Mary Allen - Narrative Therapy for Women Experiencing Domestic Violence: Supporting Womens Transitions from Abuse to Safety

Domestic abuse not only inflicts physical injury on women but leaves enduring emotional and psychological scars which erode womens sense of self, esteem and identity. Emotional abuse is frequently described by women as harder to deal with and recover from because of its on-going effects, something which can take women many years if they are not provided with appropriate support. Despite the deeply damaging impact of domestic abuse, however, women show admirable strength and resilience which eventually leads to their exit from abusive situations. Indeed, women resist in numerous ways, as elaborated in this book, and their strategies often evolve in response to the changing nature of abuse.

The interiority of domestic abuse secrecy and isolation has been amply highlighted by research which foregrounds womens narratives. However, these insights are not always utilised in the professional interventions which women encounter when they perform the final act of resistance to abuse, that of leaving abusive partners. Starting new lives and carving out new selves is amongst the most challenging of experiences for women who have lived with abusive men who exercise high levels of control over them, something for which they need the support and expertise of sensitive and insightful helpers. The provision of practical and emotional support to help women in moving on and re-building their lives has been central to the work of domestic violence services and the aim of the womens movement to end violence against women. Currently, the emphasis on practical help finding new homes and securing incomes has at times taken second place to longer term therapeutic support, itself complex because of the legacy of coercive control.

The move from victim to survivor is not a linear progression but, as graphically illustrated in this book, a complex, contradictory and fluid process, requiring great negotiation, reconstruction and reconfiguration on the part of a woman. Womens journeys out of abusive situations to rebuilding their lives are complex, not least because they shift the power away from the abuser to the woman. Race/ethnicity, disability, class and age all add extra dimensions to womens experiences; and professional responses can be crucial for womens journeys. As well as providing important insight into womens journeys and responses, this book signals a way, through narrative approaches, for professionals to intervene and offer support that are premised on women re-authoring their biographies. Indeed, the lens of lived experience can help us to make sense of a situation. Narrative approaches have increasingly been used in helping to make sense of and create new ways of describing issues or problem relationships. Unlike traditional therapeutic approaches which pathologies abused women as passive victims, the narrative approach outlined in this book avails a view of women as survivors, which foregrounds womens resistance through a reframing of their apparent passivity/helplessness and lack of agency, who find numerous and creative ways to resist. Instead of fixing women in their victimhood, understanding womens responses to their abusive situations provides a picture of women as constantly changing and re-negotiating their identities in response to their abuse experiences. Experiences of abuse leave women forever changed, something that creates the need for them to re-formulate their identities in ways that affirm self-hood once they have performed the ultimate act of resistance, leaving the abusive relationship. The challenge for professional intervention is how questions can be asked which enable women to recognise their own skilled resistance behaviours to their abuse.

Through the central use of womens narratives, complex concepts are brought to life in this book, which aims to inform social work, counselling and other professional practice to be better informed by womens individual experiences of domestic abuse and the meaning given by women to such experiences. By tracing womens journeys through the abuse, it seeks to offer insights into the ways in which women search for meaning, survival and a redefinition of their selves. Experience has been at the heart of a feminist epistemology and, indeed, to the development of interventions by the movement to end violence against women. For years now, the willingness and engagement of women has enabled researchers to provide greater insights into the lives of women who live with, resist and finally leave domestic abuse. Through their voices, women have enabled improved professional responses to better ensure safety for women and children. Hearing and representing womens voices is also, importantly, at the heart of this book. Just as a feminist methodology foregrounds experience as a route to liberating knowledge, narrative approaches reflect this in practice by emphasising the centrality of womens subjectivity. Keeping womens voices at its heart, and through its focus on identity, meaning and resistance in womens journeys out of abuse, the author develops a narrative intervention approach which can be used by professionals working with abused women. By listening to the meanings women construct for their responses to abuse, and taking cognisance of their various strategies of resistance, professional interventions can thus emanate and be potentially liberating for women.

The struggle against violence against women is by no means over. The dedication of women and others has helped to bring it out of its secretive silence into the public domain so that more conversations can take place. The enduring problem of domestic abuse reveals the nooks and crannies of gendered inequality, something that remains a focus of struggle throughout the world. In particular, post-separation safety and support remain crucial for womens on-going recovery, something that is not always recognised by the crisis intervention nature of services encouraged by current funding regimes. This book is a timely and powerful reminder of the importance of considering womens post-separation recovery and the accompanying support, and funding, necessary to facilitate this.

For women to reclaim and reconstruct themselves through giving their own meaning to their experiences of abuse and resistance is a powerful and transformative process and which can be facilitated by professionals with the necessary insight into womens complex journeys. This book, at a time when domestic violence is increasingly professionalised, provides greater insight into womens constant reconstruction of meaning about their experiences. Given that the danger of professionals disempowering women further is ever present, and by drawing on research in the fields of domestic violence and therapeutic approaches, the book suggests a transformative model for professional intervention a Narrative Intervention for Intimate Partner Violence - which takes cognisance of womens experiences and meaning about their complex journeys from abuse to safety whilst retaining the link to wider social, cultural and gender discourses. It provides an important new way to conceptualise womens journeys through the subjective and complex interrelationship between self-identity, meaning reconstruction and resistance. The approach keeps womens voices and concerns at its heart and suggests questions that professionals can ask. It advocates a model which, if embraced, has the potential to make professional intervention not only more effective but also more efficient.

Ravi K. Thiara

Principal Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Safety and Well-being, University of Warwick, UK

One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and larks jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky and then I went down on my knees. At that moment there was little I knew of myself or of the world I had but one sentence in mind always the same: I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space. How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall.