Jennifer R. Wies, Hillary J. Haldane - Anthropology at The Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence-Vanderbilt University Press (2011)

Anthropology
at the
Front Lines of
Gender-Based
Violence
Jennifer R. Wies and Hillary J. Haldane, Editors

Anthropology
at the Front Lines
of Gender-Based Violence
Anthropology
at the Front Lines
Edited by Jennifer R. Wies

and Hillary J. Haldane
Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville
© 2011 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper made

from 30% post-consumer recycled content.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anthropology at the front lines of gender-based violence/

Jennifer R. Wies and Hillary J. Haldane, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8265-1780-7 (cloth edition : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1781-4 (pbk. edition : alk. paper)
1. Violence—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Women—Violence
against—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Abused women—Cross-
cultural studies. 4. Domestic violence—Cross-cultural
studies. I. Wies, Jennifer R. II. Haldane, Hillary J.
GN495.2.A567 2011
303.6'2—dc22
2010040505
This book is dedicated to all frontline workers
who respond to and prevent gender-based violence:
Your tireless efforts transform thousands of lives.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
â•‡1 Ethnographic Notes from the Front Lines

of Gender-Based Violence 1
Jennifer R. Wies and Hillary J. Haldane
â•‡2 Disparity in Disasters: A Frontline View of Gender-

Based Inequities in Emergency Aid and Health Care 19
Roxane Richter
â•‡3 Participant and Observer: Reflections on Fieldwork

in a Women’s Shelter in Tokyo, Japan 29
Sharman L. Babior
â•‡4 Crafting Community through

Narratives, Images, and Shared Experience 51
Stephanie J. Brommer
â•‡5 “We Couldn’t Just Throw Her in the Street”:

Gendered Violence and Women’s Shelters in Turkey 71
Kim Shively
â•‡6 Institutional Resources (Un)Available:

The Effects of Police Attitudes and Actions
on Battered Women in Peru 91
M. Cristina Alcalde
â•‡7 Child Welfare and Domestic Violence Workers’
Cultural Models of Domestic Violence:
An Ethnographic Examination 107
Cyleste C. Collins
â•‡8 Gender-Based Violence: Perspectives

from the Male European Front Line 129
Uwe Jacobs
â•‡9 Cultural Politics of a Global/Local Health Program

for Battered Women in Vietnam 139
Lynn Kwiatkowski
10 Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of

Belonging: Defining Violence against Women
in Russia 165
Julie Hemment
11 Memorializing Murder, Speaking Back to the State

Belinda Leach
191
12 Laliti, Compassionate Savior:

The Hidden Archaeology of Founding a Shelter 211
Jamila Bargach
Contributors 223
Index 227
viii
Acknowledgments
This volume grew from a conversation in a hotel coffee shop in Vancouver,

British Columbia, in 2006 during the Society for Applied Anthropology
meetings. We were both finishing our dissertations and felt fortunate to
connect with another anthropologist committed to the issue of gender-
based violence. While the field has grown rapidly in the past few years, our
own literature reviews were constructed largely of accounts by sociologists,
psychologists, and social workers. We believe that anthropology has much
to contribute to this important field of study, and this book is a result
of our shared passion to ultimately eliminate gender-based violence. We
came to this topic from our own experiences on the front lines, work-
ing in emergency shelters as victim advocates and hotline volunteers. We
have personally felt the adrenaline rush and nausea that can overwhelm
one when driving to a hospital emergency room or police station in the
middle of the night to assist a survivor of violence. In that coffee shop
we commiserated over our common frustrations with a safety net of care
that sometimes appeared to have more holes than thread, and how our
prevention efforts seemed to fall short. But we were energized by the spirit
of humanity and compassion that cuts across the various sectors of the
front line, across communities, and even nation-states. We convinced each
other that Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence was the
much-needed next step to the contributions in anthropology focusing on
gender-based violence.
The workers whose stories are presented in this book deserve attention,
support, and appreciation. We cannot thank all the workers by name, but
we hope that you find the stories told here to be a faithful rendition of
your thoughts and work. On behalf of our colleagues, and the survivors to
whom you devote your energies, thank you for your labor, devotion, and
care.
Many colleagues have supported our efforts through the years. Three
ix
xâ•…â•… Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence
fellow travelers in the field of gender-based violence deserve special men-

tion. Melissa Beske and Karin Friederic have joined us on panels at con-
ferences over the years and their work has helped us to think about the
diversity of experiences that the anthropologists, as well as the workers
have in this field. Sarah Orndorff organized a panel for the 2008 Society
for Applied Anthropology meetings entitled Experiences of Violence, Sites
of Recovery: Understanding the Complexities of Intimate Partner Vio-
lence that led to a special issue of Global Public Health. The papers from
that panel provided clarity on what issues we wanted to tackle here.
Madelaine Adelman’s work on political economy and domestic vio-
lence provided the theoretical framework from which this volume devel-
oped. Her feedback on early drafts and her comments from a working
session at a conference on gender-based violence in 2009 helped us see the
promise in this project. Sarah Hautzinger agreed to serve as a discussant for
a panel we held in 2010, and her comments from that session reminded
us of the importance of this project and the unique perspective it brings to
the field.
We are especially appreciative of the feedback from our two anony-
mous reviewers, who identified lacunae in the original draft, and their
critiques have lead to a much stronger final text. While we incorporated
feedback and suggestions from our reviewers, colleagues, and friends, we
alone are responsible for any mistakes, errors, or disagreeable arguments
found in the book.
Individually, Jennifer would like to thank her colleagues at Eastern
Kentucky University and Xavier University for supporting her efforts. In
addition, she sends thanks to her family for their inspiration, passion, and
support. Hillary would like to thank her family for patiently living with
this project for the past four years. Her colleagues at Quinnipiac Uni-
versity provided the humor and support necessary to keep everything in
perspective.
Anthropology
at the Front Lines
1
Ethnographic Notes
from the Front Lines
Jennifer R. Wies
and Hillary J. Haldane
My work is a part of empowering the whole community. When

there is violence it is the community’s soul that is injured.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. As a
community, we need to ask, “Are you safe at home? Are you OK?
Is there anyone you fear?” Because it is not OK if you live in fear, it
is not OK that this is happening, and this can change. So it comes
out of the shame, the silence, and we as a total community are
releasing people from the shame of abuse. That’s my ideal world.
—Frontline worker, New Zealand
Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence presents anthro-

pologically informed ethnographies of frontline workers in the field of
gender-based violence. It explores how hotline counselors, emergency shel-
ter advocates, court advocates, child protection workers, police officers,
lawyers, shelter directors, psychologists, and other direct services workers
comfort, advocate for, and assist victims and survivors of gender-based vio-
lence and why these workers perform their labor. It examines the models
of care and compassion they employ and tells their personal and profes-
sional stories. The chapters address the delivery of services, the struggle for
legal recognition, the effort to improve the lives of victims and survivors,
and the challenges of ending violence. By focusing on the front line, the
“small spaces of interaction” (Merry 2008, 520), this collection illustrates
1
2â•…â•… Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence
the ways that workers create meaning, frameworks, and identities in a lo-
cal context. At the same time, it exposes the ways that frontline workers
shape and are influenced by global institutions dedicated to addressing and
preventing gender-based violence.
Frontline workers offer a unique perspective to our understanding of
violence. While the perspectives of the policy makers, victims, and survi-
vors are critically important to how we conceptualize adequate responses
to gender-based violence, they have only one story to tell: their own story
of violence and survival or the story of the institution or organization they
direct. Frontline workers can tell hundreds of stories of victimhood and
survival. They can map the scope and scale of violence in their communi-
ties, and they are attuned to the ways shifts in policy affect the day-to-day
decision-making of the very people such policy is intended to help. They are
the barometer of violence, and understanding their stories is a necessary part
of any effective effort to end the global pandemic of gender-based violence.
Gender-Based Violence
We define gender-based violence as violence against an individual or popu-

lation based on gender identity or expression. We understand gender-based
violence to be violence occurring in the family or the general commu-
nity that is perpetrated or condoned by the state (United Nations 1993).
Gender-based violence includes multiple forms of violence and reflects the
political-economic structures that perpetuate gender-based inequalities
among people and populations. Gender-based violence includes violence
against women, defined by the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights (1993) as
any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in,
physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including
threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether
occurring in public or in private life, and including domestic violence,
crimes committed in the name of honour, crimes committed in the name
of passion, trafficking in women and girls, traditional practices harmful to
women, including female genital mutilation, early and forced marriages,
female infanticide, dowry-related violence and deaths, acid attacks and
violence related to commercial sexual exploitation as well as economic
exploitation.
Ethnographic Notes from the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violenceâ•…â•… 3
Gender-based violence also includes acts of violence perpetrated toward

individuals and populations as a result of gender positionality. It includes
acts of pedophilia, sexual assault of female and male prostitutes, human
trafficking, and violence perpetrated toward people because of their gender
expression, including individuals and populations that self-identify as gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer.
To situate gender-based violence within global political-economic
structures and processes, our analysis of gender-based violence also takes
into account the structural violence that contributes to macro-level pat-
terns of oppression and exploitation. Structural violence refers to the pro-
cesses, policies, and polities that systemically produce or reproduce “social
and economic inequities that determine who will be at risk for assaults and
who will be shielded from them” (Farmer 2005, 17–18). Anthropologists
have employed a structural-violence framework to examine how “various
social processes and events come to be translated into personal distress and
disease” and how “political and economic forces have structured risk for
forms of extreme suffering, from hunger to torture and rape” (30).
Situating gender-based violence as structural violence has allowed
scholars to move from individual pathology to social responsibility. While
researchers of structural violence assert a relationship between intimate
partner violence (as a form of gender-based violence) and structural vio-
lence, they do not explicitly interrogate local-level violence. The study of
violence within intimate settings requires a framework that allows analyti-
cal attention to some of the hidden “sites” of violence (Scheper-Hughes
1992). The public/private dichotomy masks many forms of gender-based
violence, particularly such acts as rape, incest, sexual assault, and domestic
violence. Exposing the hidden sites of violence allows us to reflect on the
structural factors that produce, reproduce, and exacerbate the suffering of
the victim, and far too often, protect the perpetrator.
This conceptualization of gender-based violence and its relationship to
structural violence is further reflected in the United Nations High Com-
missioner for Human Rights (1993) resolution pertaining to the elimina-
tion of violence against women, where it is recognized that
racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance reveal

themselves in a differentiated manner for women and girls, and can be
among the factors leading to a deterioration in their living conditions,
poverty, violence, multiple forms of discrimination and the limitation
or denial of their human rights, and recognizing the need to integrate a
gender perspective into relevant policies, strategies and programmes of

action, including effective implementation of national legislation, against
racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in order
to address multiple forms of discrimination against women.
All acts of violence considered in this book result from culturally spe-
cific ideologies of gender roles and norms. In each case of violence, an
individual person is driven to act by the victim’s gender and expectations
of that gender. No case in this book presents violence that could be classi-
fied as “random” or “accidental.” A focus on gender-based violence allows
us to consider multiple forms of violence, such as rape, child abuse, sexual
assault, family violence, and domestic violence, as well as structural vio-
lence, such as poverty, homelessness, sexual exploitation, and other socio-
economic inequalities, while drawing on the same foundational works in
anthropology. The term gender-based violence allows the reader to consider
various structural dynamics producing domestic violence that heretofore
have rarely been brought into the same conversation. In our own society,
the United States, the specialization of labor and the professionalization of
social services have prompted policy responses to various forms of violence
that treat problems in isolation (Wies 2008). With this collection we seek
to weave together the disparate pieces of the issue of gender-based vio-
lence, thereby demonstrating the holistic relationship between problems,
and advocating for a comprehensive response to gender-based violence by
our communities and our governments.
The Anthropology of Gender-Based Violence
Anthropologists have a long history of studying violence and conflict

(Fortune 1939; Gillin 1934; Gluckman 1955, 1963; Hadlock 1947; Ma-
linowski 1959; Skinner 1911; Williams 1941). Early scholars examined
acts of violence as defined by warfare, cultural ethos, conflicts over mate-
rial resources, or cultural rituals related to rites of passage, such as genital
cutting, nosebleeding, and forced scarification (Boddy 1982; Harrington
1968; Hayes 1975; Herdt 1982; Otterbein 1999; Rafti 1979; Singer and
Desole 1967). Acts of gender-based violence, however, such as rape, do-
mestic violence, and human trafficking were left largely undertheorized.
Thus, forms of gender-based violence were not identified as cultural phe-
nomena in most societies until the 1970s. Another reason for the limited
engagement by early anthropologists with gender-based violence as we
define it here is the discipline’s investment in cultural relativity (Harvey

and Gow 1994; Helliwell 2000). Anthropology is premised on the idea
that emic understandings are what we strive to study and present to our
audience.
The 1989 text Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective by David
Levinson and the 1990 special issue of Pacific Studies, Domestic Violence
in Oceania, edited by Dorothy Counts, were the first major anthropologi-
cal treatments of domestic violence. These writings initiated an anthropo-
logical focus on gender-based violence at the same time that many socieÂ�
ties began to pay greater attention to the problem (Counts 1990, 248).
Levinson and the authors in the Pacific Studies special issue challenged
the established practice among anthropologists of writing about violence
in culturally specific terms by beginning to interrogate in universal terms
the violence they witnessed as part of their fieldwork. These two publica-
tions were also significant for creating new categories of analysis for an-
thropology to engage, for identifying and classifying victimhood, and for
attempting to explain why violence was present or absent in a given social
context. The authors addressed such issues as alcohol consumption, gender
equality between women and men, changing political-economic stressors
and contexts, and the effects of “modernity” on people who were rapidly
being incorporated into a wage-labor mode of production.
Following the publication of the 1990 special issue of Pacific Stud-
ies, Counts established the study of violence against women as a legiti-
mate research domain within the discipline with the publication of two
major works, Sanctions and Sanctuary: Cultural Perspectives on the Beat-
ing of Wives (with Judith Brown and Jacquelyn Campbell) in 1992 and
the second edition of the book in 1999, To Have and to Hit: Cultural
Perspectives on Wife Beating. These two books inspired a new generation
of anthropologists to study gender-based violence as the main object of
inquiry. Several significant monographs and influential works soon ap-
peared in the anthropological literature that dealt with domestic violence
and other forms of violence against women. As gender-based violence cut
across niche specializations, anthropologists from various subdisciplinary
backgrounds turned their ethnographic lens on the topic. Medical, legal,
and political anthropologists addressed such issues as the problems shelter
workers face, the role of the police, and the way policies often fall short of
victims’ needs.
Laura McClusky’s (2001) “Here Our Culture Is Hard”: Stories of Domes-
tic Violence from a Mayan Community in Belize chronicles the experiences
of violence through first-person narratives and addresses the problem of at-
tempting to study a “closed” and “private” topic. Donna Goldstein’s (2003)

ethnography Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in
a Rio Shantytown explores interpersonal and state-level violence through
a political-economic lens, examining acts of battery and rape within the
structures of inequality that obliterate poor black women’s experiences
from view. Goldstein shows how women use laughter to make sense of the
violence that the state simultaneously ignores and promotes. In Sheltering
Women: Negotiating Gender and Violence in Northern Italy, Sonja Plesset
(2006) brings us closer to the lived experiences of victimhood by exploring
the inner-workings of two women’s shelters. Plesset’s work is important
for its consideration of how diverse the local can be, as she explores two
very different shelter programs: one run by communists, the other by the
Catholic Church.
Ethnographically informed journal articles have also broadened our
qualitative understanding of how violence affects everyday lives. Nia Par-
son’s (2010) “Transformative Ties: Gendered Violence, Forms of Recovery,
and Shifting Subjectivities in Chile” examines the way a woman’s experi-
ence with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) created what Parson
terms “transformative ties,” relationships that radically alter the way sur-
vivors see themselves in the world and those around them, as well as how
these ties create avenues for them to enact positive change in the world.
And Maureen Hearn’s (2009) “A Journey through Ashes: One Woman’s
Story of Surviving Domestic Violence” provides an uplifting account of
one woman’s journey from victimhood to survival. Such pieces are an im-
portant reminder of the humanity that often gets lost in the analysis and
dissection of gender-based violence.
While anthropologists address the issue of gender-based violence in
multiple locales, political and legal arenas have proved to be especially rich
sites for exploring how individual actors define, negotiate, and respond
to various categorizations of gender-based violence. Sarah Hautzinger’s
(2007) Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Bahia, Bra-
zil; Cecilia MacDowell Santos’s (2005) Women’s Police Stations: Gender,
Violence, and Justice in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Elizabeth Shrader and Mont-
serrat Sagot’s (2000) Domestic Violence: Women’s Way Out; and Margaret
Abraham’s (2000) Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South
Asian Immigrants in the United States draw on legal frameworks that com-
plement cross-cultural, ethnographic research that examines how women
obtain protection from abuse. Ethnographies such as Mindie Lazarus-
Black’s (2007) Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures
of Reconciliation, Fiona Macaulay’s (2006) Gender Politics in Brazil and

Chile, and Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s (2001) Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic
Family Law highlight cracks in the system, including court procedures that
are out of reach for many victims, the disjuncture between laws on the
books and victims’ lived experiences, the economic barriers that prevent
victims from obtaining their rights, and the state agents who unknowingly
or unwittingly perpetuate systemic violence.
As this review indicates, much of the contemporary anthropological
literature on gender-based violence shares two concerns. First, employing
a structural-violence framework, anthropologists consider the relationship
between the individual and structures of power. The anthropological lit-
erature moves our understanding of gender-based violence from individual
characteristics (batterer profiling, victim characteristics, etc.) to the more
complex topic of how individual actors make sense of their own behaviors,
the behavior of others, and the institutions and ideologies that contex-
tualize an experience of gender-based violence. This approach does not
deny the lived experience of violence; rather, it foregrounds the ways that
individuals and institutions make sense of the cultural world in which a
person’s trauma takes shape. Second, while anthropologists who work with
these issues strongly believe in the value of maintaining cultural relativity,
no one excuses the violence. The acts of abuse are treated as human rights
violations with grave health consequences. These anthropologists still at-
tempt to make sense of the violence in emic terms, as they demonstrate
how individuals around the world are working to prevent and end violence
in their homes, their communities, and their countries.
Local Workers in the Global Political Economy
Sally Engle Merry has persuasively made the case that transnational dis-
courses of gender violence are translated into local vernaculars in distinct
and inventive ways. Her 2006 book Human Rights and Gender Violence
examines gender-based violence from a structural violence perspective,
demonstrating the way institutions and well-intentioned efforts to end
violence also create and maintain systems of inequality. Her work pro-
vides a strong foundation for scholars wishing to connect frontline or local
ethnographic perspectives with larger political-economic structures that
contribute to micro-level violence.
Merry acknowledges, however, that gaps are left in the wake of deter-
ritorialized ethnography. In responding to reviewers of her 2006 book,

Merry (2008, 520) states:
In seeking to understand the complex and vast world of human rights

law, I worked with NGOs, rather than the lawyers, governments, or
victims. This means that there are important dimensions of this process I
did not study.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Moreover, there are areas of resistance and refusal that
are critically important to understand, as well as obstacles and barriers to
the movement of these ideas and practices. Local systems of justice may
merge with the more transnational ones but may also context or reject
them. These issues cannot be examined without attention to economic
and political inequalities as well as those based on gender.
Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence fills these lacunae

by highlighting how local-level or indigenously produced frameworks for
care and advocacy operate and how frontline workers engage “universal”
models of preventing and responding to gender-based violence. The case
studies illustrate the ways international institutions shape local places and
practices and how local or indigenously crafted knowledge and practices
filter back up to the transnational discourse.
Furthermore, the contributors to this book offer frameworks for situ-
ating micro-level interactions within the context of structural violence.
Their approach is similar to Madelaine Adelman’s (2004) in “The Battering
State.” In this timely work, Adelman describes the role of the state as a force
for maintaining and producing the violence that individuals experience
in their “private” lives. She asserts that the state, through various policies
that are premised on conservative and neoliberal ideologies, promotes an
idealized family that is self-sufficient, free from dependency on the state,
and responsible for its own economic and social well-being. She shows
that in the United States, policies such as the 1996 Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Act and the subsequent implementation of the
Temporary Aid to Needy Families legislation further complicate a single
woman’s ability to raise and care for her children independent of state
or extrafamilial support. According to Adelman, the dynamic resulting
from these laws is punishment of single women, because they encourage
women, despite the abuse they receive regularly, to remain in the care and
support of men who can economically provide for them. Adelman posits
that this is just one of the many instances in which victims of violence are
forced because of state policy to choose between economic survival and
psychological and physical torture.
Adelman’s work illustrates that a political-economic analysis is central

to analyses of gender-based violence. The chapters in this book demon-
strate the usefulness of viewing the frontline workers as caught between
the unintended consequences of state policy and individual cries for help.
By approaching gender-based violence from a political-economic perspec-
tive, rather than individualizing the behavior, these chapters demonstrate
that global discourses of gender-based violence circulate in local settings
and are occasionally translated into culturally appropriate frameworks
(Merry 2006b) while highlighting each setting’s distinct and culturally
specific approach to, and understanding of, the problem of gender-based
violence. Through rich ethnographic examples, the pieces in this collection
highlight local efforts of gender-based violence intervention, identify the
lessons frontline workers offer to others engaged with gender-based vio-
lence at any scale, and provide accounts of the labor at the front line, a site
undertheorized yet critical to any effort to end gender-based violence.
Ethnographic Notes from the Front Lines
Social and behavioral science researchers use ethnography to gain an in-

depth understanding of the relationships between a study population,
the power structures that may impact a study population, and the daily
behaviors of a study population (Babbie 2001; Bernard 1994; Emerson,
Fretz, and Shaw 1995). Sometimes referred to and paired with “participant
observation,” ethnography is the process of describing a study population
through daily interaction and recording the activities that appear exotic
and mundane, explicit and tacit, to the researcher (DeWalt and DeWalt
2002; Fetterman 1998). The process of ethnography also lends itself to in-
formal conversations with the research population in the course of normal,
everyday activities. By participating in the everyday activities of a popu-
lation in their geographic and cultural space, the researcher can expose
practices that may not be visible to the casual observer (Burawoy 1991).
Sherry Ortner (1995, 173) says of ethnography, “It has always meant
the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much of it
as possible—as the instrument of knowing.” The chapters in this book il-
lustrate the intersecting roles of participant and observer as the authors are
simultaneously positioned as advocate, activist, ally, counselor, and friend.
The ethnographic combination of active participation and research ob-
servation yields chapters rich in descriptions, anecdotes, and reflections.
The ethnographic case studies presented in this book provide a context for
scholars who collect, analyze, and share the stories of survivors, frontline
workers, and themselves as they pursue scholarship, advocacy, and activism
to end gender-based violence.
Explorations of how frontline workers make sense of their daily experi-
ences, and how this sense-making constructs new narratives about gender-
based violence, exemplify the power of ethnography. It is not enough to
document the policy changes, the decision making, and the sites of con-
testation and compromise. Ethnography allows us to put ourselves in the
mindset and worldview of the people whose stories it tells. Attempting to
view the world of gender-based violence from the perspectives of those
dedicated most passionately to decreasing its prevalence allows us to bear
witness to the pain and suffering, the hope and determination of the front-
line workers and victims and survivors of gender-based violence.
The authors who have contributed to this volume cover a range of
theoretical and geographical territory. It includes four chapters by front-
line workers (Babior, Bargach, Jacobs, and Richter) and travels across Peru,
Japan, Russia, Turkey, Canada, Morocco, Vietnam, and the United States.
The chapters explore the constraints of state policy and the workers’ acts
of resistance, the insider/outsider status that complicates an ethnographer’s
attempt to remain apart from events, and the vicarious trauma experi-
enced by workers and ethnographers alike who attempt to document acts
of structural and interpersonal violence that defy simplistic explanations or
formulaic solutions (Farmer 2005).
The authors use terminology that is appropriate to each case study, and
thus the terminology is different in each chapter. Rather than fitting their
collaborators’ words into a disciplinary-specific language, the anthropolo-
gists who carried out the studies they report here use language that reflects
the local conceptualizations of the problems. We hope the reader appreci-
ates the unique standpoint within each chapter, recognizing that all the
pieces lead us to a greater understanding of the complexity and nuance
within the broad term gender-based violence.
We open the book with a powerful reminder of the connection be-
tween structural violence and suffering by Roxane Richter. In “Disparity
in Disasters: A Frontline View of Gender-Based Inequities in Emergency
Aid and Health Care,” she discusses how after working as an emergency
medical technician (EMT) and Red Cross volunteer assisting victims in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she found herself on the receiving end
of “disaster relief ” as a victim of Hurricane Ike a few years later. Richter ex-
amines the complexities that unfold within organizational efforts to assist
victims from the perspective that state-level structural violence produces

and contextualizes the violence that frontline workers hope to prevent. She
analyzes how “natural” occurrences become “human-made” disasters, par-
ticularly through the glaring omission of a gender perspective in disaster
preparedness and relief planning.
Ethnography as the practice of simultaneously learning about others
and about oneself is the foundation of Sharman L. Babior’s chapter, “Par-
ticipant and Observer: Reflections on Fieldwork in a Women’s Shelter in
Tokyo, Japan.” Babior explores her insider/outsider status, as researcher
and shelter advocate, and the impact this dual role, distinct from Rich-
ter’s roles as an advocate and victim, has on her study outcomes. Through
her analysis of frontline workers in a shelter for victims and survivors of
domestic violence and human trafficking, we learn about the deep and
intimate relationships among advocates and shelter residents.
In “Crafting Community through Narratives, Images, and Shared Ex-
perience,” Stephanie J. Brommer uses thick description combined with
participant observation and qualitative interviews to explore the emer-
gence of organizations in California in response to violence experienced
by women from India and illustrates the multiple levels of violence that
advocates must respond to through organizations. She stresses the value
of recognizing “culture” in the development of separate and specialized
responses to gender-based violence, particularly for communities uniquely
affected by global shifts in political-economic resources. Brommer’s piece
adds to the growing anthropological literature examining the complexi-
ties of providing domestic violence services within heterogeneous, multiÂ�
cultural contexts. It also provides a critical intervention in the study of
the transmission of theories of gender-based violence from one context to
another.1
While Brommer’s piece emphasizes domestic violence as the key locus
of experience for frontline workers in California, Kim Shively’s experience
in Turkey demonstrates the explicitly local definition of domestic violence.
Shively’s chapter, “â•›‘We Couldn’t Just Throw Her in the Street’: Gendered
Violence and Women’s Shelters in Turkey,” questions the notion that do-
mestic violence shelters are the ideal state-level response to gender-based
violence. In Turkey, the past two decades have witnessed a strengthening
of laws criminalizing batterers and the development of public and pri-
vate institutions that offer assistance to victims and survivors of domestic
violence. Shively investigates how the processes of transplantation, appro-
priation, and translation of international gender-based violence doctrines,
identified by Sally Engle Merry, have influenced the creation of domestic

violence shelters in Turkey. She exposes the dissonance between the local
and the global in defining and responding to gender-based violence.
Complementing research focused on voluntary or paid work at a non-
profit organization or an NGO, M. Cristina Alcalde explores the role of
police officers as frontline workers in “Institutional Resources (Un)Avail-
able: The Effects of Police Attitudes and Actions on Battered Women in
Peru.” The ethnographic interviews and participant observation she con-
ducted in women’s police stations reveal the indifference, hostility, and dis-
crimination often at work in the intersection of victim and police officer.
As a result, this chapter illuminates a necessary shift in our understanding
of frontline workers, from advocate to possible secondary perpetrator.
While Babior, Brommer, Shively, and Alcalde focus on various in-
stitutional responses to violence, the next chapter, “Child Welfare and
Domestic Violence Workers’ Cultural Models of Domestic Violence: An
Ethnographic Examination” by Cyleste C. Collins, explores the cultural
frameworks that guide the labor of the front line. Collins employs partici-
pant observation and ethnographic interviews to examine U.S.-based do-
mestic violence and child welfare workers’ beliefs about domestic violence
and how these beliefs shape their everyday work with victims and survivors
of violence. Collins’s chapter reminds us that while frontline workers are
mechanisms in society that reproduce ideologies of domestic violence and
victimhood, they are also active agents in producing the very ideologies the
mainstream public holds about domestic violence.
To demonstrate the decision-making process and logic of working
daily with victims and survivors of violence, we include another piece by
a frontline worker, Uwe Jacobs. In “Gender-Based Violence: Perspectives
from the Male European Front Line,” Jacobs confronts his own location as
a white, European, heterosexual man counseling refugees who have expe-
rienced suffering and acts of violence. Jacobs also considers the role of men
in ending gender-based violence by both ceasing interpersonal violence
and acknowledging structural-level privilege and violence. Jacobs suggests
that to achieve this goal we must examine our own biases, our gendered
identities, our translations of local and global ideologies, and the manifes-
tations of structural power inequalities in the relationships we engage in as
frontline workers.
Lynn Kwiatkowski moves us from the perspective of an insider coun-
selor to that of an ethnographer in “Cultural Politics of a Global/Local
Health Program for Battered Women in Vietnam.” Kwiatkowski focuses
on an international health program in Vietnam and how the local front-

line workers seek to address and redress gender-based violence in conjunc-
tion with the international health program. In Vietnam, as discussions
of wife battering and domestic violence have become more public, they
are increasingly understood through local cultural logics as well as trans-
national discourses of wife battering. The result is the development of new
approaches to local practices that are infused with local and culture-based
ideologies as well as global theories about gender-based violence that exist
in Vietnamese society.
Julie Hemment’s “Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belong-
ing: Defining Violence against Women in Russia” also focuses on local/
global dynamics. Hemment connects the local advocacy of frontline work-
ers to the global neoliberal political economy. By tracing the connections
between the global North and global South, feminists and correspond-
ing sponsoring agencies, Hemment exposes the “tensions of transnational
women’s activism” through a study of emergent violence against women
campaigns and crisis centers in Russia.
Kwiatkowski and Hemment position frontline workers within the na-
tions, states, or other macrostructural entities within which they organize,
advocate, and pursue activism. In “Memorializing Murder, Speaking Back
to the State,” Belinda Leach directs our attention to the state. Focusing
on the creation of memorials to murdered women, Leach describes the
techniques employed by frontline antiviolence workers as they organize
their efforts to bring awareness of gender-based violence into the public
sphere. At the nexus of these activisms is Leach’s exploration of how the
Canadian state defines and recognizes violence against women and in turn
the frontline workers who work with victims and survivors.
We conclude this book in the same way that it begins—with a raw,
intimate, and emotional frontline reflection. In “Laliti, Compassionate
Savior: The Hidden Archeology of the Founding of a Shelter,” Jamila Bar-
gach recounts her experiences establishing a domestic violence shelter in
Morocco. In doing so she exposes the humanity of the people manag-
ing organizations dedicated to responding to gender-based violence. Like
Richter and Jacobs, Bargach uses brutal honesty to expose the fraught and
fragile world of working with and for survivors of violence. Her piece con-
tinues the deep ethnographic work found throughout the book, analyzing
frontline workers from the perspective of a researcher or practitioner who
is simultaneously “doing the work.” It also provides an account of how
international donor funds influence local efforts to end violence, and how
they affect the relationships between workers and between the workers and
the survivors themselves. Bargach brings us closer to the important task of
seeing frontline work not solely as global to local but also as local to local.
Conclusions and Beginnings
Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence explores how we

define and respond to gender-based violence locally and globally by em-
phasizing the experiences and production of frameworks at the local level.
Through its ethnographic focus, this book is meant to compel those con-
cerned with the issue of gender-based violence to incorporate the locally
crafted and continuously shifting frameworks of prevention, treatment,
and care into our analyses. As such, it speaks simultaneously to those
working at local scales and those working at international scales in an ef-
fort to contribute to a transnational discussion of gender-based violence.
What needs to be done is staggering. The global movement against
violence has existed for over thirty years, and each year new statistics reveal
the growing number of cases in every part of the world. The authors in this
book and our colleagues who serve as our interlocutors marshal personal
and professional resources to address this epidemic. Gender-based violence
is a difficult issue to fund, for both research and program delivery. Thus,
anthropologists who research this topic have great empathy for frontline
workers and their attempts to maintain the resources they need to con-
tinue their important efforts. We hope our work here gives voice to those
struggles and highlights how important the labor of the front line is for
maintaining hope and dignity in people’s lives. The majority of workers
presented in this book will never be famous. Their efforts receive little at-
tention and rarely admiration. Yet their stories hold important lessons for
us all. Their work is a part of our collective effort to make the world a safer
and more peaceful and equitable place for all women, children, and men.
Note
1. See Hodžić 2009 for a critical assessment of the culture/rights dichotomy and
how this dichotomy has generated problematic assumptions about local contexts
as static and about transnational discourses on human rights as dynamic and
modern.
Works Cited
Abraham, Margaret. 2000. Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South
Asian Immigrants in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Adelman, Madelaine. 2004. The Battering State: Towards a Political Economy of
Domestic Violence. Journal of Poverty 8 (3): 45–64.
Babbie, Earl. 2001. The Practice of Social Research. 9th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Bernard, H. Russell. 1994. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quan-
titative Approaches. 2nd ed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Boddy, Janice. 1982. Womb as Oasis: The Symbolic Context of Pharaonic Circumci-
sion in Rural Northern Sudan. American Ethnologist 9 (4): 682–98.
Burawoy, Michael, ed. 1991. Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Mod-
ern Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Counts, Dorothy, ed. 1990. Domestic Violence in Oceania. Special issue, Pacific
Studies 13 (3).
Counts, Dorothy, Judith Brown, and Jacquelyn Campbell, eds. 1992. Sanctions and
Sanctuary: Cultural Perspectives on the Beating of Wives. Boulder, CO: Westview.
———. 1999. To Have and to Hit: Cultural Perspectives on Wife Beating. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
DeWalt, Kathleen, and Billie DeWalt. 2002. Participant Observation: A Guide for
Fieldworkers. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic
Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Farmer, Paul. 2005. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on
the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fetterman, David M. 1998. Ethnography. In Handbook of Applied Social Research
Methods, ed. L. Bickman and D. J. Rog, 473–504. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Fortune, Reo. 1939. Arapesh Warfare. American Anthropologist 41 (1): 22–41.
Gillin, John. 1934. Crime and Punishment among the Barama River Carib of British
Guiana. American Anthropologist 36 (3): 331–44.
Gluckman, Max. 1955. Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 1963. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
Goldstein, Donna M. 2003. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexu-
ality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hadlock, Wendell. 1947. War among the Northeastern Woodland Indians. American
Anthropologist 49 (2): 204–21.
Harrington, Charles. 1968. Sexual Differentiation in Socialization and Some Male
Genital Mutilations. American Anthropologist 70 (5): 951–56.
Harvey, Penelope, and Peter Gow, eds. 1994. Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation
and Experience. New York: Routledge.
Hautzinger, Sarah J. 2007. Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Ba-
hia, Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hayes, Rose Oldfield. 1975. Female Genital Mutilation, Fertility Control, Women’s
Roles and the Patrilineage in Modern Sudan: A Functional Analysis. American
Ethnologist 2 (4): 617–33.
Hearn, Maureen. 2009. A Journey through Ashes: One Woman’s Story of Surviving
Domestic Violence. Anthropology of Consciousness 20 (2): 111–29.
Helliwell, Christine. 2000. “It’s Only a Penis”: Rape, Feminism, and Difference.
Signs 25 (3): 789–816.
Herdt, Gilbert. 1982. Sambia Nosebleeding Rites and Male Proximity to Women.
Ethos 10 (3): 189–231.
Hodžić, Saida. 2009. Unsettling Power: Domestic Violence, Gender Politics, and
Struggles over Sovereignty in Ghana. Ethnos 74 (3): 331–60.
Lazarus-Black, Mindie. 2007. Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and
Cultures of Reconciliation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Levinson, David. 1989. Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Macaulay, Fiona. 2006. Gender Politics in Brazil and Chile. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1959. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. Paterson, NJ:
Littlefield.
McClusky, Laura J. 2001. “Here, Our Culture Is Hard”: Stories of Domestic Violence
from a Mayan Community in Belize. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2006a. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating Inter-
national Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2006b. Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the
Middle. American Anthropologist 108 (1):3: 38–51.
———. 2008. Commentary on Reviews of Human Rights and Gender Violence.
American Anthropologist 110 (4): 520–22.
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. 2001. Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law. London:
I. B. Tauris.
Ortner, Sherry. 1995. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173–93.
Otterbein, Keith. 1999. A History of Research on Warfare in Anthropology.
Parson, Nia. 2010. Transformative Ties: Gendered Violence, Forms of Recovery, and
Shifting Subjectivities in Chile. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24 (1): 64–84.
Plesset, Sonja. 2006. Sheltering Women: Negotiating Gender and Violence in Northern
Italy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rafti, Phyllis. 1979. Review of The Hosken Report by Fran P. Hosken. Medical An-
thropology Quarterly 11 (1): 19–20.
Santos, Cecília MacDowell. 2005. Women’s Police Stations: Gender, Violence, and Jus-
tice in São Paulo, Brazil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life
in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shrader, Elizabeth, and Montserrat Sagot. 2000. Domestic Violence: Women’s Way Out.
Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization.
Singer, Philip, and Daniel Desole. 1967. The Australian Subincision Ceremony Re-
considered: Vaginal Envy or Kangaroo Bifid Penis Envy. American Anthropologist
69 (3): 355–58.
Skinner, Alanson. 1911. War Customs of the Menomini Indians. American Anthro-
pologist 13 (2): 299–312.
United Nations. 1993. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.
New York: United Nations General Assembly.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 1993. Elimination of Vio-
lence against Women. In Commission on Human Rights Resolution 2003/45. Ge-
neva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Wies, Jennifer R. 2008. Professionalizing Human Services: A Case of Domestic Vio-
lence Shelter Advocates. Human Organization 67 (2): 221–33.
Williams, Francis. 1941. Group Sentiment and Primitive Justice. American Anthro-
pologist 43 (4): 523–39.
2
Disparity in Disasters:
A Frontline View of Gender-Based
Inequities in Emergency Aid and
Health Care
Roxane Richter
It seemed as though all of Houston was on high alert, anxiously glued

to the round-the-clock TV coverage of busloads of Hurricane Katrina
evacuees pulling into our convention center in the wee morning hours in
early September 2005. As an emergency medical technician (EMT) and
an American Red Cross Disaster Health Services volunteer, I drove down
to the convention center on the first morning of the evacuees’ arrival.
What greeted me was a fast-congealing mayhem of Houston’s emergency
medical, police, and fire services all struggling to handle an unprecedented
influx of over two hundred thousand evacuees.
I immediately started to triage and assist evacuees who were lying on
sidewalks and being carried out of buses. One of the first evacuees I cared
for was a thirty-year-old African American woman with three small chil-
dren in tow. She was three months pregnant and complaining of heavy
vaginal bleeding over the previous three days—a potential miscarriage. In
the early stages of this Herculean relief effort, there were no ambulances
available. Yet to my surprise, the woman refused any transport to a local
hospital. She explained to me that as a single mother, she would rather
risk losing “this one” (pointing to her belly) than run the risk of losing her
three other children in the evacuee chaos. There was nothing to be done;
there were no child-care or support facilities to assist her at that time. I had
witnessed such stark life-and-death realities in developing areas of Africa,
Latin America, and Asia, but I could not grasp that such a scenario was
19
possible here in the United States of America. It seemed both impossible

and surreal.
While that particular mother’s story was heart wrenching, many more
followed: women who were pregnant and overwrought with concern for
their fetus’s health (yet there were no immediate obstetrics/gynecologi-
cal [OB/GYN] services or prenatal medicines or vitamins); women who
thought they might be pregnant (there were no testing supplies); women
who could not seek out job or financial assistance because of their now
twenty-four-hour child-/dependent-care responsibilities; one woman who
had to undergo an invasive vaginal exam and treatment lying on the floor
of a pastor’s office at a shelter (whose large window I attempted to tape
shut with scraps of paper)—and so on. In triage I lost count of the number
of times women began their patient intake by leaning in and whispering
to me, “I don’t sleep around” or “I’m not unclean”—grappling to compre-
hend the onset of a vaginal infection or rash brought on by postdisaster
stress or a walk through water contaminated by chemicals, debris, and
corpses.
These extraordinary moments working with female evacuees forever
altered my perception of disasters—as an EMT, international aid worker,
and social scientist, and as a woman. At that moment, it was clear to me
that we had to more effectively meet the needs of women and address the
missed opportunities in gender-based care in disaster management, relief
planning, and emergency health care.
I am no rookie. As a frontline worker, or first responder, in national
and international disaster and emergency medical services (EMS), I have
witnessed firsthand how gender-based violence (GBV) and inequities di-
rectly affect disparities in disaster and aid programs. Through my decade-
long work in international humanitarian aid projects, I have witnessed
glaring gender inequities and GBV in Ghana, Nigeria, India, South Africa,
and Zimbabwe. But this, my “postdisaster epiphany,” inextricably tied the
third world to my world. It was like rerunning the glaring GBV from
developing nations on a widescreen color TV, and now watching the same
program here in the United States—just playing out on a much smaller,
black-and-white set.
After those fateful months aiding Hurricane Katrina evacuees, I spent
the next three years interviewing female victims of Katrina and research-
ing gender-based disaster issues. In 2008, yet another disaster, Hurricane
Ike, altered my perception, this time by devastating many neighborhoods
and cities surrounding my own hometown of Seabrook, Texas. So it was
now my turn; I was to have a firsthand evacuee experience packed with
A Frontline View of Gender-Based Inequities in Emergency Aidâ•…â•… 21
all of the fear, trauma, and frustration that comes with a rapid-onset di-
saster. My home sat in the direct path and mandatory evacuation zone of
a hurricane the size of Texas, packing a category 4 storm surge and wind
speeds of 96 to 130 miles an hour. As a single mother, I struggled with
the difficult manual labor of boarding up windows, disconnecting live gas
lines, packing “everything” into a Toyota Camry, and driving four hundred
miles before I found a hotel to shelter me with my frightened son and
often carsick 110-pound dog. We were among the lucky in that we had
a house to come home to and a structure that was repairable, sustaining
some $25,000 in damages. But after a few weeks without electricity, long
waits in line for bagged ice and boxed government food rations, my views
on disaster were again transformed. No longer did I see staid and static
postdisaster statistics of 195 deaths, $32 billion in damages, and so on.
Now those numbers morphed into living representations of my distraught
neighbors, my struggling neighborhood, and my now homeless friends. It
seems that no matter what manmade geographic, political, or cultural line
I traverse, this much holds true: Wherever I work in disaster aid, the poor
receive inequitable access to available resources in aid, health care, and
mitigation skills, and, in general, the poorest of the poor are women.
By describing my own personal disaster aid and frontline emergency
health care experiences, I have sought to illustrate, humanize, and person-
alize how women are disproportionately affected and disadvantaged when
faced with natural and manmade disasters. Many women are at high risk
to succumb to social, physical, financial, and psychological postdisaster
hardships and post-traumatic stress, and specific areas of inequitable and
ineffective aid and services often include EMS, OB/GYN care, triage, and
supplies and services. And while it is important to identify gender-based
(socially constructed) and sex-based (physiological) issues and structural
violence in disasters, I prefer to highlight interventions that define gender
equity as a social justice, health care, and human rights issue, and to il-
lustrate how women are an overlooked and underutilized yet vital part of
disaster mitigation and response efforts—whether they act in their tradi-
tional roles or transcend them.
Gender Does Matter
When a natural disaster strikes, its path of destruction may be indiscrimi-

nate, but the collateral damage is not. Disaster preparedness, research, and
relief involve sociological variables, such as gender, race, and class, as well
as cross-cultural comparisons between the responses of developed and de-

veloping nations. Social injustices and structural violence create inÂ�equiÂ�
ties, and those already denied an equitable share of resources and bene-
fits find themselves disproportionately affected by a disaster’s devastation.
Current World Health Organization (2002) studies point to a pattern of
gender differentiation throughout the disaster process—in preparedness,
response, physical and psychological impact, risk perception and exposure,
and recovery and reconstruction.
Thus does a disaster, as a “natural” occurrence, erupt into an “un-
natural” catastrophe as a consequence of the sudden interface of socially
constructed roles, vulnerabilities, and imbalances of power. It is vital,
therefore, that we address women’s gender-specific issues, power struggles,
needs (such as protection from sexual and domestic violence), rights (such
as fair resource distribution), vulnerabilities (such as social isolation and
lack of personal autonomy), and strengths and opportunities in these are-
nas. But we cannot view women’s disaster risks, rights, and opportunities
solely through women’s physiological makeup. Rather, we must view them
within their psychosocial framework. We should adopt a more holistic
“Social + Biological = Whole Woman” approach so we can more effectively
allow frontline workers to engage and eradicate GBV and inequities across
artificially set social, cultural, and political barriers and divisions.
Two points should be emphasized. First, gender-based disaster aid re-
search and advocacy are not zero-sum games in which every word written
about female suffering means one less word is written about male suffering
or vice versa. We must all seek to expose and examine gender-based disas-
ter issues and take actions that can potentially lead to reductions in human
suffering and loss. Second, I am not suggesting that men are unaffected by
disasters, nor do I condone such thinking. Rather, I hope to serve as a fil-
tered “gender lens,” showing how men and women are (both) constrained
by their socialization and disproportionately impacted by disasters.
Majority Population, Minority Access
Perhaps the most frustrating part of my disaster relief work and research
in the United States has been watching the painstaking and meticulous
disaster preparations and planning that go into meeting the needs of every
“special population” group—infants, the elderly, the disabled, drug ad-
dicts, those who are deaf, and so on—yet somehow women remain largely
underÂ�served and their needs overlooked. This is despite the fact that
women (along with their children) usually make up the majority popula-
tion in most postdisaster shelters!
After my experience in EMS with Hurricane Katrina evacuees, I spent
the next three years interviewing female victims of Katrina, researching
several gender-based disaster issues: women’s role, active or passive, as a
decision maker in the disaster evacuation and aid processes; barriers to
evacuation; women’s ability (or lack thereof ) to seek financial/health/child
care assistance based on any increased postdisaster caregiver role due to
dependents; and women’s assessment of equitable and fair treatment con-
sidering their gender in the evacuation process, aid distribution, health ser-
vices, counseling, employment assistance, and child/dependent care help.
Here is what a few evacuees had to say, in their own words:
I felt like they didn’t want to hear me. If I had been a man I could com-
mand someone to hear me.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I had difficulty in getting people to listen
to me.
—Forty-seven-year-old African American woman who stated that she
needed (but did not have access to) a gynecological exam
There were wild, drunken men. I was scared for my kids. I was scared.
There were no separate places for women to shower or sleep.
—Forty-three-year-old Hispanic woman from New Orleans
There was no birth control, so I had to go and pay for it out of my own
pocket.
—Thirty-one-year-old African American woman
I was on my period two blocks from the beach in a dress and I had to
climb a tree during the storm. I was bleeding. The men who helped me
didn’t think about “sanitary items” even though my shirt and my legs
were bloody. Maybe I was too embarrassed to ask. They were too.
—Forty-eight-year-old single Caucasian female who stated that, after
her rescue, there were no sanitary items available at her shelter
As a woman, you feel helpless.

—Thirty-one-year-old single African American mother of seven
In the days after Hurricane Katrina, mini tent-cities of EMS crews

and hospitals sprang up all over downtown Houston. Without the timely
intervention and round-the-clock work of local churches, EMS/fire units,
Houston mayor Bill White, nongovernment organizations (NGOs) such

as the American Red Cross, and Houston-area hospitals including the Uni-
versity of Texas Medical Branch and Memorial Hermann, I think many
more lives would have been lost. I remember one evacuee in her fifties
that I drove to a Red Cross shelter in my car who had just been plucked
off her roof after four days without food and medical care for her diabetes.
She wept when I hugged her and she apologized for how bad she smelled.
She said, “I would still be on my roof ” waiting for help if it weren’t for
the compassion of volunteers and NGOs. I think she was right. What
I saw time and again was the kindness of volunteers, civic workers, and
ordinary people who were strangers to one another that moved Katrina aid
along. State-sponsored aid was lean, hopelessly disorganized, and mired in
bureaucratic indecision. But every day, I had local people come up and ask
me (I was wearing an EMS or Red Cross shirt) whether there was anything
we needed at the shelters, hand me checks for hundreds of dollars for the
Red Cross, and give me their telephone numbers because they wanted to
take evacuees into their homes. And while New York is known as the “Big
Apple” and New Orleans as the “Big Easy,” Houston became known as the
“Big Heart” because of our post-Katrina aid.
During those days, we had warehouses overrun in infant formula, dia-
pers, and clothing—so much so that incoming donations were halted—
but what I could not find were boxes of tampons or sanitary pads for
my female patients. In triage and at local Red Cross shelters, I was able
to access (on behalf of our patients) free over-the-counter medications
of every conceivable kind: antacids, sunscreen, cough syrup, nasal spray,
antidiarrheals, contact lens solution, allergy tablets and liquids, day- and
nighttime moisturizers—you name it. But not one box of vaginal yeast/
antifungal cream was offered, even though many of my female patients
suffered from genital rashes and infections caused by stress and wading in
unclean water. I personally collected carloads of tampons, sanitary pads,
antifungal cream, and new women’s underwear from my own network
of friends and colleagues so that the shelters I volunteered in would have
some “female” supplies. Months later, one of the pastors who ran a large
Methodist church shelter in New Orleans joked with me about his staff-
ers’ making “midnight Tampax runs” in the large church van to the city’s
outskirts to buy as many feminine hygiene products as they could get
their hands on. Apparently, these were disaster planning items that no one
seemed to plan on.
My postdisaster interviews of female Hurricane Katrina evacuees
found that a majority (53 percent) of the 105 women surveyed felt that
their female health care needs went unmet (they cited inadequate OB/
GYN care, prenatal nutrition, sanitary supplies, birth control, etc.), and
a majority (54 percent) felt that their access to aid and resources was in-
equitable compared with that of their male counterparts (Richter 2007).
Perhaps the most intriguing finding from my interviews was that among
the majority (51 percent) who reported that they had been the primary
decision-maker in the evacuation process, the key determinant was their
level of education, which proved to be a more significant factor than race
or even marital status. This is a pivotal finding, in that several disaster
researchers have reported significant differences in evacuation behaviors
between men and women, noting that women weigh risk more heavily
than men and therefore are likely to evacuate earlier and more rapidly than
men. This is a gender-based disaster behavior that should be positively ex-
ploited by targeting women in disaster preparedness training and evacua-
tion notification—an effort that could facilitate more timely evacuations
and potentially save lives.
“I’m Not Disabled—I’m Female”
Several months after completing my interviews with female Katrina evacu-

ees, I gave a talk on gender issues in disasters at the Partners in Emergency
Preparedness Conference in Seattle, Washington. I saw this conference as
an opportunity to get my message to every Federal Emergency Manage-
ment Association (FEMA) representative I could locate. Two FEMA staff-
ers attended my session and asked how other foreign nations and NGOs
handle female-specific relief efforts. I explained that most large NGOs
and government aid outreaches have gender officers and gender-awareness
programs, adding that the position of gender officer was not my ingenious
idea but that gender mainstreaming has long been considered a neces-
sity in developing nations. These officers are responsible for implementing
“gender awareness” across a program’s framework. I then suggested that it
would be wonderful to see FEMA implement gender awareness through-
out their policies and procedures. One of the staffers, a man, said, with
determined look, that yes, FEMA should consider gender-based policies
and he would put me in touch with the national disability coordinator of
FEMA. To which I could only reply, “But I’m not disabled—I’m female.”
According to the agency’s inexplicable system of categorization, “fe-
male” issues fell under special populations’ needs, which was under the
umbrella of “disabilities.” Brilliant. Of course I then had to wonder whether
we would have had the same conversation if I were male. Although I have
since met with my nation’s disability coordinator (whom I found to be a
compassionate, though overworked, woman with a disability), I am not
aware of any substantive gender-specific disaster aid efforts that developed
from our encounters.
In retrospect, I suspect it is all too easy for disaster aid workers (espe-
cially those of us in EMS) to focus narrowly on women’s physiological,
reproductive, and maternal functions during a disaster, without consid-
ering gender-based biology and engendered aid and health issues. Yet as
frontline workers and emergency care providers, we have a duty to assist
all patients, and this duty includes fighting against the marginalization
of women in disaster planning and relief programs. There should be no
distinction between the systematic planning and provision of supplies
and services for special-population needs (such as geriatric supplies, infant
formula, deaf translation services, mental health services, drug addiction
counseling, and foreign language translation) and planning and provision
for the imminent needs of women.
For gender-based policies to work, we need to offer a locally based,
gender-aware “rapid assessment checklist” of supplies and services. To
adequately support OB/GYN services and supplies, the checklist would
include pregnancy testing supplies, a (triage) pregnancy registry, daily pre-
natal nutritional advocacy, prenatal vitamins, ultrasound machines, sterile
delivery kits, infant formula, breastfeeding supplies, breastfeeding areas,
and “fact sheets” about the potential effects of vaccines, environmental
toxins, and exposures on pregnancies. Providers should ensure that female
physicians, including gynecologists, are available in areas where social,
religious, or patriarchal traditions limit or prohibit nonfemale physical
and pelvic exams for women. Other supplies and services should include
the provision of antifungal yeast-infection products, new female under-
garments, a variety of contraceptives, feminine hygiene kits, rape intake,
sexual and domestic violence counselors, and crisis “meeting places” for
community women to network and offer other women child/dependent
care and support. Most of the female Hurricane Katrina evacuees I sur-
veyed stated that they desired and would have participated in female-led
postdisaster initiatives and female emotional care support groups, includ-
ing groups for those with post-traumatic stress disorder.
As I witnessed in my post-Katrina service, many gender-aware supplies
and services are inadequate or nonexistent. Yet the provision of these rela-
tively inexpensive short-term interventions could mitigate suffering and
even prevent acute illnesses, mortalities, and long-term health care costs.
These relatively low-cost, short-term interventions speak to the adage, “An
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Or I’ll coin a new one:
“Take care of a mother’s need now, or see the mother and her ill infant
in the emergency room later.” When opportunities for early proactive pa-
tient interventions and treatments, such as providing basic nutrition for
an infant, are disregarded, the resulting medical issues can prove much
more acute and costly in their latter stages—including, in the example of
a poorly fed infant, the addition of one more patient to the patient-care
scenario.
Conclusion
Women have unique and gender-distinctive social, physical, economic,

and psychological needs, vulnerabilities, and opportunities in disasters.
The current glaring absence of gender-disaggregated data (due to inher-
ent difficulties in interviews in postdisaster settings and data collection
methodologies, and a lack of widespread interest in gender-specific data)
continues to keep women “invisible” among special interest group initia-
tives and to keep women’s rights excluded in planning and aid.
Gender equity in disasters and EMS is a health care issue and a social
justice and human rights issue, because women’s rights are human rights.
A human-rights approach to disaster planning would move the impetus
for change from its tidy, vacuum-packed academic research arena into
the more comprehensive sphere of individualized and localized frontline
worker methodologies. Yet we must strive to focus on women’s unique ex-
periences, risks, and opportunities in disasters and healthcare aid because
they remain largely undocumented, unexamined, and unharnessed. As a
society we must have women remain healthy and fully engaged because
understanding their unique challenges and opportunities in a disaster and
in medical services is a prerequisite to justice. But if the truth of wom-
en’s lives remains hidden, unaccounted for, and unexamined, change is
unlikely.
Disaster and emergency health care planning that takes into consid-
eration less than half of a community (i.e., men only) can only lead to
misconceptions about how to most effectively meet women’s needs. When
disaster health care and aid programs fail to empower women, they fail to
empower the entire community. Clearly, in disaster and emergency health
care, it is better to plan with women—rather than for them. The struggle
for women’s equitable share of health care is about empowering women in
planning, mitigation, and recovery efforts, stopping discrimination and
violence, and ultimately, making women’s lives count equally with men’s.
Works Cited
Richter, Roxane. 2007. Gender Matters: Female Specific Relief Efforts during Disas-
ters Are Key. Journal of Emergency Medical Services 32 (2): 58–63.
World Health Organization. 2002. Gender and Health in Disasters. Geneva: World
Health Organization.
3
Participant and Observer:
Reflections on Fieldwork in a
Women’s Shelter in Tokyo, Japan
Sharman L. Babior
This chapter describes the methodology of participant observation and ex-

plores how these two aspects of anthropological fieldwork—“participant”
and “observer”—become blurred by the stresses of a field setting. I address
the premise that one can remain removed and objective as an impartial
observer while confronting the everyday issues of fieldwork. I argue that as
a participant observer residing in a women’s shelter, I unavoidably devel-
oped subjective views of the shelter setting and the larger social environ-
ment. My view of shelter life is based on personal interactions and self-
identification with the shelter clients and their frames of mind, informed
by their narratives and case studies. The themes of fear and helplessness
that appear repeatedly in their narratives are consistent with the docu-
mentation and literature on gender-based violence and the victimization
of women. With the passage of time, my subjective views came to reflect a
perspective similar to that expressed by shelter clients—a sense of power-
lessness and lack of control over my immediate circumstances.
As a live-in staff member on the front line, advocating for clients at
a shelter for abused and exploited Japanese and non-Japanese women in
Tokyo, Japan, I confronted the immediacy of women’s daily experiences
with gender-based violence and sexual exploitation. Ironically, while in-
timacy fueled the violence and exploitation the shelter clients reported
suffering at the hands of their abusers, intimacy later inspired these women
to expose, reject, and escape such abuse by allowing them to tell their
stories and share their fears and aspirations within the safety of the local
shelter environment (Merry 2008, 522). When I joined the shelter staff as
a participant observer in Tokyo, I also became part of a local community of
29
women who served as my support system. The staff and volunteers became
a surrogate family for me, and the clients became my shelter mates and
friends. The intimacy the shelter provided formed a bridge between the
subjective, participatory aspects of my shelter life, and the observational,
objective elements of my fieldwork.
Ethnography, Reflexivity, and Participant Observation
Reflexivity, or self-reflection in the construction of ethnography, and eth-

nography as a constructed object concerns a large audience of anthropolo-
gists and scholars from other disciplines who employ participant observa-
tion as a methodological tool (Abramson 1992; Callaway 1992; Clifford
and Marcus 1986; Crapanzano 1977; Golde 1970; Harding 1987; Jong-
mans and Gutkind 1967; Marcus and Cushman 1982; Rabinow 1977).
Exposing the vulnerable, self-conscious side of the researcher in ethnog-
raphy lies in the arena of reflexivity, and the goal I find the most difficult
to achieve because it is the most personal. Reflexivity includes aspects of
introspection and relationships between the “self ” and the “other.” For
example, retrospectives of anthropological fieldwork frequently dwell
on the anthropologist’s anxiety about access to information, appropriate
data collection, methodology, and the daily interactions with informants
(Bowen 1964; Cesara 1982; Lunsing 1999; Moeran 1985; Nader 1970;
Pelto and Pelto 1978; Pettigrew 1981; Rabinow 1977). These features may
influence the overall description and interpretation of fieldwork, leading to
enigmatic and ambiguous conclusions. Crapanzano (1977) contends that
when a self-conscious effort is made to “confront” the ethnography, these
anxiety-provoking and stressful encounters of fieldwork can be turned into
sensitive and insightful analyses.
Rosaldo (1989, 19) points out the need to recognize each ethnogra-
pher’s “angle of vision” and to view each ethnographer as a “positioned
subject, who grasps certain human phenomena better than others” and
who can be objective only within the framework of his or her own life
experiences and social positioning. In this sense, ethnography contains a
complex mixture of self-reflection, descriptive narrative, and interpreta-
tion. As Cesara (1982, 3) points out in her discussion of the fieldwork
experience, the impact of research on the researcher and the researcher’s
response are equally important considerations.
The researcher must maintain a balance between observing and par-
ticipating (Behar 1996; Bolton 1992). Some researchers are so detached,
Reflections on Fieldwork in a Women’s Shelter in Tokyo, Japanâ•…â•… 31
however, they are present merely to observe some occurrence. Some even
purport to become invisible or unknown to those they observe. At the
other extreme are researchers who reject their observer status and “go na-
tive” as full participants (Bolton 1992, 130; Tedlock 1991, 69–71). As
Bolton states, “Most anthropological research falls between these two ex-
tremes, but, in general, it would appear that the emphasis is placed on
observation rather than participation” (130).
Participant observation is problematic when used as a methodology in
intimate or sensitive situations. In my own fieldwork, I examine incidents
of domestic violence that occur most often in private, as well as aspects
of intimate sexual encounters that take place under conditions of exploi-
tation and duress. Anthropology, for example, has traditionally taken an
indirect approach to conflict and violence, viewing them as aberrations
from the norm (Firth 1954; Gluckman 1963; Leach 1954). More recently,
anthropological theories of human violence have debated and evaluated
biological, ecological, and social structural factors as contributors to vio-
lence in simple egalitarian and stratified human societies (Chagnon 1977;
Denton 1979; Knauft 1987, 1991). Similarly, most anthropologists inter-
ested in sexuality “have opted to concentrate on issues of gender, identity,
roles, rituals, and symbolism almost to the exclusion of sexual behavior”
(Bolton 1992, 132). When sexual behavior is addressed, it is most of-
ten romanticized or justified as an individual action apart from the larger
society (Lunsing 1999, 176).
For the most part, research concerned with violence and sex is lim-
ited by the difficulty of collecting data on these often concealed acts. The
data are indirect, since researchers rarely observe these behaviors directly.
ParÂ�ticiÂ�pant observation, however, can yield extremely rich data. In my re-
search, through shelter interviews, informal conversations, and daily inter-
actions with shelter clients and staff, I collected numerous stories of shelter
clients with similar scenarios of abuse, violence, and exploitation. Despite
the obvious limitations of participant observation as a methodological tool
for sensitive and private situations, the commonalities inherent in these
women’s experiences suggest patterns that can be used as part of an overall
approach to the research process and analysis.
Overlapping with anthropological modes of inquiry are feminist meth-
ods of doing research within the social sciences. To situate my analysis,
I turn to Harding’s (1987, 7) three features of feminist research: (1) de-
signing research for women that women want and need, (2) “locating the
researcher in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter,” and (3)
using the experiences of women “as a significant indicator of the ‘reality’
against which hypotheses are tested.” My research meets these criteria by

my addressing issues pertinent to women, placing myself as an overtly
visible and consciously biased individual within the scope of the fieldwork,
and presenting the local experiences and voices of the women I lived and
worked with as the foundation of my hypotheses and data.
The effects of living in the shelter environment are in many ways
comparable to the effects referred to in the fieldwork literature as “culture
shock” or the “dysadaptation syndrome.” The notion of “culture shock,”
originally described by Cora DuBois in 1951 as “a syndrome ‘precipitated
by the anxiety that results from losing all your familiar cues’â•›” (quoted in
Golde 1970, 10–11), in many ways mirrors the reflexive experience of
shelter life and perceptions of life beyond the shelter. Pettigrew (1981, 76)
describes her own “culture shock” and her feeling of desperation that she
would never be able to return to her own people and culture after having
internalized the values of the Punjabi village in India where she conducted
anthropological fieldwork.
The “dysadaptation syndrome” (Wintrob 1969, 65) refers to the
stresses generated by the field experience. In a description applicable to
shelter life, Wintrob details how anxiety leads to repressed hostility that
is intensified by unaccustomed dependence and helplessness in the new
environment (67–69). Many researchers have had reactions like this to
fieldwork experiences. For example, Raymond Firth’s (1967) description
of his very personal reaction to fieldwork contrasts sharply to his report of
his impersonal ethnographic studies of Tikopian social structure and so-
cial organization. He states, “The feeling of confinement, the obsessional
longing to be back even if for the briefest while in one’s own cultural sur-
roundings, the dejection and doubts about the validity of what one is do-
ing, the desire to escape into a fantasy world of novels or daydreams, the
moral compulsion to drag oneself back to the task of field observation—
many sensitive fieldworkers have experienced these feelings on occasion”
(xv).
In the women’s shelter in Tokyo I experienced similar doubts, long-
ings, compulsions, and daydreams. I see the shelter environment as con-
tributing even more intensely to these common reactions because of the
strains, tensions, and traumas in the everyday lives of women at the shelter.
The perspectives of the shelter clients became my own internalized view.
The distancing and isolation that the shelter necessarily maintains from the
surrounding society compounded the situation. During the course of my
fieldwork, I felt more and more alienated from Japanese society by virtue
of the type and place of my research. The continual crises, threats, uncer-
tainties, and horrific accounts of the clients tainted my view of the larger
Japanese society, which I began to see as treacherous and cruel.
My ethnographic account begins with a brief description of how I lo-
cated and gained entrance to HELP (House of Emergency Love and Peace)
Asian Women’s Shelter and continues with a description of the shelter
environment, case studies, and the larger political-economic context of
gender-based violence.
Field Site and the Shelter Environment
The HELP shelter is situated on the fringes of downtown Tokyo’s enter-

tainment district, Kabuki-cho, set among flashing neon lights, massage
parlors, cabarets, nightclubs, and the merging train lines of one of Tokyo’s
largest train and subway terminals, Shinjuku. Approached down a narrow
alley crowded with pedestrians, lined by parked cars and motor scoot-
ers, a hamburger shop, a noodle shop, and piles of neatly bagged garbage,
the five-story concrete shelter building is inconspicuous among the other
structures crammed into the densely populated area. When I first entered
the building, I saw no evidence of a shelter. I followed the instructions
a staff member had given to me on the telephone the previous day and
climbed the stairs to the third floor. A small, wooden fence blocked the
third-floor landing, the reception area for those entering the shelter. Door-
ways off the landing led to the shelter’s dining room, community rooms,
kitchen, and staff offices.
I was met by an American caseworker with whom I had spoken on
the telephone about my interest in doing research at the shelter. She ar-
ranged for me to interview one of the Japanese caseworkers about wife
abuse and the exploitation of women in Japan. She gave me a brief tour of
the shelter’s facilities and described the staff, volunteers, and clients. She
also described the history of the shelter and its founding agency, Nihon
Kirisutokyo Fujin Kyofukai, the Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union (JWCTU), established in 1886 (Babior 1993; Oshima and Francis
1989).
In 1986, to mark the one-hundred-year anniversary of JWCTU, the
shelter was founded as a means of recognizing the organization’s history
of coordinating and advocating for women’s issues. As initially conceived,
the shelter was to serve trafficked and exploited non-Japanese women, but
soon it expanded to serve abused Japanese women as well (Mackie 2000,
190). Within six months, the shelter was housing both Japanese and non-
Japanese women and their children, a demonstration of the flexibility of

the JWCTU founders and shelter staff.
The shelter staff consisted of a full-time director, three part-time case-
workers, one full-time treasurer, and one full-time housekeeper and cook.
Only the housekeeper and cook, known as the “daily care staff person,”
lived at the shelter full-time. All other staff members commuted every day
to the shelter, along with volunteers of various nationalities who came to
do office work, provide translation services, or assist clients and staff.
The shelter occasionally broke into separate units of operation based on
the languages and cultures of its volunteers, staff, and clients. Counseling
was regularly conducted in both Japanese and English with the appropriate
caseworker and translator, if needed. Food was also served according to
cultural preference. Both Japanese and non-Japanese meals were prepared
by either the cook or the clients. Differences in culture and personality
created tensions among clients. Women often refused to dine together, and
accusations of lying, stealing, or being unclean were common.
On the fourth floor of the building, one level above the offices and the
main dining and community rooms of the shelter, were four single rooms
and six double or family rooms reserved for the shelter’s clients. Above
this, on the fifth floor, was a laundry and bathing area, adjacent to a large
rooftop with an outdoor area for hanging laundry and bedding on sunny
days. The rooftop area also had an emergency stairway leading down the
outside of the building to ground level that clients at the shelter used as an
alternative entrance and exit.
My initial encounter in 1987 with the shelter clients and personnel
marked the starting point for my participant observation research and the
beginning of an ongoing, twenty-three-year association with the shelter.
I made daily visits to talk with clients and staff, as well as help out by
doing some typing and filing. After only a few days of volunteering, I
was escorting apprehensive and frightened new clients to their rooms and
supplying them with bedding, clothing, and a brief introduction to the
shelter. When groups of visiting students and concerned citizens came to
learn about the kakekomi (a place to run into for refuge), as the shelter was
commonly called, I ran a narrated slide show that preceded a question-
and-answer period with the staff. Within a few weeks, I was asked to wait
for the evening arrival of a new client, after the daytime staff had gone
home for the day. I was told that this particular incoming woman was a
Filipina who spoke English. When she arrived, I did a brief intake inter-
view and got her settled for the night. Welcoming and helping new clients
get settled soon became one of my regular assignments as a volunteer. In
this capacity, I emerged as a frontline worker who engaged face-to-face

with clients, volunteers and staff.
A look at the shelter’s first six months of operation, from April 1, 1986,
through September 30, 1986, reveals that in its twenty-three-year history
there has been little change in the basic categories of the clients’ needs
and problems and the solutions to their problems. In 2007, HELP clients
comprised 97 adults: 34 non-Japanese women and 63 Japanese women.
Among the 34 non-Japanese women, 17 were accompanied by 25 young
children, 60 percent under the age of five years, from countries around the
world (see Table 3.1).
The length of each woman’s stay was based on her situation and could
be as short as one night or as long as several months. In 2007, the aver-
age length of stay was 22.93 days, down 9 days from 31.93 days in 2006.
The age range for non-Japanese women was fourteen to sixty-eight years.
The overwhelming majority of shelter admissions among non-Japanese
women—close to 75 percent—were related to domestic violence or vio-
lence inflicted by a partner. Violence from a different family member, such
Table 3.1. HELP Residents by Country

of Origin, April 2007–March 2008
Country of Origin Adults Children

Philippines 12 15
Thailand 6 0
China 4 1
Brazil 3 4
Myanmar 2 1
Colombia 1 1
Mexico 1 1
India 1 0
Sri Lanka 1 1
Romania 1 0
United States 1 1
South Korea 1 0
â•…Subtotal 34 25
Japan 63 13
â•…Total 97 38
Source: HELP Asian Women’s Shelter 2008.

as an in-law or child, affected about 2 percent, putting the total number of

non-Japanese women clients citing violence as their reason for seeking help
at nearly 80 percent.
Other reasons cited by non-Japanese women for seeking shelter were
homelessness, human trafficking, and pregnancy. According to HELP
staff, while the numbers of trafficked women dropped significantly from
previous years, information gathered by telephone counseling and other
groups’ sources establish a clear increase in the severity and magnitude of
trafficking situations.
In 2007, the HELP hotline received 603 calls from Japanese women
and 1,321 calls from non-Japanese women representing thirty different
countries (see Table 3.2). The reasons for the calls for help from the non-
Japanese women included injury, illness, divorce, homelessness, mental
illness, domestic violence, immigration issues, nonpayment of child sup-
port, cultural adjustment problems, forced prostitution and sexual slavery,
threats and acts of violence by employers, a need for safety after escaping
from an employer, confiscated passports and airplane tickets taken by em-
ployers, and nonpayment of wages and other employment promises not
fulfilled. These patterns have remained consistent during the years of the
shelter’s operation for non-Japanese women, though the categories and the
numbers of women in each category have varied.
Among the 63 Japanese clients in 2007, 9 brought children with them.
Their reasons for seeking shelter assistance were homelessness, domestic
violence from an intimate partner, violence from a different family mem-
ber, and pregnancy (see Table 3.3). The ages of the clients and their chil-
dren ranged from a few months to eighty years. The average residency was
15.88 days, somewhat shorter than the average for non-Japanese women.
The number of homeless women and children among the Japanese shelter
clients rose dramatically in 2007–2008, reflecting widespread unemploy-
ment caused by the dire global economic situation. Many of the homeless
came from among the increasing numbers of men and women in tempo-
rary and part-time labor niches who were the first to face worker lay-offs
with few economic or legal protections (Glionna 2009; Mackie 2000).
Although the locus of this study is the urban metropolis of Tokyo, I be-
lieve that incidents of domestic violence and sexual exploitation much like
those documented in Tokyo occur throughout Japan. Current HELP shel-
ter data suggest that the women who receive assistance and accommoda-
tion at the various Japanese women’s shelters in the Tokyo area come from
both urban and rural settings (HELP Asian Women’s Shelter 2008, 4).
These data correspond to the cross-cultural domestic violence literature
that suggests that wife abuse is not confined to any one socioeconomic class
or ethnic group (Gelles and Pedrick-Cornell 1983; Martin 1976; Pagelow
1981; Schechter 1982; Walker 1979). Increased awareness regarding do-
mestic violence throughout Japan resulted in the passage of antiÂ�–domestic
violence legislation in April 2001, known as the Law for the Prevention
of Spousal Violence and the Protection of Victims (Allen 2006). In 2002,
Japan signed the United Nations Trafficking Protocol to Prevent, Suppress
Table 3.2. Hotline Calls by Caller’s Country

of Origin, April 2007–March 2008
Caller’s country of origin Number of calls

Japan 603
Philippines 727
Thailand 403
China 38
Myanmar 17
South Korea 15
North Korea 12
Russia 11
Colombia 9
Mexico 8
Sri Lanka 8
United States 7
Brazil 7
Romania 7
Peru 6
India 5
Ghana 4
Serbia and Montenegro 3
Ukraine 2
Vietnam 2
Morocco 2
Taiwan 2
Venezuela 2
Indonesia 1
Australia 1
Bangladesh 1
Tunisia 1
Uzbekistan 1
Canada 1
Chile 1
Pakistan 1
Unknown 16
â•…Total 1,924
Table 3.3. Reasons for Coming to HELP,

April 2007–March 2008
Japanese clients
Homelessness 63.2%
Partner violence 27.6%
Family violence 5.3%
Pregnancy 3.9%
Non-Japanese clients
Partner violence 74.6%
Homelessness 8.5%
Trafficking 3.4%
Pregnancy 1.7%
Family violence 1.7%
Other
Immigration, children, divorce, visa problems 10.1%
and Punish Trafficking in Persons (United Nations 2000). Estimates sug-

gest that approximately 100,000 women enter Japan each year legally and
illegally for sex-related work, and at least 150,000 to 200,000 are in Japan
illegally, having arrived through trafficking or because of immigration ir-
regularities (Douglass 2003, 111). The destination of many of the women
leaving HELP suggest their marginal status in society. Most end up in a
residence facility until they can find alternative live-and-work situations.
The majority of the illegal HELP clients are eventually deported to their
country of origin.
Against this background, after I had worked for six weeks as a volun-
teer at the shelter, the HELP director asked me to become the night-duty
staff person. The position included room and board, plus a small stipend.
With a substantial amount of hesitation, I decided to accept the offer.
Whether or not this was a wise decision is debatable, but the experience
went far beyond my expectations both professionally and personally.
Adjustments to Shelter Life
I had agreed to live in the shelter for an indefinite period as the English-
speaking night-duty staff person. This was to be my home, place of work,
and site of research for the duration of my fieldwork. The shelter staff was
aware of my intent as a researcher to ask questions, conduct interviews,
and gather information, though my role as both participant and observer

became blurred during the course of my stay at the shelter. The tension I
felt between my commitment to the clients and staff I worked with and
my intention to gather data for academic purposes was similar to the ten-
sion between activism and academia found in the battered women’s move-
ment (Campbell 1998; Incite! Women of Color Against Violence 2006;
Sokoloff and Pratt 2005).
My job description was quite vague but ideally included nightly avail-
ability from five in the evening until nine the next morning, Monday
through Friday, and around the clock on weekends. In practice, my week-
day hours generally extended later into the morning and resumed whenever
I returned to the shelter. My primary responsibility was to attend to the
needs and welfare of the non-Japanese clients. My many and diverse tasks
included giving intake interviews, arranging for airline tickets, answering
hotline telephone calls from English speakers, and escorting women to
doctors and hospitals for health care appointments, to their appropriate
embassies for travel affidavits to replace their confiscated passports, to the
Tokyo Immigration Bureau for immigration and deportation documents,
and to the airport bus and Tokyo’s Narita airport for departure to their
home countries. Although I was not directly addressing the original topic
of my research proposal, I became increasingly absorbed in my role as an
advocate for non-Japanese women at the shelter. As Billings (1990) argues,
meaningful discoveries may be those that are unanticipated and that we
are unprepared for rather than those that result from preconceived research
designs and procedures. Nevertheless, I was confronted daily with self-
doubt, mistrust, and skepticism about my own roles and feelings.
One of the biggest adjustments I had to make was living in an environ-
ment that lacked privacy. I traded time alone and solitude for total immer-
sion and access to information. Feeling what Firth (1967, xv) describes as
“the desire to escape into a fantasy world of novels or daydreams,” I found
myself daydreaming to create a sense of personal space. It was the only
way to separate myself from the intrusion and problems of others. But the
blocking out of those around me only intensified my alienation, for when
I returned to my daily tasks, I found myself especially resistant and hostile
to the intrusions. Sometimes I would return to my room only to hear a
knock on the door moments later. I felt guilty for sequestering myself,
so whenever I felt the need for solitude I made a point of seeking it out-
side the shelter in neighborhood coffee shops, libraries, and parks. When
I was in the shelter, regardless of the time designated as my “work” hours,
I was incorporated into the activities of the moment. From a methodo-
logical perspective, my subjective participant role took precedence over my

objective observer role. As Harding (1987, 9) suggests, “Introducing this
‘subjective’ element into the analysis in fact increases the objectivity of the
research and decreases the ‘objectivism’ which hides this kind of evidence
from the public.”
Coping with my lack of privacy was only one problem. With the pas-
sage of time, I internalized many of the shelter clients’ experiences and
their fearfulness, their sense of being exploited, and their feeling of power-
lessness. This kind of reaction has been identified as “vicarious traumatiza-
tion” (McCann and Pearlman 1990). Vicarious traumatization describes
a condition of persons who may experience profound psychological ef-
fects, including feelings of fright, numbness, ambivalence, and negative
or moral/judgmental feelings as a result of working with survivors of vio-
lence. In my case, living at the shelter and working with clients shifted my
attitude about the world outside the shelter to one of anger, alienation, and
trepidation, and a sense of violation. When I ventured beyond the shelter
I felt hostility, particularly toward men, because men were the perpetrators
of so much of the suffering and violence I witnessed every day. Therapists
emphasize the importance of confronting and sharing one’s own feelings of
rage, grief, horror, loss of control, aggression, and vulnerability as a means
of coping with vicarious traumatization. But I had no place to go where I
felt totally secure and I had no specific person with whom I could share my
innermost fears.
Similar reactions were noticeable among the clients of HELP. Their
initial fears and anxiety over their location and safety, followed by concern
over finances, children, personal belongings, and future living arrange-
ments were expressed as rage, shame, guilt, doubt, resentment, and depres-
sion. Even the mere adjustment to shelter life involved passing through
various mental stages. Schechter (1982, 59) describes one of these stages
in her account of shelter life in the United States as clients grapple with
their new predicaments: “At first they are frightened and nervous, both
about the decisions they have made and about their new environment.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯.
After the initial flurry of activities .â•¯.â•¯. they may feel intense doubts, fear,
and pain. Women struggle with ambivalence, self-blame and guilt as they
.â•¯.â•¯. attempt to make sense of what happened.” Regardless of the cultural
setting, the emotions and experiences of shelter clients are similar in theme
and pattern.
The case studies that follow describe the experiences of two women
from two different cultures, Japanese and non-Japanese, in terms of their
perceptions of safety and security and their personal sense of power and
powerlessness within and beyond the shelter environment. These case
studies provide a sample of the shelter clients’ points of view and reveal
how their narratives influence the perspective of the participant observer.
The notions of participant/observer and objective/subjective identities are
embedded in the practice of fieldwork and the writing of ethnography. The
degree to which one is a participant or observer, subjective or objective,
is highly individualized, yet these categories commonly overlap. The two
case studies demonstrate the gamut of emotions that affect both the shelter
clients and the participant observer.
Case Studies
Isabel de la Cruz, Age Twenty-Three,
Citizen of the Philippines
Isabel de la Cruz was abducted from a train station while a resident at the
shelter. Her case demonstrates the fragility of supposedly safe and secure
surroundings. Her former employer, who had ostensibly hired her as a
waitress, demanded that she work as a prostitute. He sent two men to
survey the shelter environs, subsequently luring her into a nearby train
station by telephone, where they kidnapped her. My field notes from that
day describe the unfolding of events surrounding Isabel de la Cruz.
Isabel had completed her day at the Tokyo Immigration Office, securing
a visa extension and an Embassy travel document in lieu of her passport.
She was residing at HELP while preparing to return to the Philippines. At
5:00 a.m., the shelter’s public phone rang. One of the clients answered it
and summoned Isabel to the phone. After speaking and hanging up the
phone, Isabel borrowed a pair of slippers from the shelter’s housekeeper
and told her she was going to meet a friend at the nearby train station.
No one heard from her again until the following day.
When the phone rang at HELP at 2:00 a.m. the next day, Isabel was
on the other end speaking in a whisper. She said she didn’t know where
she was and she didn’t feel safe. She hung up the telephone.
Early the next morning she called again, this time from the safety of
a police station. She told me that two men had grabbed her when she
originally went to the train station to meet her friend. She explained that
she and a friend had been forcibly taken back to the night club where
they had originally been working. After their abductors interrogated, hit,
and threatened to kill them both if they tried to flee, they were left alone
while their abductors prepared to move them to a different location. It
was at this point that they escaped.
They hid in the farming fields outside of town all night. Early in the
morning they went to a park and asked a jogger to help them. He took
them to a nearby police station, where the women called HELP. Isabel
returned to HELP that evening escorted by one of the HELP caseworkers
who went to meet her at the rural police station.
The days following Isabel’s abduction kept everyone at HELP on alert

for suspicious-looking men lurking outside the shelter. Isabel remained
secluded and withdrawn at the shelter until she eventually returned to
the Philippines escorted by a HELP guest from the Philippines. Periodic
dramas like this one undermined my already weak sense of security.
As this incident illustrates, the security of the shelter as a place of
refuge was limited and only temporary. On numerous occasions, abduc-
tors, recruiters, promoters, employers, and batterers came to the shelter or
contacted it by telephone. Within the walls of the shelter, women could
take time to think about their situation and perhaps make effective fu-
ture plans. But there remained a sense of danger and uncertainty beyond
the boundaries of the shelter. In 2008, a family’s location was divulged
to their batterer, forcing them to return to HELP. The source of the in-
formation leak about their location was a government municipal office
that helped locate housing for women in need. The municipal office had
promised previously to “absolutely never” give away these details and risk
exposure of a family’s whereabouts. “Such experiences,” the shelter ad-
ministration recognizes, “remind us of the gravity of the problem of con-
tinued stalking for survivors of domestic violence” (HELP Asian Women’s
Shelter 2008, 2).
Many of the unavoidable interactions outside the shelter were with
police officers, male officials at the Tokyo Immigration Office, and men
encountered at close range on very crowded subways and trains. It was jar-
ring for women who have been in the all-female environment of the shelter
to step into a world where men seem to be everywhere. As McCann and
Pearlman (1990, 141) note, trauma survivors often experience a sense of
alienation from other people and from the world in general, and for many
of the shelter clients, these men symbolize exploitation and violation.
After long days of preparing for deportation, many of the women re-
laxed at the shelter and distanced themselves from the outside world by
joking about their past experiences. Being able to share with others similar
circumstances helped to relieve their sense of guilt, shame, and isolation.
Laughing about their situations was a common practice after dinner in
the dining room or clients’ rooms as noted in the following field note
observation:
Commonly after dinner everyone relaxed. There were lots of jokes about
Japanese men. This was followed by the acting out of men walking with
their pelvises protruding and feet wide apart. There was a lot of laughing.
The women acted out the lighting of cigarettes and pouring of drinks for
men. Occasionally they demonstrated how the men would kick them in
their groins or faces “just for fun.” “Can you imagine they wanted me to
swallow their sperm? They are like animals,” said Maria Perez as she imi-
tated how the men pushed her head down while forcing her to perform
oral sex.
Toyota Keiko, Age Fifty-Three, Citizen of Japan
Security and safety issues were concerns of everyone at the HELP shelter.
For Toyota Keiko, who finally left her physically and emotionally abusive
husband after twenty-five years of marriage, the prospects of living on her
own were terrifying. When the shelter caseworker encouraged her to find
housing, she expressed the very real fear that her husband might locate her
and harm her. She eventually rented a small room close to the shelter and
spent her evenings and weekends visiting the staff and clients at HELP.
As a sojourn, the shelter acted both as a sanctuary and a place of con-
finement. In contrast to the many women who remained at the shelter
while seeking assistance, some felt compelled to flee. One woman from
Thailand decided to leave secretly in the middle of the night. A woman
from the Philippines stayed at HELP for only two days before vanishing.
And a homeless Japanese woman spent three days washing, bathing, eat-
ing, and sleeping at the shelter, and then she simply walked out the door,
once again onto the streets. Cases such as these, which were not unusual,
triggered a reassessment by the staff and volunteers about shelter struc-
ture. The shelter stood out as unusual, because, in contrast to the general
regimentation of Japanese society, it functioned without rigid organization
and without strictly enforced rules or timetables.
One evening when Toyota-san stopped by the shelter after work, she
looked particularly upset. We had just finished dinner and offered her a
cup of green tea. She began by telling us that during the night she had
heard someone trying to open the lock on her door. She feared it was
her husband, though it turned out to have been merely someone at the
wrong door. Over the course of the next few weeks she expressed con-
tinual anxiety about being harmed. At the urging of a shelter caseworker,
Toyota-san rented a larger room in an area farther away from the shelter
and brought her daughter to live with her. Her shelter visits became less
frequent, though she continued to keep in daily telephone contact for the
duration of my six months of research at the shelter.
The shelter staff and volunteers maintained a philosophy originating
in the Japanese feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, wherein they
acted in solidarity with women rather than seeing them as “victim” and
looking upon them with pity (Mackie 2000, 190). At the time of the
founding of the shelter, the shelter supporters and organizers articulated
the links between the current oppression and exploitation of women in
Japanese society and the oppression perpetrated by Japan in Asia and
Southeast Asia under systems of dominance and subordination through-
out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japanese feminists recognized
that the production of food, clothes, and goods in daily use in Japan were
manufactured primarily by Asian women under appalling conditions
within a system of economic imperialism. Additional links were made be-
tween prostitution tourism and the history of Japan’s sexual exploitation
of women in Asia and Southeast Asia during the 1930s and 1940s. The
shelter staff now sees systems of inequality based on gender, class, and
ethnicity directed at migrant women who come to Japan to work and
are often tricked into sex work and prostitution (Sellek 1997). Because of
its improved economy, Japan now attracts increasing numbers of workers
from around the world (Mackie 2000, 190), rather than exporting Japa-
nese women workers to do the dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs in other
parts of the world once relegated to economically destitute women.
With the passage of time, my status as a staff/participant and researcher/
observer evolved into a blur of roles and feelings. I identified with many of
the shelter clients’ experiences and their current dilemmas. I felt hostility
and helplessness within the shelter environment, compounded by fear, in-
security, and violation outside its boundaries. I worried that I would need
to confront antagonistic and potentially dangerous men at any time, and I
was nervous about my personal safety and security. I was depressed about
shelter life and worried about whether I would be able to function outside
of it ever again. Both the shelter itself and how I perceived it trapped me. I
directed my anger at the world outside that appeared to sanction violence

and abuse through what seemed to be apathy, denial, and insensitivity. The
constant needs of other people, compounded by the erratic hours, inter-
ruptions, and endless curiosity about me as a foreigner, were exhausting
me. But I recognized that experiences like mine, as McCann and Pearlman
(1990, 147) point out, can create greater sensitivity and empathy for the
suffering of others, resulting in a deeper sense of connection and hopeful-
ness about the capacity of humans to endure, overcome, and transform
their lives.
Conclusion
This analysis is based on personal and professional experience. It exam-

ines the methodology of participant observation in shaping the views of
anthropological research. It addresses the struggle to maintain a balance
between the supposed objective, neutral, value-free scientific observer
and the personal, experiential, and subjective participant. It draws on the
importance of using women’s personal experiences as resources for social
analysis (Harding 1987, 7), and it reveals the interplay of “self ” and “other”
through ethnographic narrative (Tedlock 1991, 69).
As a shelter staff member, I engaged in both participation and observa-
tion to fulfill my dual roles as a frontline worker and an anthropologist. As
I increasingly internalized the experiences of other women, I put aside my
role as detached observer and became a full-fledged participant. This shift
in focus forms the basis of my reflexive ethnographic narrative. Presenting
myself as receptive, truthful, and innately biased about who I am and how I
see others frames the ethnography and informs the reader. As Okely (1992,
24) states, “Reflexivity forces one to think through the consequences of
our relations with others, whether it be conditions of reciprocity, asym-
metry or potential exploitation, .â•¯.â•¯. we are obliged to confront the moral
and political responsibility of our actions.” I took personal responsibility
for my interpretation and analysis by sharing my completed text with the
shelter staff and volunteers. The HELP shelter members reacted pragmati-
cally. They initiated a monthly women’s study group to translate, discuss,
and critique the finished ethnography in an effort to view the shelter from
another perspective. Most recently, the issue of staff “burnout” became the
focus of shelter concern. Training activities, workshops, lectures, retreats,
and exchange of information between facilities highlighted an eight-
month project in 2007 concluding with the development of the notion of

“habitual consciousness,” or maintaining preventative structures for future
risk of staff burnout.
Shelter philosophy and projects like these are rooted in a historical con-
text that encourages open dialogue, negotiation, unity, and action among
staff, volunteers, and clients. For the founders of the HELP shelter, “the
concept of helping was not that of standing at a distance, viewing the
situation and criticizing it, but rather being involved directly in action”
(Oshima and Francis 1989, 90). This model provided the ideal environ-
ment for a participant observation study. In the end, the merging of my
living space and my fieldwork site enriched the overall research experience.
The construction of ethnography is framed by the experiences and
boundaries of the researcher. As Clifford notes in the introduction to Clif-
ford and Marcus 1986, ethnographies are merely “partial truths” or “true
fictions” in that “all constructed truths are made possible by powerful
‘lies’ of exclusion and rhetoric,” through selective withholding, exclusion,
translation, and editing (7). I have compensated for some of the inevi-
table pitfalls of ethnographic writing by inserting myself as a positioned
subject into the text. The interplay between my own experiences and the
experiences of the women I lived and worked with is ultimately a matter
of personal perception and interpretation.
Ack nowledgment s
The research and writing of this article would not have been possible without the
encouragement, advice, and support of numerous people and institutions. I wish to
thank all the many courageous women who shared their lives and stories with me. I
also owe enormous thanks to the Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, To-
kyo, whose generous support and commitment allowed me to live and work in the
shelter. My many thanks go out to Oshima Shizuko, the first director of the HELP
shelter, for her steadfast advice, mentoring, and friendship. Her activism and unwav-
ering belief in universal human rights continues to serve as a lofty model for us all.
And finally, my mother, Lynne Babior, who has given me more feedback and edito-
rial input than I care to admit. I am forever grateful to her for her love and guidance.
Works Cited
Abramson, Paul R. 1992. Sex, Lies, and Ethnography. In The Time of AIDS, ed. G.
Herdt and S. Lindenbaum.101–23. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Allen, Rachel. 2006. Shelter Reaches Out to Abuse Victims. Japan Times. Dec. 5.
search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20061205zg.html.
Babior, Sharman L. 1993. Women of a Tokyo Shelter: Domestic Violence and Sexual
Exploitation in Japan. PhD diss., University of California.
Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Billings, Dorothy K. 1990. Is Fieldwork Art or Science? In The Humbled Anthropolo-
gist: Tales from the Pacific, ed. P. R. DeVita, 1–7. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Bolton, Ralph. 1992. Mapping Terra Incognita: Sex Research for AIDS Prevention;
An Urgent Agenda for the 1990s. In The Time of AIDS, ed. G. Herdt and S. Lin-
denbaum, 124–58. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bowen, Elenore Smith. 1964. Return to Laughter. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Callaway, Helen. 1992. Ethnography and Experience: Gender Implications in Field-
work and Texts. In Anthropology and Autobiography, ed. J. Okely and H. Calla-
way, 28–49. New York: Routledge.
Campbell, Jacquelyn C. 1998. Interdisciplinarity in Research on Wife Abuse: Can
Academics and Activists Work Together? In Women’s Studies in Transition: The
Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity, ed. K. Conway-Turner, S. Cherrin, J. Schiffman, K.
Turkel, 308–19. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Cesara, Manda. 1982. Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist: No Hiding Place. New
York: Academic Press.
Chagnon, Napoleon A. 1977. Yanomamo: The Fierce People. New York: Holt, Rine-
hart, and Winston.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 1977. On the Writing of Ethnography. Dialectical Anthro-
pology 2 (1): 69–73.
Denton, Robert K. 1979. The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
Douglass, Mike. 2003. The Singularities of International Migration of Women to
Japan. In Migration of Women to Japan, Past, Present, and Future, ed. Mike Doug-
lass and Glenda Susan Roberts, 91–121. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Firth, Raymond. 1954. Social Organization and Social Change. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 84:1–20.
———. 1967. Introd. to A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, by Bronislaw Ma-
linowski. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Gelles, Richard J., and Claire Pedrick-Cornell, eds. 1983. International Perspectives on
Family Violence. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Glionna, John. 2009. Part-Timers in Japan Confront Full-Time Woes. Los Angeles
Times, January 29.
Gluckman, Max. 1963. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. New York: Free Press of
Glencoe.
Golde, Peggy. 1970. Introd. to Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences, ed. P.
Golde. Chicago: Aldine.
Harding, Sandra. 1987. Introd. to Feminism and Methodology, ed. Harding. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
HELP Asian Women’s Shelter. 2008. Network News (Tokyo), June, no. 53.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. 2006. The Color of Violence: The Incite!
Anthology. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Jongmans, Douwe Geert, and Peter Claus Wolfgang Gutkind, eds. 1967. Anthropolo-
gists in the Field. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum.
Knauft, Bruce M. 1987. Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies. Cur-
rent Anthropology 28 (4): 457–98.
———. 1991. Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution. Current Anthropology 32
(4): 391–428.
Leach, Edmund R. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma. London: Anthlone
Press.
Lunsing, Wim. 1999. Life on Mars: Love and Sex in Fieldwork on Sexuality and
Gender in Urban Japan. In Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist, ed. F. MarÂ�
kowitz and M. Ashkenazi, 175–95. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mackie, Vera. 2000. Feminist Critiques of Modern Japanese Politics. In Global Femi-
nisms since 1945, ed. B. Smith, 180–201. New York: Routledge.
Marcus, George E., and Dick Cushman. 1982. Ethnographies as Texts. Annual Re-
view of Anthropology 11 (1): 25–69.
Martin, Del. 1976. Battered Wives. San Francisco: Glide Publications.
McCann, Lisa, and Laurie Anne Pearlman. 1990. Vicarious Traumatization: A
Framework for Understanding the Psychological Effects of Working with Vic-
tims. Journal of Traumatic Stress 3 (1): 131–49.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2008. Review: Commentary on Reviews of “Human Rights and
Gender Violence.” American Anthropologist 110 (4): 520–22.
Moeran, Brian. 1985. Okubo Diary: Portrait of a Japanese Valley. Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press.
Nader, Laura. 1970. From Anguish to Exultation. In Women in the Field: Anthropo-
logical Experiences, ed. P. Golde, 95–116. Chicago: Aldine.
Okely, Judith. 1992. Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience
and Embodied Knowledge. In Anthropology and Autobiography, ed. J. Okely and
H. Callaway, 1–27. New York: Routledge.
Oshima, Shizuko, and Carolyn Francis. 1989. Japan through the Eyes of Women Mi-
grant Workers. Tokyo: Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
Pagelow, Mildred Daley. 1981. Woman-Battering: Victims and Their Experiences.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Pelto, Pertti J., and Gretel H. Pelto. 1978. Anthropological Research: The Structure of
Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pettigrew, Joyce. 1981. Reminiscences of Fieldwork among the Sikhs. In Doing Femi-
nist Research, ed. H. Roberts, 62–82. New York: Routledge.
Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of

California Press.
Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Schechter, Susan. 1982. Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the
Battered Women’s Movement. Boston: South End Press.
Sellek, Yoko. 1997. Nikkeijin: The Phenomenon of Return Migration. In Japan’s
Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, ed. M. Weiner, 178–210. New York:
Routledge.
Sokoloff, Natalie, and Cristina Pratt, eds. 2005. Domestic Violence at the Margins:
Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press.
Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. From Participant Observation to the Observation of Par-
ticipation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological
Research 47 (1): 69–94.
United Nations. 2000. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. www.uncjin.org/Documents/
Conventions/dcatoc/final_documents_2/convention_%20traff_eng.pdf.
Walker, Lenore E. 1979. The Battered Woman. New York: Harper and Row.
Wintrob, Ronald M. 1969. An Inward Focus: A Consideration of Psychological
Stress in Fieldwork. In Stress and Response in Fieldwork, ed. F. Henry and S. Sa-
berwal, 63–76. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
4
Crafting Community through
Narratives, Images, and
Shared Experience
Stephanie J. Brommer
In 1990, five first-generation Indian women and one Bangladeshi woman

came together in the San Francisco Bay eastern shore region to help South
Asian immigrant women deal with isolation and domestic abuse. By 1992,
they formally named their organization Narika, which, in Hindi, means
“of and for women,” and offered a weekly support group with funding
from a Bank of America grant. “But not that many women came,” one
of the founders, a prominent Berkeley attorney, said.1 “It was very artifi-
cial, a Western notion that we would talk about our problems with other
women. We did not know what we were doing when we started.”
So the group of Northern California women swapped the support
group for a monthly potluck where women could enjoy chai, homemade
food, and friendly company and chat one-on-one—“the South Asian way
of doing a support group,” according to another co-founder who is still
very active in the organization.
“It was clear from the beginning that we really made a big difference,”
the Berkeley attorney, a Christian Goan who immigrated from Delhi in
1970, said.
We were helping women on a more informal basis and not getting hung
up on statistics. We helped people transform their lives. We decided if we
could help one woman change the cycle of abuse, think about it—how
many can say they helped one woman not get beaten? We were not better,
not experts, not sophisticated, and did not call them clients; we regarded
them as members of our family, as peers. Every one of us through the
force of circumstances could be placed in circumstances like this. Our at-
51
titude was that this does not mean you’re a failure. We are like your sister
or mother or cousin. We built a model on familial relationships in India.
We thought we could provide the best of both worlds—Â�cultural security
and familiarity and not gossiping or taking sides.
This chapter examines how South Asian domestic abuse activists and
frontline workers in Northern California integrate worldviews with the
immigration experience to empower women to confront and overcome
domestic abuse. Through mottos, themes, and models of caregiving, these
frontline workers use discursive politics to signal an alternative vision of
community that results in a weblike fictive kin relationship to promote
women’s empowerment and choice, while engaging in social change.
Through their work and their discourse, these workers seek to break the
silence and create a supportive community for women who are surviving
domestic abuse.2 Their emphasis on South Asian sisterhood and empower-
ment shapes their caregiving strategies and frames the way their work is
viewed within the larger community. The South Asian immigrant com-
munity’s status as a model minority, a label given to a group of people in
a subordinate position in society that is associated with high educational
achievement and financial success and strong family values, also contrib-
utes to the way in which they approach domestic abuse and the specter of
abused women.3
By placing a high cultural value on family to appeal to South Asian
abused women, frontline workers position themselves both as caregivers
and as fictive kin. Their relationship thus functions as a kin network
similar to the supportive kin network the immigrant woman left behind
in South Asia. The frontline workers are reflecting familiar values, such as
close family ties, and become culturally appropriate persons to talk with
about family life. Drawing on this tradition of social life—the notion of
women having kin, constructed as fictive kin, to turn to for support, as
well as women helping women—is behind the names, symbols, slogans,
and caregiving models of Maitri and Narika, two South Asian domestic
abuse organizations in Northern California.
By speaking a language of empowerment, the Maitri and Narika front-
line workers are feminist. As Katzenstein (1995, 35–36) points out, femi-
nist interest groups are “word conscious” and seek to “change understand-
ings of gender stereotyping.” Katzenstein uses the term “discursive politics”
to discuss meaning-making. “In discursive politics the careful thought
given to word choices and language is sometimes instrumental but more
Crafting Community through Narratives, Images, Shared Experienceâ•…â•… 53
often expressive. Its intent is to articulate clearly the differences in perspec-

