No regrets: Widows' stories about the last days of their husbands' lives

This article looks at the stories older women, who were participants in a study of older women's experiences of widowhood, told about their husbands' deaths. The findings are based on in-depth, narrative interviews with 28 women over 50 whose husbands had died within the previous five years. Most participants told their husbands' death stories without being asked to. There were three major parts to these death stories: finding out their husbands were dying; taking care of their husbands while coming to terms with the fact of their impending deaths; and the period immediately before and at the actual time of death. These stories appear to give meaning and comfort to widows as they recount them. They provide bridges or transition experiences through which women come to understand their own journey from wife to widow.     

Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self‐narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self‐narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture—especially “bitch” imagery and sometimes racialized discourse—to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre‐making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.     

Domestic Violence in Nusa Tenggara Barat,Indonesia: Married Women's Definitions and Experiences of Violence in the Home

This article contributes to cross-cultural understandings of gender-based violence by examining women's definitions and experiences of domestic violence in Eastern Indonesia. The research was part of a larger study of human rights in maternal and neonatal health and involved a survey that integrated common anthropological practices in its development and delivery. This survey measured the prevalence of emotional and physical abuse, violence during pregnancy, unwanted sex and fear of violence among a sub-sample of 504 married Muslim women. Standard human rights definitions of violence were adapted to create locally appropriate definitions of economic violence, husband infidelity and unwanted sex within marriage. Survey responses indicated that the majority of women believed verbal abuse, threats of harm, economic violence, physical violence, control of women's mobility and a husband's public infidelity to constitute domestic violence. Our exploration of how Indonesian women understand domestic violence reinforces the salience of cultural specificity for different women's definitions of violence, as well as the applicability of internationally recognised definitions of gender-based violence.     

Disrupting the ‘life-cycle’ of violence in social relations: recommendations for anti-trafficking interventions from an analysis of pathways out of sex work for women in Eastern India

This article argues for the need to change the ways in which anti-human trafficking (AT) non-government organisations (NGOs) and their interventions in India frame and address violence in sex work. The article asserts that AT NGOs need to move beyond their ideological allegiances and infuse their interventions with a better understanding of the lived realities of women who are coerced into sex work. This argument is based on an analysis of women's pathways out of sex work in Eastern India, which include both finding independent routes, and also reliance on AT interventions. The research suggests that AT interventions need to acknowledge the centrality of social relationships in women's lives and experiences of violence. Social relations influence women's entry into sex work, affect their experiences within it, and shape their pathways out of sex work.     

Survivors of Woman Abuse

Abstract

The feminist social work and related literature on abused women has focused on women's processes of empowerment but has overlooked the question of women's movement from individual survival to collective resistance. In this feminist qualitative study, I explore the processes through which survivors of abuse by male partners become involved in collective action for social change. Using story telling as a research method, I interviewed 11 women about the processes, factors, insights, and events that prompted them to act collectively to address violence against women. I found that women's movement from individual survival to collective action entails significant changes in consciousness and subjectivity. Women's processes of conscientization are complex, contradictory and often painful because they involve political and psychic dimensions of subjectivity, protracted struggles with contradictions and conflict, and resistance to knowledge that threatens to unsettle relatively stable notions of identity. I suggest that feminist social work theory and practice must take into account three interrelated elements of women's transformative journeys: the discursive and material conditions that facilitate women's movement to collective action; the social, material and psychic costs of women's growth; and the multifaceted and difficult nature of women's journey in recognizing and naming abuse, making sense of their experiences, and acting on this knowledge to work for change. I recommend that feminist social work practice with survivors recognize that survivors can and do contribute to social change, and develop new, more inclusive liberatory models of working with survivors of abuse.     

‘We are not Victims,we are Protagonists of this History’

This article centers on the Mexican and Argentinean ‘Dirty Wars’, examining the limitations inherent in human rights and women's human rights responses to these epochs of violence. I situate Argentina's report on the dictatorship, Nunca más (1984), in conversation with Elena Poniatowska's text on the 1968 Mexico City massacre, La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), to trace the rise of a global human rights discourse that has become the dominant manner of conceptualizing human rights violations and gender violence in the latter half of the twentieth century. While feminist critiques of human rights have centered on the lack of gender-specific focus of violence committed against women, this article questions whether the women's human rights discourse disengages the historical, economic and geopolitical realities from which these violations were committed and instead focuses on women's sexual violations to garner international condemnation of gender violence. By turning to these texts, this article centers on the possibilities and limitations of women's human rights discourse and the impact this has on the shaping of women's political agency. This article calls for a critical feminist approach to women's human rights in order to document narratives of women survivors of human rights abuses without obfuscating their political subjectivities.     

Women's self‐defense and sexual assault resistance: The state of the field

Public attention to sexual assault has increased dramatically over the last decade, spurring questions about how it can be prevented. One approach that has received scant attention is women's self‐defense training (sometimes known as sexual assault resistance training). This neglect is curious because empowerment‐based women's self‐defense (ESD) training is so far the only approach that has produced substantively significant decreases in victimization rates. In this article, I review the research evidence on women's self‐defense training. Does resisting a sexual assault affect the outcome of sexual violence? Does self‐defense training further reduce women's risk of violence? What are the other consequences of self‐defense training? How does self‐defense work for different groups of women—for example, those who have survived prior victimizations? Are the critiques of women's self‐defense training valid? Finally, what do we still need to learn about women's self‐defense? Overall, I argue that this evidence presents a compelling case that women's self‐defense training should be central to any efforts to prevent sexual violence.     

Intimate Partner Violence: Modifying an Internet-Based Safety Decision Aid to a New Zealand Context

Women experiencing intimate partner violence face complex decisions in navigating their safety. In a feasibility study, we examined the suitability of an intimate partner violence interactive online decision aid developed in the United States for its application in New Zealand, particularly with regard to cultural appropriateness. We conducted focus group sessions with women who experienced partner violence and focus group sessions with service providers. Women completed the U.S. online decision aid tool and provided feedback on the safety decision criteria, content, and design. Considering the findings from the focus group sessions the decision aid was modified. We reflect on the process of balancing women's stories with technical limitations and constraints of a replication study.     

Belonging: women living with intellectual disabilities and experiences of domestic violence

Women with an intellectual disability are under-represented in domestic violence research, yet they are one of the most vulnerable groups who are at risk of violence and abuse. This article aims to contribute to the domestic violence field by reporting on a narrative dialogic performative study, which utilised a feminist poststructural perspective to explore significant relationships and the concept of belonging in the lives of women with a mild intellectual disability. Four in-depth narrative interviews were conducted. The study found that the women shared similar stories of devaluation and rejection in childhood and hence the women’s search for belonging contributed to their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse in domestic violence relationships. The paper argues that gendered discourses and constructions of intellectual disability regulate domestic violence as a personal problem or way of life for women with intellectual disabilities.     

Truth or Fiction: Men as Victims of Domestic Violence?

Recently, claims have been made that womens's violence towards their male partners is a hidden and unacknowledged form of domestic violence. This paper critically examines this claim, arguing that studies that compare men's and women's violence, while showing a similar frequency of violent acts perpetrated by both men and women, also reveal significant differences. A man's violence is more serious in its effects, can employ a wider range of violence tactics and emanates from a more dominant and powerful position in relation to his female partner. A woman's violence, on the other hand, is often in self defence or is an expression of frustration and stress. In contrast to men's violence, women's violence is not usually an attempt to control or dominate their partners. The implications for practice are discussed and therapists are encouraged to differentiate between women who are violent towards an abusive partner versus those whose partners are not abusive.     

Intimate Violence against Rural Women: The Current and Future State of Feminist Empirical and Theoretical Contributions

Rural crime in general ranks among the least studied social problems in the social sciences; however, a growing body of research shows that rural woman abuse is a major problem. The current state of progressive critical feminist social scientific knowledge enhances an empirical and theoretical understanding of intimate violence against rural women. Revealing the complexities of rural women's experiences and struggles with violent relationships reconstitutes violence against women as a public crisis that requires continued serious attention with regard research, theory, and policy. Three primary objectives of this article are as follows: (i) briefly review recent feminist social scientific literature on research, methodology, and theoretical contributions on violence against women in rural areas, (ii) suggest new directions in researching and theorizing rural women's experiences with intimate violence, and (iii) offer creative practical and policy solutions towards a broad vision of social change.     

Narrative Diversity and Sympathetic Abortion: What Online Storytelling Reveals About the Prescribed Norms of the Mainstream Movements

Social movement scholarship demonstrates the importance of formula stories in raising awareness for social causes. The stories put forth by the opposing sides of the abortion rights issue in the United States utilize sympathetic narratives in furthering their arguments for and against abortion rights respectively, but differences in each side's narrative strategies are instructive in understanding current reproductive debate discourse. This article is a qualitative examination of abortion narratives published on two websites, one pro‐life and one pro‐choice. Chief among my findings are that narratives for each cause support opposed views of women's appropriate contemporary social roles and that authors' reported approaches to pregnancy and abortion are instrumental in constructing these broader understandings. Narratives posted by pro‐choice authors are confined by circumstantial norms surrounding unintended pregnancy (such as young age, student status, and first‐time pregnancy) as well as by a requirement to attribute empowering outcomes to the abortion decision. Pro‐life authors discuss a broader array of circumstances surrounding their pregnancies with narratives ultimately unified by themes of intense regret followed by atonement.     

Status Compatibility,Physical Violence,and Emotional Abuse in Intimate Relationships

This article analyzing national data (N = 7,408) examines the connection between men's and women's relative economic contributions in families and the risk of husband‐to‐wife physical violence and emotional abuse. Family violence researchers have conceptualized the association between economic variables and the risk of intimate partner violence with respect to the structural dimensions of sociodemographic factors, whereas feminist researchers connect economic power to family dynamics. Marital dependency and stress frustration theories treat income, education, and employment as socioeconomic resources, whereas some feminist research points to the need for research that treats these economic variables as symbolic resources. Although income and educational attainment reduce women's risk of physical violence and emotional abuse by husbands, I find that status incompatibilities between partners that favor women increase the likelihood of emotional abuse.     

The significance of fathers for inner-city African-American teen mothers

Using the accounts of family life in young women's life stories, this qualitative study examined experiences with biological fathers for a sample of inner-city African-American teen mothers and a comparable sample of young women who were not parents. Distinguishing findings emerged about the pattern of young women's residential history with fathers, activity and interactions with fathers, and feelings about fathers. These qualitative findings were discussed in terms of their implications for services, policy, and research.