In the first week of October, our CEO Natalie Collins was part of the University of Central Lancaster's (UClan) Connect Centre conference. The Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence and Harm was established in 2013 with a vision to prevent sexual, gender-based, and interpersonal violence across all age groups, through academic research. Natalie writes about her experiences of the conference.
It was great to be at the Connect Conference. Just over a year ago, I attended the European Conference on Domestic Violence in Reykjavík; and so it was great to only have to travel a couple of hours from our office in Sunderland, across the beautiful North Pennines, to Kendal for a conference dinner in the evening of 2nd October. It was wonderful to reconnect with researchers I had first met in Reykjavík, and to meet others doing interesting research; passionate about making women's lives better.
Professor Caroline Överlien
The following morning, the conference was opened by Professor Helen Beckett, the incoming Co-Director of the Connect Centre, with Professor Caroline Överlien delivering the first keynote speech on Sexual Violence and Abuse in Young People's Intimate Relationships. Professor Överlien talked us through her research, remarking on the challenges of gaining ethical approval. It was shocking to learn that while the ethics board were willing to approve researchers speaking to girls aged between 16 - 18 years old about the sexual violence boys had subjected them to; researchers were only given permission to speak to males who had perpetrated sexual violence if they were over 18 years old. The committee felt the interviews could be "too traumatic" for the boys (but apparently not for the girls).
Although Professor Överlien spoke about the ways technology was used as part of boys perpetrating sexual abuse, she also asserted that girls were using technology to resist abuse and safeguard themselves. Some examples of this included girls using audio and visual recordings to capture evidence of boys' perpetration towards them, keeping their phones close by in case they needed to reach out for emergency help, and using search engines to learn about abuse and services that could help them.
Professor Nicky Stanley
The second keynote speaker was Professor Nicky Stanley. This was her valedictorian speech, as she is retiring from her Co-Directorship of the Connect Centre. Her presentation was entitled "Reflections of 30 years of Research on Preventing Abuse and Harm and Supporting Recovery and Change". It was wonderful to hear Professor's Stanley's reflections on her career which started in social work and moved into academic research.
At Own My Life, we are extremely keen to honour foremothers and learn from them. Too often, women's learning is siloed and lost; leaving feminist work reinventing the wheel in each new generation. There were nine areas that Professor Stanley was keen to highlight in terms of what future research could focus on:
How can prevention work with children and young people target boys' attitudes and behaviours without alienating them?
What does a more critical and less protective view of specialist domestic abuse services allow us to learn?
Should risk assessment be a dominant model in supporting those who have been subjected to abuse?
How can perpetrator interventions best link to support for women and children subjected to abuse?
How can post-separation contact with children (both court mandated and informal), after their mother has separated from their abusive father, best meet children's needs?
How can health services better link with domestic abuse services?
Can the relation nature of interventions be preserved as digital technology becomes more heavily relied upon?
What should be done by Children's Social Care and what should be done by the Independent Sector?
How can services and inerventions best meet the diversity of children and young people's identities, communities and developmental stages?
Althea Cribb
The rest of the day included attending sessions where three or four different presenters shared their research in fifteen minute slots. My favourite of these was Althea Cribb's presentation about her PhD research, which focussed on examining domestic abuse practitioners' perceptions of client "engagement".
It was fascinating to learn about the ways funding and "service outcomes" limit workers' ability to support women, with "engagement" framed as meeting practical goals and women's compliance to the organisations' demands. While women are very often absolutely dependent on the domestic abuse service, because no other organisations are funded to help them; workers are trained to prevent women becoming dependent on the service. I'm excited to see more of what Althea will produce so that we can learn further about how domestic abuse services can better support women and their children.
Me!
My presentation came just before Althea's and was entitled "Rejecting those women: Addressing the personal/professional dichotomy in domestic abuse support". A handout of my presentation can be found HERE. I focussed on the ways we "other" women subjected to abuse, including in media, where photographs of broken individuals with bruised faces are weeping and silenced. This is part of a problem Evan Stark describes, ‘Today's advocates have learned to only parse what they can handle, salve, or fix, an approach made easier by focusing on a woman's dependency rather than her rage.'
Some of the ways we do this generally:
Labelling (victim, survivor, and the newest worse one: victim/survivor).
Decontextualising (the abuser becomes invisible, the harm women have been subjected to is ignored and she is expected to meet what I describe as "safenormative" expectations).
Pathologising (she is diagnosed with a personality disorder or her problems all described as "mental health issues).
The legendary Davina James Hanman offers much in THIS chapter that ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE should read. In it she states, ‘…domestic violence service providers lost their politics, the issue became de-gendered…and was de-coupled from other forms of male violence, and started to be referred to as a sector rather than as a movement’.
I offered some ways that domestic abuse services are contributing to the othering of women:
Depoliticisation of the movement (when the personal is no longer political, services commodify women through labelling them as "experts by experience" who are exceptionalised from the rest of us).
Contract based funding (women become consumers of a service and are no longer the heart and soul of that service).
Risk-based models (women are no longer invited into a community of care, but are othered through risk assessments which categorise them and often refuse to support them if their partner is not deemed as "dangerous enough").
I wasn't able to get through all of my suggested solutions in the allocated fifteen minutes, but I did manage to include the following... We need to:
Intentionally use language (I reference THIS short book, Abuse Is A Verb as a practical example in doing this).
Honouring resistance (as we make space for women's stories of resistance, they become much more fully human, capable and competent).
The Power Threat Meaning Framework (more on this can be found HERE; it's a brilliant, robust model for offering a non-pathologised model for understanding human distress).
A wonderful opportunity!
Overall, the Connect Conference was a wonderful opportunity to learn, connect and develop thinking. It was particularly joyous to celebrate Professor Nicky Stanley's work and learn from her about what future research needs to include. Along with her team, Professor Helen Beckett did a brilliant job of organising the day, and it was great to see "non-othering" communications both before and during the event which acknowledged that all of us could be coming to the conference with stuff in our lives which could make some of the content challenging. Let's hope we can see more events that seek to do this.
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