tive and the revisioning of a feminist world view” (36). The discursive
strategies articulated by these frontline workers include an empowerment
discourse, differing experience discourse, and social change discourse.
The Organizations
When Maitri and Narika started in the early 1990s, they both faced
community hostility, but by their tenth anniversaries in 2001 and 2002,
respectively, the impact of their discursive politics had resulted in wide-
spread community support. Emphasizing a discourse of differing experi-
ences, South Asian caregivers of domestic abuse survivors recognize that a
woman’s action is situated within the discourses or frames of gender roles,
cultural experiences, and community ideologies. Thus, a woman may
hesitate to enter an emergency thirty-day shelter if she adheres to cultur-
ally prescribed dietary restrictions or is subject to familial and community
pressures to keep her marriage intact, or lacks the necessary visa, job train-
ing, or language skills to be self-sufficient. A woman’s behavior may be
shaped by her position as a daughter-in-law or by the effect it might have
on her family in the home country.
The frontline workers at these two Northern California organizations
reflect and honor a wide South Asian feminist point of view that binds
women from these diverse nations and regions regardless of geopolitical
boundaries. To reach out to women from all South Asian countries, many
South Asian domestic abuse organizations in the United States, includ-
ing Maitri and Narika, socially construct themselves as “South Asian.”4
Women’s subjugation by South Asian and Western patriarchal structures
and institutions, including family, law, and politics, is the common thread
linking women of South Asian background. For these organizations, do-
mestic abuse itself, and combating domestic abuse, transcend nation-state
boundaries. This identification is marked through the emphasis on South
Asia and their goal to assist any woman of that regional background.
The number of Asian Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area, however,
far exceeds the number of Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Bangladeshis. Of
the region’s total South Asian population, Asian Indians account for 94
percent, Pakistanis for 5 percent, and Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis for
less than 1 percent each (Ahuka, Gupta, and Petsod 2004). According
to the U.S. Census 2000, the population of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangla-
deshis, and Sri Lankans make up 2.8 percent of the San Francisco Bay
Area’s total population, which is the highest percentage of South Asian
population in any area in the United States and equals 40 percent of Cali-
fornia’s South Asian population (U.S. Census Bureau 2002).5 Overall in
the United States, the Asian Indian population doubled in the decade
after the 1990 census and is now the third largest Asian American popu-
lation in the United States.6 In 2000, the city of San Jose, the home of
Maitri, had the largest Asian Indian population in California (26,606),
representing 3 percent of the city’s population and a 149 percent jump
in Asian Indian population in ten years. In Santa Clara County (where
San Jose is located), the Asian Indian population, totaling 66,741 people,
grew 231 percent. Santa Clara County ranks third in the nation for Asian
Indian population, and the neighboring Alameda County, which includes
Berkeley, Narika’s home, ranks fifth (Kang 2001).
Though the majority of the leaders, members, and clients of domes-
tic abuse organizations are Indian, these organizations still claim the title
“South Asian” because they aim to serve all people from the region, of-
fering services in more than a dozen languages. Mohanty (1993, 352)
explains the significance: “Obviously I was not South Asian in India—I
was Indian.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Identifying as South Asian rather than Indian adds num-
bers and hence power within the U.S. State. Besides, regional differences
among those from different South Asian countries are often less relevant
than the commonalities based on our experiences and histories of immi-
gration, treatment and location in the U.S.”
“South Asian” in the appellation of an organization connotes inclusion
and common concerns beyond national borders and throughout the dias-
pora (Passano 1995; Shah 1996). It is a political term because it threatens
national and cultural boundaries and sets aside nationalistic differences.
The countries of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh, and
groups within them, are diverse in cultural beliefs, religious practices,
and local histories, but many do share some historical commonalities and
certain cultural practices, such as the caste system, a patrilineal form of
patriarchy, joint family household, and patrilocal residence. Shah (1996,
53) points out that “while the term ‘South Asian’ can be problematic if it
points to a group that is solely Indian and Hindu, it is useful for marking
the region’s shared histories and cultures.” The term, she adds, is “particu-
larly useful in a diasporic context—such as the United States—because
it refers us to a collective homeland .â•.̄â•.̄ [and] allows progressive work-
ers for social change to bypass national allegiances and claim belonging
elsewhere.”
Like other domestic abuse organizations with a majority of their volun-

teers and clientele of Indian heritage, Maitri and Narika market themselves
as “South Asian.” But they are critically aware of the religious, cultural,
and linguistic differences within the South Asian collectivity, as the Narika
founder who is a Berkeley attorney makes clear: “We are not operating in
the mainstream Indian community and are not comfortable with segre-
gation in the linguistic and regional way. We’re South Asian—from the
beginning, we have had Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and we don’t hang our
cup in Indocentrism or Hindu or BJP [Hindu nationalist political party,
Bharatiya Janata Party]. We are not caught up in any geopolitical game.” A
former Narika executive director reports that she sought to avoid commu-
nalism by making regionalism of foremost importance: “There are plenty
of commonalities in the cultures of South Asia. That’s not to imply it is
a homogeneous culture. There are a lot of variations within South Asian
cultures, but the pattern of violence and what we see here are similar.”
While class, caste, language, and religion differentiate both the volunteers
and the clients of domestic abuse organizations, these differences do not
subvert the solidarity of South Asian women in Northern California work-
ing together to address domestic violence in their immigrant communi-
ties. The common experience of growing up in patriarchal-based societies
and families connects these women as they create their own community to
reach out to women experiencing abuse.
South Asian caregivers tailor their programs and philosophies to the
geographic and cultural displacement of their community. Maitri, for
instance, prioritizes long-term transitional housing, and Narika supports
collaborative ventures, including an overseas project aimed at alerting
potential brides to the rights and services available in the United States.
They post informational flyers in bathroom stalls in grocery stores and
libraries so women can read them in private and take copies without being
seen by the husband or in-law who accompanied them. Maitri and Narika
volunteers also educate mainstream shelters, counselors, courts, and law
enforcement officers about the dynamics of in-law collusion, family honor,
immigration status, and the institution of arranged marriage that may im-
pact a woman’s life and obscure abuse.
Narika
The organization maintains a website that states: “Narika’s mission is to

promote the empowerment of women in our community to confront and
overcome the cycles of domestic violence and exploitation. We work to

build a movement to end violence against women and to support wom-
en’s rights as human rights.”7 Its discourse empowers women by reinter-
preting various practices and attitudes that lead to domestic abuse. Nari-
ka’s frontline workers, the former executive director explained, integrate
domestic abuse with other issues that affect the community and frame it
as a public health issue, a woman’s issue, and a man’s issue. When dealing
with domestic abuse, these frontline workers cannot ignore larger issues,
such as immigration, and social factors—including forced marriage, fe-
male infanticide, and dowry demands—all of which are tied to the ways
Indian women may be devalued. As a Narika employee, who is also a
Berkeley graduate student, noted, “It’s a social change movement deal-
ing with political and economic issues.” In fact, according to the former
director, Narika volunteers will not refer women to housekeeper or nanny
jobs, considering them avenues to exploitation and obstacles to empower-
ment. Katzenstein (1995, 36) conceives of discursive politics as “intended
to challenge deeply held beliefs, but it directly challenges the way people
write and think about these beliefs.” These words describe the strategy of
both Narika and Maitri.
Narika is located in Berkeley, a liberal, activist-oriented community
with a sizable working-class South Asian population. Its staff consists of
both first-generation women and younger, college-aged women, many of
them second-generation immigrants recruited from the nearby University
of California at Berkeley campus.
From the beginning, Narika represented regional and religious diver-
sity. Its founders, all professional women, including an attorney, a journal-
ist, a professor, and a filmmaker, are Sikh, Goan Christian, Bangladeshi
Muslim, North Indian Hindu, and South Indian Hindu. They contrib-
uted their own money to pay for the telephone line and for cabs to whisk
clients away from abusive homes. They spent several years, according to
one founder, convincing the area’s South Asian community that they were
offering options and support rather than advocating divorce: “At the be-
ginning, they would call us a bunch of lesbians and divorcees trying to
break up the home. They would call us radical women feminists, and we
got a lot of it because we are in Berkeley. What I saw was when people saw
what was happening and women were leaving abusive situations and get-
ting help, then attitudes started changing and we were tolerated and got
some support from the community.” Growing to twenty volunteers and
representing at least a dozen languages, Narika opened an office in 1994
after years of meeting in volunteers’ homes.
Narika, which sells a t-shirt bearing its logo surrounded by the words,
“Changing the way we live—violence free,” developed a symbol that
displays two hands and two doves linked. This symbol connotes peace,
nonviolence, friendship, and help and symbolizes Narika’s collaborations
with other organizations and services that address domestic abuse in Asian
communities. These collaborations include Narika’s Survivor Economic
Empowerment and Development project, an initiative that uses a peer
mentoring model and community resources to promote clients’ profes-
sional growth and financial independence.
Maitri
A college professor, one of six women who helped create Maitri, conceived
the name Maitri (“friendship between women” in Sanskrit) to connote the
deep connection between women. “I thought of it right away,” she said,
“because our mission was to extend friendship toward these women, as a
replacement for sisters, aunts, and the extended family they left behind.
If they were in India, they would go to these resources. Here, they were
alone; they came here after being married and did not have family in the
community. They didn’t know anyone.” The name Maitri reflected the
shared experiences of the women to whom the organizers sought to reach
out, and it fit with their interaction models built on traditional South
Asian familial relationships.
Among the founders is a woman who immigrated to the United States
from Calcutta in 1984, two years after her arranged marriage to an engi-
neer. She described her difficult adjustment: “When I came here, I had
nobody, no relatives, no friends, no car. The people I met were his friends.
I never drove in India, like so many women who come here. So I was not
mobile. So I was stuck at home. I’m lucky I have a nice husband, a caring
and responsible person. But if it was the other way, who would I turn to?
They were his friends and they had known him for five years longer than
me.”
As her life took hold in California, she worked as a certified public ac-
countant, brought up two daughters, made annual visits to family in India,
and prepared to share her two-story suburban home with her husband’s
parents when they retire and move from India to California. By 1991, the
woman, who comes from a family of activists—her mother and sister both
run nonprofit women’s organizations in India—was looking for a way to
become involved with “something within my cultural group,” she said. The
opportunity arrived when the principal of her daughters’ school asked her to
help an Indian widow with a young son. Some of her friends, also originally
from India and in professional occupations, had also been informally helping
newly arrived Indian immigrant women. They felt the time had come to
start a group to aid women with cultural adjustment issues because many
immigrants do not have an extended family support system in the United
States. She assumed that cultural adjustment would be the primary problem
the immigrant woman would face. But, she revealed, “I was very naïve at
that time. I’m embarrassed by it now.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I felt that Indian persons did not
have domestic violence, that cultural adjustment would be more the focus
than domestic violence. I was really unpleasantly surprised.”
Maitri is based in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley and home to a
significant number of engineers and professionals. At first, the community
“responded rather negatively” to Maitri’s mission, the college professor
explained. “They didn’t accept that there was a problem. They said we
were being melodramatic, creating a sensation. There were a lot of negative
feelings. When we’d go to public events and set up tables, people would
say mean things to us, like, ‘You just want to break up families’ or, ‘You’re
so Westernized, you’ve lost Indian values.’â•›” Another woman, a longtime
leader of Maitri, said, “We went to every community event that would al-
low us a table. We would stand there for four hours, six hours, eight hours,
and not a single person would stop by.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Or people would come up and
say, ‘You’re the home breakers,’ ‘You’re the ones encouraging people to get
divorced,’ ‘You’re lesbians.’ During the next five years, we were converting
people 1 percent at a time.”
Their aim was to create a space where women could find a sympathetic
ear and cultural understanding, as well as referrals to legal, medical, and
counseling services, job training, and other survival skills. “Our philosophy
really is that abuse is absolutely unacceptable in any way, shape, or form,
but ultimately it is her decision,” a longtime Maitri leader said. She joined
the organization in 1994 after separating from her abusive first husband,
whom she had married in an arranged match when she was twenty.
By 2000, Maitri had evolved into what its advertisements in Califor-
nia’s weekly Indian newspaper and monthly Indian magazine describe as
a “free confidential referral service for South Asian Women experiencing
domestic abuse, cultural displacement or unresolved conflict.” Its volun-
teer base had tripled, to about twenty-five volunteers who had immigrated
from the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri
Lanka, enabling Maitri to offer services in at least fourteen South Asian
languages.
Creating Community
The model of caregiving the frontline workers at these South Asian or-
ganizations in the San Francisco Bay Area use combines the concepts of
fictive kin, community-building, and empowerment.8 Drawing on ideas
about South Asian sisterhood and empowerment, these workers create a
language of empowerment intertwined with culture. They avoid position-
ing themselves as critics of the traditional culture that has, explicitly or
indirectly, supported abusive relationships, promoting, instead, their ser-
vices’ consistency with familiar values, such as close family ties. Their goal
is to assure abused women, whose natal family may not be supportive
or available in the United States, that the space they are being offered is
safe and that their disclosures are confidential. A South Indian native who
was one of the founders of Narika said, “In the Indian family support
network, a woman would have an aunt or mother or cousin on whose
shoulder she could cry.” Expanding on the issue of support, a longtime
Maitri leader said:
When a woman emigrates, she has left all of her support structure there
[in South Asia]. There are a lot of festivals she can go to, and a woman
gives birth in her mother’s house. Here, there is no break for her; her only
contact is by phone. The whole social structure that is meant to sustain
you in the home country is shattered here. There is a lot of support
structure, emotionally and physically [in South Asia]. When she’s brought
here, everyone’s working and she is physically isolated. When she marries,
she has to adjust to somebody else’s life—if the family is very nice to you,
it’s a very happy situation. Can she really call her parents ten thousand
miles away and say she’s being abused here? They feel they do not want to
burden their parents. She feels guilt, like a lot of Western women do, that
it is her fault and she should do something different.
Narika’s philosophy borrows the traditional Indian values of interde-

pendence and sisterhood or support and the American problem-solving
approach that emphasizes action based on options discussed with care-
givers and the availability of social service resources that facilitate action.
Its website states: “Narika’s philosophy relies on incorporating our cultural
affinities, our language capabilities and the most empowering practices
from both South Asian and American cultures. Our volunteers and staff
offer advice, helping hands, and a sisterly ear, providing the support and
information women need to make their own decisions.”
South Asian domestic abuse activists seek to redefine community for

abused women by creating a social space that incorporates the positive
and supportive aspects of familial relationships among women and allows
choice. Their goal is to help the woman assume control of her own life and,
supported by a network akin to an extended family, make a decision to stay
or leave the abuser. An elderly Maitri volunteer who is a retired scientist
said, “I provide them with all the options they have. I can’t tell them what
to do. I listen to them and say, ‘What do you want, what do you think
your options are?’ If they want to go back, why. I’ve helped them go out
and find cars and look at apartments. They know they can always keep in
touch.”
For these immigrant women whose support structures were left behind
in their native countries, the counselor–client relationship becomes a kin
network that operates as the woman’s support network or extended family.9
Volunteers at Maitri and Narika are often called by the Hindi terms behen
(sister) or didi (elder sister) as a way of creating community, establishing
trust, and developing bonds and support. Since elders are respected in the
Indian community, some abused women seek the support and reassurance
of older women. “The women call me ‘Auntie,’â•›” the Maitri volunteer who
is a retired scientist said. “They never say ‘Mrs.’; it’s ‘Auntie’ or ‘Sister.’ It’s
a cultural thing.”
The frontline workers adopt a ma–behen (mother–sister) model, where
a volunteer becomes fictive kin to the client and hence an insider, as well
as a caregiver. Thus, the workers become culturally appropriate persons
to talk to about family life, and the client does not feel she is betraying
her family by bringing the abuse to the public sphere. The caregiver as
fictive kin shares her personal experiences with the client, meets for tea,
and rejoices in the news of the client’s baby taking his or her first steps or
teenager graduating from high school. The boundaries between caregiver
and client are more fluid regarding personal interaction, social contact,
and gift giving and receiving than in mainstream activism (Kim 2002). An
accountant who helped start Maitri noted:
Sometimes [the clients] need to hold hands. One woman has called
me off and on for three years. Now she has a good job with computer
programs; we helped her with courses and her job search. She called me
the day her divorce was final. They’ll call with any little question. We ap-
proach as a friend because often they do not have their own friends.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I
tell them that I am available and they can call me anytime. They will visit
us, come to our homes.
South Asian familial relationships have both positive and negative at-
tributes, she stated, adding:
In India, all are involved in each other’s lives, and to some extent this is
really good—a[n abusive] man may be afraid of society; people are nosy;
they talk to each other about each other’s business. People are counseled
within the family environment. But it can be bad—women are told that
this is how it is and to just put up with it. Divorce is such a stigma in
society.
Through its work and its discourse, Maitri fosters “self-reliance and
self-confidence in its clients.” Its stated mission reads: “Maitri believes that
the best human relationships are characterized by mutual respect, open
communication, and individual empowerment. To that end, Maitri’s ac-
tivities are designed to help South Asian women make an informed choice
of the lives they lead.”10 Maitri’s logo, developed in 1998, depicts a stick
figure first curled in a ball, then starting to stand on bent legs, and finally
standing upright. The word MAITRI appears below the three figures, and
the organization’s slogan, “Helping Women Help Themselves” below that.
According to a Maitri project coordinator, “She is slowly rising to her feet.
The ‘Maitri’ word is the platform to support her.”
Maitri’s slogan is supportive of the abused woman, enjoining her to
find a solution that is comfortable for her, rather than putting pressure on
her to take a certain action, such as staying in the relationship or leaving
it. The slogan also announces to the South Asian community that since
the woman is in charge of her life, Maitri is not responsible for devaluing
families or advocating “breaking up families,” an accusation that has been
leveled at Maitri and other similar organizations by community members
upholding the model minority stereotype. Since divorce is stigmatized
among South Asians, keeping the marriage intact will often be a woman’s
first priority, according to caregivers. A longtime Maitri leader said, “A lot
of South Asian women don’t want to leave. They just want the violence to
leave. By leaving, a lot are giving up their culture. They are told that if you
are leaving, you are dead to us.” She recalled the story of one woman who
called the police, who then transported her and her two sons to a shelter.
“The community was laughing at her because she was taken away,” the
Maitri leader said. “They said, ‘See, that is what you get when you call the
cops, you get arrested.’ Are we going to be able to tell each person that no,
she was not arrested but was taken away for her own safety?”
This discourse provides a language that shapes how the South Asian
activists talk about domestic abuse. Hall (1997, 3–4) points out the im-
portance of such language:
We give objects, people and events meaning by the frameworks of inter-

pretation which we bring to them.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. The question of meaning arises
in relation to all the different moments or practices in our “cultural
circuit”—in the construction of identity and the marking of difference,
in production and consumption, as well as in the regulation of social
conduct. However, in all these instances, and at all these different insti-
tutional sites, one of the privileged “media” through which meaning is
produced and circulated is language.
From the names of the organizations themselves to the frontline activ-

ists’ use of the regional “South Asia” and emphasis on sisterhood, the ac-
tivists’ language constructs new meanings and shared understandings. Be-
cause they are actively creating community and bringing domestic abuse to
the forefront, these groups are engaged in social change. According to Shah
(1996, 55), “Domestic violence must be seen not as a personal (private)
problem within the closed arena of the home, but as a political (public)
problem influenced by cultural, social, and environmental factors.”
Acknowledging the cultural patterns of, and responses to, abuse and
giving voice to abuse previously silenced empowers the frontline workers
as well. A Narika co-founder still very active in the organization stated,
“We do a lot of outreach into our community and say we have got to take
responsibility and not leave it a secret in the family because it is an open
secret in the community; we need to rally our resources.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Everybody
knows somebody who has been helped. The South Asian community is
very small and I think it’s like one big village out here. Our results have
changed opinions about us.”
Combating a Myth
Traditionally in the South Asian immigrant community, domestic abuse

is silenced to keep the knowledge of abuse within the family and to allow
the family to maintain its model minority status in the American society.
The image of the abused woman is threatening to the South Asian com-
munity’s cultural representation of itself. South Asian Americans generally
consider themselves a model minority group because of their high educa-
tional achievement and financial success in the public sphere and strong
family values in the private sphere (Abraham 2000; Bhattacharjee 1992).

This myth symbolizes the essence of being South Asian. To preserve their
model minority standing, many South Asian Americans may deny that do-
mestic abuse exists, exhort family loyalty to conceal abuse from outsiders,
or prevent the involvement of domestic abuse organizations in commu-
nity events (Bhattacharjee 1992; Dasgupta 2000; Dasgupta and Warrier
1997; Lynch 1994; Shah 1996). Thus, immigrant leaders and community
members in the past have ignored the issue, privileging instead the image
of their community as built on family honor, women’s deference to men,
extended family, and cultural and community harmony. A longtime leader
of Maitri noted, “We get the attitude that we are such a model minority,
how can we have domestic violence? People bond to the model minority
myth and ignore other issues.”
South Asian women working with those experiencing domestic abuse
must confront this model minority image or representation. This image is
particularly strong in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California
because of the high rate of economic success and educational achievement
among the South Asian diaspora’s members there. Through their brochures,
their symbols, and their websites, Maitri and Narika have for more than
a decade opened the community’s eyes to the specter of domestic abuse.
However, to counteract the notion that the organizations and support groups
are corrupting South Asian women, the activists must tread very carefully
when seeking support for their activities and services. They do so by labeling
their services as responses to “cultural adjustment” problems, such as isola-
tion from family members who remain in South Asia, or by emphasizing
that they promote healthy relationships, not breaking up families.
These organizations also receive more support, donations, and media
coverage by using phrases such as “We speak your language” that distance
them from the mainstream American society while allying themselves with
South Asians in general. For example, Maitri’s slogan, “Helping Women
Help Themselves,” signals an alternative vision of community and is a non-
threatening way of saying they are combating the abuse of women and
patriarchal authority, striving to make it no longer socially acceptable. Taking
responsibility and rallying resources is key to these organizations’ arguments.
Discourse and Silence
Both South Asian domestic abuse organizations in Northern California

prominently feature slogans about ending silence in their informational
brochures. Maitri’s materials frequently say, “Stop the silence” and declare
that the problem cannot be solved by neglect, denial, or wishful thinking.
Narika points out in its publications that the presence of domestic violence,
which is a serious and widespread crime against women, is continually dis-
believed and ignored. Society’s silence about the woman’s suffering and the
abuser’s behavior, Narika says, permits the violence to continue, and the
price of this silence is all too often paid by the victim, not the abuser. “We
wish to break that silence,” they declare.
By “breaking the silence,” South Asian domestic abuse activists in
Northern California are creating a community that stands by and takes
care of its own. The narratives of community make a clear distinction be-
tween “we” and “they,” marking the Indian diasporic community as differ-
ent than mainstream, dominant American society. As discussed earlier, the
differences between South Asians—religious, regional, caste—are eclipsed
by their common immigrant experiences. So when Maitri and Narika seek
to make the abused woman an accepted part of the community, they call
on the commonalities of immigrants by emphasizing that the mainstream
American community does not understand and is not serving the needs
of South Asian abused women. A Narika women’s advocate asked, “Our
argument is that these are our women. The mainstream community is
helping them, and we are putting the burden on someone else. The main-
stream community is going to pick up the pieces, and how does that reflect
on our community?” And one of the founders said, “We know what to
ask. We know a certain kind of breakup is common in certain groups. We
may ask, ‘How much dowry?’ ‘Where is your jewelry?’ ‘Where is the stuff
your parents gave you?’ It may be the only thing she owns. We know what
to ask.” These frontline workers’ dual roles, therefore, are to raise commu-
nity awareness to confront abuse and to empower women. They redefine
empowerment, focusing on building interdependence and a network of
community support between women. They are positioning themselves to
create kinshiplike relationships that will, in turn, help create and define
community.
Discourse is informed by silence. As Brown (2005, 87) points out, “If
discourses posit and organize silences, then silences themselves must be
understood as discursively produced, as part of discourse, rather than as its
opposite.” Among the immigrant South Asian American community, the
dominant model minority discourse prohibits speaking of abuse. “Silence
and secrecy,” Foucault (1978, 101) has written, “are a shelter for power, an-
choring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its hold and provide for rela-
tively obscure areas of tolerance.” Silence, as a discourse prohibited from
revelation, is broken by the frontline workers, thus becoming a subversive

discourse. According to Foucault, “Silence itself—the things one declines
to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between
different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side
from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that func-
tions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within
over-all strategies” (27). If silence is a part of discourse, then it can become
a discourse. Thus, discursive politics becomes an important tool for these
domestic abuse activists.
The words and meanings used by these frontline workers convey their
understandings of, and their purposeful shaping of, domestic abuse in
their community. They frame the issues, giving words and symbols to
these issues, thus transforming the community perception and meanings
accorded to domestic abuse and abused women. They discursively turn
domestic abuse from a private, unspoken experience ignored by the com-
munity to an act reflecting unequal power relations, affecting the vitality
of the community, and openly confronted by the community.
Conclusion
To combat the silence, Maitri and Narika found new ways to talk about
abuse, framing it in terms of community and using a cultural model em-
phasizing fictive kin relationships. Shared experiences and a long-term
support network have aided abused women and generated frontline work-
ers who have in turn shaped the theory and practice of these organizations.
One longtime Narika volunteer learned of Narika when her husband kid-
napped her three-year-old son in 1991 after finding out she was seeking
a divorce. She recalled the counselor who provided her home telephone
number, urging her to call anytime, as well as volunteers’ help and support
in her court case, which also took her to Pakistan, where she recovered
her son in 1992. Ever since, she has volunteered with Narika, and her
experiences have given her a special perspective on helping other abused
women. “We are forced to use the term client, but that’s putting someone
in a condescending position. I don’t think of it as condescending help, but
help that comes from love and equality,” she said.
A Maitri frontline worker whose work with a homeless organization
brought her into contact with several South Asian women abandoned by
their spouses joined Maitri in 1995. “I take the time to do it because I
believe in it,” she said. Her sister-in-law is in an abusive marriage.
I’m not doing this for the fun of it. I work all day and then from 6:00 to
9:00 p.m. I am on the phone [with Maitri clients]. My husband has to
take care of the little one, and sometimes it gets to him, but he under-
stands because his sister is in an abusive situation [out of the country]. He
went home for his brother’s wedding—I couldn’t go because I had just
had my son—and there was an incident, so he would call me and have me
talking on the phone to him about what to do. It always hits home when
it’s in the family. We keep a close eye on them, and we talk on the phone
to her. It’s hard because we have to maintain a cordial relationship with
her husband.
Crafting support for abused women draws from this tradition of wom-
anly support. Maitri and Narika are not filling a cultural gap but instead are
revealing the need in caregiving models for a long-term support network
and fictive kin relationships. While the Western model of intervention
privileges social and legal services and a more clinical approach, organiza-
tions like Narika and Maitri train volunteer frontline workers to create an
interdependency between themselves and the clients, rather than teach-
ing them to be impartial observers as counselors are trained in the West.
This model is contrary to the traditional Western concept of the detached
counselor and client where counselors are prevented from becoming too
emotionally attached and clients from becoming too dependent on one
person.
A Maitri volunteer who works at both Maitri and the nearby Support
Network for Battered Women, a mainstream domestic abuse agency, com-
pared the two approaches.
Support Network is much bigger and better funded than we [at Maitri]
are. There is more staff and a method to the madness. At Maitri, we are
calling the lawyer and paying the bill and doing everything. Support Net-
work is more hands-off. They make the assumption that the client only
needs some help and then will take the ball and run. With the Support
Network, they will give a woman the name of a lawyer and expect her to
go. We [at Maitri] know she’ll never make it. We do go and pick her up.
[At Support Network] I will see someone one time to write a restraining
order and that’s all. The nature of our [Maitri’s] clients is that many do
not have any skills. They are new to the community. Our clients may not
know how to drive or speak English. They aren’t able to drive to pick up a
restraining order. A bond between two people develops when they come
from another country. They call us “sister” and not by our names. There’s
a little more emotional involvement and attachment, but we do keep our

boundaries. My [Maitri] clients remain clients of mine for six months to
four years.
These activists’ approach to intervention and their discourse illustrates

the political economy of domestic abuse as Adelman (2004) defines it.
Emphasizing structural inequality, the normalization of gendered violence,
the contested nature of culture, and local contextualized interpretations
of violence and resistance strategies, these frontline workers shift conven-
tional attitudes regarding domestic abuse toward contextualized cultural
and historical approaches.
The political economy approach to domestic abuse also illustrates how
caregiving and intervention in the United States emphasizes the individual,
thus reflecting the individualistic worldview that permeates American
society (Adelman 2004). The mainstream domestic violence movement
developed around the abused woman’s safety and permanent separation
from the abuser, so its services center on shelters, restraining orders, and
fostering self-sufficiency. These services are important in all domestic abuse
organizations, whether mainstream or ethnically or culturally based, but
the creation of a long-term supportive community is a vital caregiving
approach that can be used by all frontline workers in the domestic abuse
movement.
Ack nowledgment s
I am grateful to and admiring of the frontline workers at Maitri and Narika who
gave their precious time to discuss their work with me and perform such an impor-
tant service to the community. I am grateful also to the University of California at
Santa Barbara for providing financial support to this project, and I deeply appreci-
ate my family and friends—particularly my parents, Penny and Jim Brommer, my
brother, James P. Brommer, and my children, Cameron and Sarita Pauly—for their
confidence in me and their encouragement while I researched and wrote this chapter.
And thanks to my dissertation advisers, Mattison Mines, Mary Hancock, and Eve
Darian-Smith, for their feedback and advice, as well as to the editors of this book for
their dedication to this field of study.
Notes
This chapter is based on my dissertation work with South Asian domestic abuse or-
ganizations in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. I conducted interviews with
four dozen founders, volunteers, and donors and attended fund-raisers, meetings,
community events, and training sessions over a period of eighteen months beginning
in 1999. I interviewed people in their homes, their businesses, the organizations’
offices, coffee shops, and restaurants. Several people were interviewed more than
once. I held formal semi-structured interviews, as well as informal interviews when I
met women at events. I also used secondary sources—including newspaper articles,
Internet sites, court transcripts, and pamphlets—to find more contacts, as well as
additional information on domestic abuse issues and cases among the South Asian
diaspora.
1. Because of safety and confidentiality concerns, I do not use the names of my

informants in this text.
2. Domestic abuse is a pattern of behavior, including physical, sexual, economic,
verbal, and psychological attacks, where one partner in an intimate relation-
ship seeks power and control over the other partner, causing that person loss of
dignity, control, power, and safety. Rather than using the term domestic violence,
which tends to connote the physical, I prefer to use the term domestic abuse, be-
cause it is more inclusive of psychological, economic, emotional, and other non-
physical forms. The term domestic abuse also connotes a social context. According
to Sigler (1989, 75), “Domestic abuse has been defined as a social problem based
in part on changing social values regarding the role of women and men in society
and in domestic settings. Domestic violence is the dimension of domestic abuse
that is visible, provable, and in extreme cases, shocking.”
3. Though mainstream Americans often label South Asian Americans as a model
minority, they still consider them the “other,” distinguished by their skin color,
food, clothing, accent, religion, and other features that place them as subordinate
to the dominant mainstream. The model minority is defined as a role model for
other minority groups.
4. South Asia encompasses the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
and Nepal. Some researchers and organizations also include Bhutan, Myanmar,
and Afghanistan, and South Asians from elsewhere in the diaspora, such as Fiji,
are often included in antidomestic abuse organizations’ definitions of South
Asians.
5. The U.S. Census 2000 was the official headcount of people living in the United
States on April 1, 2000. While the census included U.S. citizens, permanent resi-
dents, visa holders, and undocumented immigrants, it was likely that many eth-
nic groups were underrepresented because of fear by undocumented immigrants,
beliefs that temporary residents did not need to fill out census forms, and lack
of education or awareness in non-English speaking communities about the im-
portance of the census. The following Asian American ethnicities were queried in
the census: Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and
Other Asian (with space to write in an ethnicity).
6. Comparisons with the 1990 census are available only for the Asian Indian cate-
gory, since the 1990 census did not have an “Other Asian” category where people
could write in other ethnic groups, such as “Pakistani.” Nationwide, the follow-
ing Census 2000 statistics represent the number of people identifying with South
Asian groups, either 100 percent or in combination with another ethnicity:
1,899,599 Asian Indians; 204,309 Pakistanis; 57,412 Bangladeshis; 24,587 Sri
Lankans; 9,399 Nepalese; and 212 Bhutanese (Barnes and Bennett 2002, 9).
7. Narika’s Mission, in “About Us,” available from the Narika home page,
narika.org/index.php.
8. Although empowerment is jargonistic, it is used by many South Asian women’s
organizations to describe their goals. Empowerment can mean women identi-
fying for themselves what they need, such as safety, while remaining with the
abuser; or women deciding to live autonomously by seeking housing, employ-
ment, or education (Fine 1989).
9. In many cases, a woman’s natal family will provide support. But if an immigrant
woman’s natal family members reside in India, they may be unable to help her.
Also, a woman may resist discussing the abuse with her natal family if she fears
that her husband or in-laws will threaten or harm them.
10. Maitri’s mission statement appears under “About Us,” on the Maitri home page,
maitri.org/index.html.
Works Cited
Press.
Adelman, Madelaine. 2004. The Battering State: Towards a Political Economy of
Domestic Violence. Journal of Poverty 8 (3): 45–64.
Ahuka, Sarita, Pronita Gupta, and Daranee Petsod. 2004. Arab, Middle Eastern,
Muslim and South Asian Communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Grantmakers
Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees. sff.org/about/publications/AME_
report.pdf.
Barnes, Jessica S., and Claudette E. Bennett. 2002. The Asian Population: 2000. Cen-
sus 2000 brief. U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, Washing-
ton, DC.
Bhattacharjee, Anannya. 1992. The Habit of Ex-Nomination: Nation, Woman, and
the Indian Immigrant Bourgeoisie. Public Culture 5 (1): 19–44.
Brown, Wendy. 2005. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dasgupta, Shamita Das. 2000. Who Goes There, Friend or Foe? Finding Comrades
in Domestic Violence Work. In Breaking the Silence: Domestic Violence in the
South Asian-American Community, ed. S. Nankani, 161–71. Philadelphia: Zlibris
Corporation.
Dasgupta, Shamita Das, and Sujata Warrier. 1997. In Visible Terms: Domestic Violence
in the Asian Indian Context; A Handbook for Intervention. 2nd ed. Union, NJ:
Manavi.
Fine, Michelle. 1989. The Politics of Research and Activism: Violence against
Women. In Violence against Women, special issue, Gender and Society 3 (4):
549–58.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans. Rob-
ert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. Introd. to Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices, ed. Hall. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kang, Cecilia. 2001. Valley Becomes Indo-American Hub for State. San Jose Mercury
News, May 23.
Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod. 1995. Discursive Politics and Feminist Activism in the
Catholic Church. In Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Move-
ment, ed. M. M. Ferree and P. Y. Martin, 35–52. Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press.
Kim, Mimi. 2002. Innovative Strategies: Themes and Questions. In Domestic Vio-
lence in Asian and Pacific Islander Communities National Summit 2002: Proceed-
ings, ed. Asian and Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence, 19–21. Ar-
lington, VA: LGC, Inc., for the Office of Community Services, Administration
for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Lynch, Caitrin. 1994. Nation, Woman, and the Indian Immigrant Bourgeoisie: An
Alternative Formulation. Public Culture 6 (2): 425–37.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1993. Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on
Being South Asian in North America. In Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the
South Asian Diaspora, ed. W.o.S.A.D. Collective, 351–58. San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books.
Passano, Paige. 1995. Taking Care of One’s Own: A Conversation with Shamita Das
Dasgupta. Manushi 89:17–26.
Shah, Purvi. 1996. Redefining the Home: How Community Elites Silence Feminist
Activism. In Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, ed. S. Shah,
46–56. Boston: South End Press.
Sigler, Robert T. 1989. Domestic Violence in Context: An Assessment of Community At-
titudes. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
U.S. Census Bureau. 2002. American FactFinder. U.S. Census Bureau. Available at
factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en.
5
“We Couldn’t Just Throw
Her in the Street”:
Gendered Violence and
Women’s Shelters in Turkey
Kim Shively
In the past two decades, Turkey has made impressive efforts to deal with
the problem of violence against women, by strengthening laws to criminal-
ize batterers and developing public and private institutions to assist the
victims of domestic violence. The new laws have largely been transplanted
from international doctrines, and the institutions have been appropriated
from and modeled on corresponding institutions in Europe and North
America. This chapter investigates the process of what Sally Engle Merry
(2006) has called the transplantation, appropriation, and translation of
women’s shelter models from Europe into the Turkish state social service
system.
Based on research conducted into two women’s shelters in the western
Turkish province of Izmir, this chapter examines the de facto role that
these shelters play in dealing with violence against women. Where in Eu-
rope and North America, women’s shelters are set up specifically to provide
refuge for victims of domestic violence (i.e., intimate partner violence), my
research revealed that, even though the Izmir shelters were perpetually full,
only a handful of the guests at the Izmir shelters were actually victims of
domestic violence as defined in the United States and Europe. Indeed, the
director of one of the shelters said that, quite frankly, among the women in
the shelters only about 10 percent were there to escape domestic violence.
Initially, I was shocked by this revelation, since these shelters were of-
ten exhibited by politicians and activists as a viable (if not ideal) state
response to domestic violence. The shelter director, Ummuhan, said that
71
she had also been surprised that there were so few women there because
of domestic violence. She had expected to be dealing entirely with bat-
tered women and their children but was now confronted with a wide range
of issues that affect mostly poor and marginalized women. In this initial
conversation with Ummuhan, I had to ask: “Why are there so few bat-
tered women in these shelters? Who are the women in these shelters?”
Ummuhan seemed to be so overwhelmed by the day-to-day logistics of
running a very dynamic women’s shelter that she had not really formulated
a response to these questions, other than to say (to paraphrase), “What else
can we do with the women who are here and need help, even though they
are not battered? We can’t just throw them in the street!”
As I made several visits to the shelters and spoke with the women and
employees of these shelters, I came to realize that the process of institu-
tional transplantation was not so clean and straightforward as the state
might present or as some might presume. What I wish to show here is
that a better way to think of these women’s shelters is not as a response to
domestic violence as “intimate partner violence.” Rather, the domestic vio-
lence that women have to confront—and that the frontline workers have
to deal with—can be characterized as structural violence that does not fit
easily into the women’s rights activists’ discourse that dominates many hu-
man rights institutions with regard to domestic violence.
Research Setting and Methods
This investigation of the transplantation of the shelter system into the

Turkish context is based on the status of two women’s shelters (kadın ko-
nukevleri—literally, “women’s guesthouses”) in Izmir province in western
Turkey.1 I conducted research in the summers of 2004, 2006, and 2007
at these two shelters. One shelter, located in the northern Izmir municiÂ�
pality of Çiğli, was established in 2001, replacing a smaller shelter that had
existed in Izmir since 1988. I visited this shelter in all three summers of
my research, though in 2006 it was closed for a much-needed expansion.
(I toured the expansion project in 2006.) During construction, the guests
and staff of that shelter were transferred to the second provincial shelter—a
newly opened establishment in Aliağa municipality about fifty kilometers
north of the city of Izmir. By the summer of 2007, both shelters—plus
a third smaller one that I did not have a chance to visit—were open and
filled to capacity.
I conducted several long, open-ended interviews relating to women’s
Gendered Violence and Women’s Shelters in Turkeyâ•…â•… 73
issues and domestic violence with several frontline workers: a social worker
(Türkan) and a psychologist (Birsen) in the Izmir office of the Social Ser-
vices and Child Protection Agency (Sosyal Hizmetler ve Çocuk Esirgeme
Kurumu [SHÇEK]). These were the personnel who referred women to
the provincial shelters. I also interviewed the general director of Izmir
SHÇEK, Zekarya Ertaş, and several private citizens involved in providing
material support for the shelters in Izmir province, including members of
the Çiğli Rotary Club and a representative of the International Women’s
Association of Izmir. I also visited the provincial shelters, interviewed the
director, Ummuhan, as well as other frontline shelter workers, spoke with
a number of the women who were temporary residents, and listened to
some of their stories and hopes for the future.
Translating International Models

into Turkish Reality
In the United States, domestic violence is seen as a form of gendered vio-

lence that requires special responses. This is a distinction that not every
society necessarily makes or can afford to make. Domestic violence, for
example, is defined rather narrowly in the United States and western
Europe as physical, sexual, or psychological harm—or threats of harm—
caused by a current or former partner or spouse (this is the current defini-
tion articulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [2006];
see also Saltzman et al. 2002). Indeed, there is a general trend to replace
the term domestic violence with intimate partner violence as a way of more
precisely defining the phenomenon. This tendency is also found in some
international studies of domestic violence and in human rights documents
(e.g., World Health Organization 2005).2
The focus on domestic violence as “intimate partner violence” in inter-
national human rights discourse creates problems when looking at domes-
tic violence, gendered violence, and local institutional responses to various
types of gendered violence in cross-cultural contexts. Domestic violence
can take many forms, as I discuss later, and thus may require different types
of institutional responses not commonly considered in Western settings.
Even looking beyond domestic violence, international women’s rights ac-
tivists and transnational campaigns for women’s rights have tended to fo-
cus on violence against women or “gender violence” in terms of individual
injuries or individual acts of violence against individual women. But the
most dire types of violence many women must confront are broader and
more structural, such as armed conflict, economic disenfranchisement, en-

vironmental degradation, or loss of land. As Julie Hemment (2004, 829)
has pointed out in her studies of women’s aid organizations in Russia, “It
is impossible to separate the problem of domestic or sexual violence from
other issues women face.”
In most European and North American countries, there are institu-
tions established to cope with these structural forms of violence and mar-
ginalization, as well as with domestic violence. But like many other de-
veloping or unstable countries, Turkey has few social service institutions,
and these are often overwhelmed by the social problems they are estab-
lished to deal with. Thus, the direct transplantation of Western women’s
shelter models without much alteration into a social service system that
is more limited in its scope of services has meant that the shelters—most
often by accident—serve a much broader set of women’s needs than do
their Western models.
Transplanting Women’s Rights
As Merry (2006) has pointed out, transplanting international human rights

concepts and laws, such as notions of women’s rights and gender justice,
into local situations requires a process of appropriation and translation
that may or may not be successful. For international standards for gender
justice to be applied to the Turkish context, for example, mechanisms that
promote gender equality—such as domestic violence laws, women’s shelter
systems, and other social service concepts—have had to be transplanted
into a pre-existing set of social expectations, institutions, and laws that
cannot always easily accommodate them.
Appropriation of international laws and institutions, Merry (2006,
135) points out, “means taking the programs, interventions, and ideas
developed by activists in one setting and replicating them in another set-
ting.” Most often this process is transnational, since programs and laws
are borrowed from other nations or from the international community
and imported into the local context. In Turkey, the laws and institutions
were appropriated—often wholesale—from European and international
human rights discourses and transnational processes. The impetus for cre-
ating domestic violence laws and the model for programs and institutions
aimed at combating gender violence derive from requirements made by
the European Union accession process and the World Bank, as well as from
requirements of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms

of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international human
rights document to which Turkey is a signatory. In 1990, in response to
the CEDAW requirements, Turkey established the Directorate General on
the Status and Problem of Women, which is directly affiliated with the
Prime Ministry (Arat 1998; Levin 2007). The directorate mandated that
every province have at least one women’s guesthouse (kadın konukevi), to
be run by the provincial SHÇEK.
Further legal transplantation took place in Turkey because of pressure
from the European Union and a variety of Turkish women’s nongovern-
mental organizations. The Turkish Civil Code was amended in 2001 and
the penal code was updated in 2005 in part to improve women’s posi-
tion legally, including in situations of domestic violence (Ertürk 2008;
WWHR 2002). The original Turkish Civil Code of 1926 contained clauses
on marriage and family that contradicted the CEDAW requirements and
were subsequently discarded in the 2001 amendments. For example, the
original code placed familial authority and decision-making powers in
the hands of the husband and delegated to the wife the roles of helpmate
and household caretaker, while the 2001 code eliminated any idea of the
head of the “conjugal union.” In the 1926 code, husbands had also been
deemed the ultimate authority over children and a husband’s permission
was required for a wife to work outside the home or to travel abroad with
children, provisions that were rejected in 2001 (Levin 2007).
Similar progressive changes were made to the Turkish Penal Code in
2005. The previous penal code had defined rape as a crime against public
decency rather than against the individual, thereby configuring women’s
bodies as repositories of public morality rather than construing women as
rights-bearing individuals (Ecevit 2007; Uçan Süpürge 2005). The 2005
changes redefined rape as a crime against the individual and also introduced
more than thirty amendments to advance the cause of gender equality and
protect the bodily and sexual integrity of Turkish women (Levin 2007,
210). Among other provisions, the code has also criminalized marital rape,
prohibited sexual harassment in the workplace, and introduced language
by which honor killings (the murder of women believed to have sullied the
honor of the family) are considered murder without mitigating circum-
stances (WWHR 2005b). Most important for this discussion, the 2005
penal code also defines domestic violence as a crime that can be punished
by incarceration.
Other laws designed to curb domestic violence include the Law on the
Protection of the Family, no. 4320, approved in 1998 by the Turkish Par-
liament. This law permits a family member subject to domestic violence
to file a court case for a protection order against the perpetrator of the
violence (WWHR 2002). The protection order bars the perpetrator not
only from using any further violence but also from approaching or harass-
ing the victims. This law has provided some respite for women: CEDAW
2005 reports that between 1998 and 2003, 18,810 domestic violence cases
were finalized in the courts under the provisions of the 1998 law. Part of
this success may be attributed to the very active women’s rights education
efforts organized by women’s nongovernment organizations (NGOs), such
as Women for Women’s Human Rights, Flying Broom (Uçan Süpürge),
and the Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation (Mor Çatı Kadın
Sığınağı Vakfı).
Lost in Translation
These legal transplantations have been welcomed by women’s groups,

frontline workers, and others in Turkish society. But those working most
closely with women’s issues and domestic violence, such as female activ-
ists and workers in the social service system, have noted that this process
of appropriation has occurred sometimes without proper cultural transla-
tion. Translation, in Merry’s terms (2006, 135), “is the process of adjust-
ing the rhetoric and structure of [the] programs or interventions to local
circumstances.” Appropriation of programs tends to be most successful
and popular if they are well translated.
In Turkey, a number of activists and frontline workers, including those
I interviewed, have expressed concern that the European institutional
models were dropped into a set of social structures, expectations, and
political realities that could not easily accommodate these new mechaÂ�
nisms. For example, the establishment of the Directorate General on the
Status and Problems of Women (as part of the CEDAW process) was not
welcomed by nongovernmental Turkish women’s organizations, because
the organizations were suspicious of the directorate’s intentions. The
Turkish state is often heavy-handed when dealing with a whole variety of
political, economic, and social issues, frequently imposing its own short-
sighted solutions on civil society rather than allowing for more organic,
bottom-up responses to emerge. The Turkish women’s NGOs have thus
been fearful that the directorate was set up to appropriate and control the
independent women’s organizations rather than deal with the “status and
problems of women” as it was mandated to do. By now the directorate
has gained some degree of acceptance by Turkish women’s groups, but
when I have discussed my research on the shelters with women involved
in the NGOs, they have continued to express a great deal of suspicion
(see Ecevit 2007).
Indeed, my original research plan was to investigate how politics at the
national or provincial level affects the operations, especially funding, of
women’s shelters. Several female activists and academics had declared that
conservative municipal governments often cut funds to women’s services
not only as a way to save money but also as a way to maintain a patriarchal
social order in which women remain dependent on their families. When
I first suggested this bias against the shelters to Türkan and Birsen, the
Izmir SHÇEK social worker and psychologist, respectively, they looked
genuinely puzzled. They were not aware of any government anywhere
shutting down the state shelters for any reason. If anything they felt that
the government at various levels was trying to find the resources and staff
to create more shelters. As for the lack of funding, they argued that all
social service divisions of SHÇEK, including those assisting orphans and
the elderly, were chronically underfunded. The women’s services, including
the shelters, were not singled out in any way that they could see, a fact that
was confirmed by the Izmir SHÇEK director.
These very different perceptions of the viability and vulnerability of
women’s shelters probably arise from there being different kinds of shel-
ters: shelters run by the state and independent shelters established by Turk-
ish women’s groups and nonprofit organizations, such as the Purple Roof
Women’s Shelter Foundation. These independent shelters fulfill the state
mandate for women’s shelters—that there be at least one in every prov-
ince—while the autonomy of the shelters allows them to target the issues
and populations they choose. This autonomy makes them more effective
than the state shelters at dealing specifically with intimate partner violence.
But these independent shelters are unevenly spread through Turkey, and
the funding for them is spotty at best. Interestingly, the work of these
private women’s organizations in constructing shelters for battered women
provided much of the original impetus for the government, through the
Directorate General for Social Work and Social Services, to develop wom-
en’s guesthouses. In fact, municipalities have looked to women’s organiza-
tions and NGOs for help to establish consultancy and educational services
for battered women (Ecevit 2007, 199). I do not discuss these private
shelters here but instead focus on those shelters put in place by the Turkish
state and affiliated with SHÇEK.
Despite Türkan’s and Birsen’s objections, the administrative structures
of government do leave the state women’s shelters vulnerable to political
manipulation. While in the past the Directorate General on the Status and
Problem of Women has provided the initial capital for each shelter and
funded on-going operations (food, salaries, utilities), a 2005 public ad-
ministration reform process stipulates the transfer of all responsibility for
opening and sustaining the women’s shelters to local governments. Such
a development is troubling, because, as pointed out in WWHR 2005a,
“local governments .â•¯.â•¯. are subject to frequent changes in administrations
every election period, and with highly volatile financial flows, are most
likely to apply different priorities with respect to whether Women’s Shel-
ters .â•¯.â•¯. in their locality should be kept open; and if they are kept open, the
operational guidelines under which they are to be monitored” (2). At least
Izmir tends to be a socially liberal province, and the local government has
maintained a relatively positive stance toward the women shelters, provid-
ing the funding for two shelters by 2006 and for a third by 2007. But such
reliance on the largesse of local governments does nothing to guarantee
institutional stability—not in Izmir, and certainly not in more socially
conservative parts of Turkey. Indeed, the Purple Roof Foundation shelter
of the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul lost its municipal funding at the end of
2008 because of a decision by the district’s conservative government, de-
spite that government’s supposed commitment to a World Bank mandate
that women’s shelters be maintained in areas with a population over fifty
thousand (see, e.g., Mor Çatı Kadın Sığınağı Vakfı 2008).
Turkey has difficulty upholding this World Bank requirement in many
parts of the country, partly because of a continuing lack of resources. One
of the most common criticisms directed at Turkey’s institutional response
to domestic violence is that there are simply not enough shelters avail-
able to battered women. In 2006, there were only twenty-four women’s
shelters in Turkey affiliated with the state, though the number of shelters
is slowly increasing (Karabat 2008). Even as shelters have become more
widely available since the 1990s, several international organizations, such
as Amnesty International, have called for at least a four-fold increase in the
number of women’s shelters in Turkey.
The shortage of shelters also stems from an anemic investment in in-
stitutional resources. Turkey has only two schools of social work: one at
Hacettepe University (Türkan and Ummuhan were both graduates of this
program) in Ankara and a recently opened school at Başkent University.

Thus, there is a constant shortage of social workers and no one expects an
adequate increase in the next few years. The lack of personnel (social work-
ers, managers, psychologists, etc.) has meant that while the legal way has
been paved for opening shelters in all eighty-one Turkish provinces, many
planned shelters will never open (see Shively 2006).
In the extant shelters, Turkish social services have attempted to trans-
late the European shelters models they drew on to meet some specific
needs of Turkish society. For example, Article 8 of the SHÇEK regulations
(Resmi Gazete 24396 2001) states that the shelters may accept women
who have left home for any sort of misunderstanding or who are escaping
violence, women who are left destitute by divorce or widowhood, women
who are escaping a forced marriage or who are being threatened for hav-
ing a child out of wedlock, women who are overcoming addiction, and
women who are newly released from prison. These regulations already
demonstrate that the missions of the Turkish shelters are considerably
broader than those shelters in the United States and Europe. The shelters
take in women dealing with problems that in Europe and North America
would be dealt with in a separate institution, such as a halfway house or
rehabilitation facility.
Because of systemic issues relating to gendered violence, however, that
are often outside the domestic violence discourse found in many Western
countries, this official translation of the European institutional model to
the Turkish context does not reflect the realities of shelter functions. Un-
like in shelters in the United States, for example, the frontline workers in
the Turkish shelters go well beyond their de juro functions and maintain a
de facto policy of accepting almost any woman in need, despite the restric-
tions of Article 9 of the SHÇEK regulations, which forbids accepting pros-
titutes, women with addictions, women with mental illnesses, and women
with substantial mental or physical handicaps. Thus, the official attempt
at institutional translation was only partially successful in actual practice
(as opposed to formal policies). As Ummuhan, the Izmir shelter director,
complained to me:
The social services system was adopted directly from England but without
adjusting for different customs. Turks are much more willing to help their
neighbor and much more tied to the family than is the case in England,
and setting up social services is harder under these circumstances. For
example, the state wanted to set up the social services department and did
so—but without personnel or training. It did no good. People aren’t used

to the idea of referring to an institution or to the government for dealing
with problems relating to the family.
Rethinking “Domestic Violence”
Furthermore, as Ummuhan’s comment suggests, common social attitudes

toward violence within the family and the preferred remedies for that
violence leave little room for institutional solutions. Domestic violence
is common in Turkish society, as it is in most of the world. According to
statistics reported by Amnesty International (2004), around two-thirds of
Turkish women reported experiencing violence in the domestic context.
But as Türkan explained to me, battered women often do not come to
SHÇEK looking for help, since in Turkey there is such a widespread accep-
tance of domestic violence and internalized social norms that lead many
women to believe that they deserve abuse or that domestic violence is sim-
ply the order of things (see also Gülçür 1999). This attitude may be gradu-
ally changing as public awareness of the problem has grown and violence
is more publicly condemned in the Turkish media and political discourse.
Certainly, Türkan, Birsen, and other members of the Izmir SHÇEK have
invested considerable time, energy, and resources into conducting edu-
cational programs and advertising campaigns to mitigate the widespread
acceptance of battering, including some training programs conducted in
conjunction with a women’s NGO for assisting police personnel in recog-
nizing and responding to domestic violence.
Yet, even with this increased public awareness, many women either do
not know of their options in applying to law enforcement or social service
institutions for help or believe that the institutions would not help and
could possibly make the situation worse. This opinion was certainly that
of battered women I knew. This suspicion of the institutional arms of the
state might also explain, in part, why so few victims of domestic violence
seek out help from state institutions. The state has so long been seen as
part of the problem for marginalized individuals—because of the state’s
inadequate economic development policies, antiminority rhetoric and ac-
tions, and abuse of human rights and the corruption that seems endemic
to Turkish politics—that it may well be difficult for women to trust the
state to be part of a solution to their individual suffering (see Adelman
2008). Thus, the very structure of the state shelter system and its political
context already establishes barriers to the success of its mission.
Furthermore, because in Turkey, gendered violence within the family

context is not necessarily confined to partner-on-partner violence, domes-
tic violence cannot be conceptualized as only “intimate partner violence”
as it is in Europe and North America. In patrilineal patrilocal households
that are common in many parts of the world—including in parts of Tur-
key, India, Afghanistan, and China—the intrafamilial power dynamics
and experiences of emotional intimacy may be more diffuse and arranged
along diverse lines relative to nuclear families common in the West. As
such, tensions and the potential triggers for violence against women in the
family may diverge sharply from Western expectations (see Grewal 2008).
A patrilineal, patrilocal household generally encompasses an extended
family where all women of the resident lineage will leave the household
when they marry. Marriage for a woman means going to her husband’s
family. On the flip side, all resident married women are “outsiders,” at
least to the lineage segment that resides in the household. In Turkish, the
word for “bride” and “daughter-in-law” is gelin, which means “the one
who comes.” Thus, all the married women in such a household are struc-
tural outsiders, a system that creates a series of tensions, especially between
the in-laws and the daughter-in-law. The daughter-in-law is a foreign
element that is nevertheless necessary for the perpetuation of the patriÂ�
lineage, and she must be controlled. The husband certainly has a role in
that control—and if violence does erupt, it is often within the marital pair.
But the in-laws, especially the mother-in-law, are also part of the power
dynamic. Indeed, a daughter-in-law is often under the direct control of
her mother-in-law. Because many households are segregated by gender, a
daughter-in-law often spends considerably more time with her mother-in-
law than with her husband. This relationship is also a potential site for the
eruption of domestic violence: the mother-in-law may beat or even sanc-
tion the murder of a disobedient daughter-in-law. Thus, domestic violence
is perpetuated by a senior woman against a junior woman.
In many such situations, the husband’s family is a wife’s principal
household—she cannot always return to her natal home, nor can she easily
strike out on her own—so it is not a simple matter for a woman, especially
a poor, rural young woman, to extricate herself from an abusive situation
(cf. the case of China in Merry 2006, 149–50). This kind of domestic vio-
lence is not the “intimate partner violence” that occurs in a nuclear family
that women’s shelters in the United States and Europe are most commonly
set up to deal with, and therefore the Turkish shelters must (and do) in-
clude provisions for women who are victims of violence from the extended
family.3
Case Studies
Women seek out the shelters to deal with a whole series of life problems
for which they have no other recourse. Some are escaping from bad mar-
riages or family circumstances, others are threatened with honor killings.
Some are simply destitute and cannot easily care for themselves. There are
rules about who may or may not stay at the shelter, as I outlined earlier,
but exceptions are often made. One woman I talked with, Meral, clearly
had mental limitations, which according to the rules would disqualify her
for the women’s shelter.4 But her family was not taking care of her and
let her wander in the streets of her village. Local authorities had brought
her to the shelter because they did not know what else to do with her. As
Ummuhan explained in a refrain that I would hear many times, “They
couldn’t just leave her in the streets.” Meral was bored at the shelter and
deeply homesick for her village, but she could not take care of herself, and
there was no other place for a young woman in her situation. (An elderly
woman could be placed in a home for the aged.)
Türkan, the social worker for women’s issues at the Izmir SHÇEK, said
that Meral’s case represents one of the agency’s biggest problems: there are
not enough treatment centers or halfway houses for people with various
problems, and women like Meral are especially vulnerable because they,
unlike men, cannot take advantage of informal forms of charity when in
need. For example, while there are no homeless shelters, men may sleep in
mosques or in the street, relying on the kindness of neighbors. But these
options are not open to women. Mosques are, by and large, male spaces
not open for casual female visitors. And a woman who sleeps in the street
could lose her reputation and be suspected of sexual impropriety—a status
that can be devastating and even life-threatening.
The women come to the shelters from all over Turkey, many from the
east, which is considerably more impoverished and underdeveloped than
western areas, such as Izmir and Istanbul. Indeed, many of the women
from the east may be internal refugees—fleeing the frequent ethnic vio-
lence between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish military. When I began
my research in 2006, a family had just arrived at the Izmir shelter. The
family consisted of a woman and her two young daughters who came from
Edirne in Thrace, though they were originally from the east. They had
been abandoned with no nearby relatives and no means of support. The
police did not know what to do with them but turn them over to the shel-
ter system. “The police couldn’t just throw them in the street,” the shelter
director Ummuhan again remarked to me. When Ummuhan asked the

woman what her address in Edirne had been, the woman could give only
the street name but did not know the house number. The daughter (nine
years old) did not know her own birthday, and Ummuhan made it a game
to keep asking the girl her birthday (which Ummuhan had learned from
the girl’s identity papers) until the girl could recite it herself. Clearly, this
little family was at the mercy of the social service system and was fortunate
to find refuge in a shelter.
The shelters have also taken in foreign women refugees and their chil-
dren. Türkan reported that most such refugees are Turkish citizens born
abroad or are non-Turks married to Turkish men. During my research
stints in both 2006 and 2007, international refugees of a different sort
found temporary refuge in the Izmir shelters. In 2007, a Somali woman
and her newborn daughter, as well as some other Somali women, were
housed at one of the shelters. In 2006, an Eritrean woman and her three
sons had been dropped off by the police at the shelter for reasons that were
not very clear. According to the oldest boy (he was twelve years old and
spoke good Turkish and English, and therefore the mother mostly relied
on him for translation), the family had been living in Istanbul under the
auspices of the United Nations, but some sort of problem developed with
their refugee status. Ummuhan had no information about them and did
not know why they were there. And their situation never became clear.
They had been scared about being brought to the shelter, and they disap-
peared one night. No one heard from them again.
The house takes in women with continuing alcohol or drug dependen-
cies, even though such women are officially not supposed to be accepted
into the shelters. These women simply have nowhere else to go, and hospi-
tals deal only with acute cases, not chronic issues. Ummuhan maintained
a lot of contact with hospitals to deal with any crises that might arise, but
largely she had to cope on her own with women with severe problems. Ba-
sically, the shelter acts as a women’s crisis center—any kind of crisis—not
only as a shelter relating to domestic violence.
For women who do suffer from intimate partner violence, the shelters
are not always a good option. This limitation is due to common social ex-
pectations rather than the merits of the shelters themselves. As mentioned
earlier, many Turks have accepted the inevitability of domestic violence,
and even when violence gets unbearable, most Turks would prefer to look
to their neighbors or family for help. And because the shelters accept for-
mer prostitutes, they have become linked, at least to some extent, with
prostitution. Therefore many women are reluctant to approach this insti-

tution for fear that they too will be associated with prostitution—again, a
status that could be socially devastating and even life-threatening.
The shelters have little to offer many of the women who do end up in
residence. While the guests may always participate in general activities in
the shelter, such as cooking, cleaning, and child care, there are only a few
organized activities, such as literacy or skill-learning courses, available to
the women. For example, 80 percent of the women who come to SHÇEK
for assistance are illiterate, and the shelters often try to provide some lit-
eracy training. The very first time I visited the Çiğli shelter in 2004, the
director, whom I was interviewing, called in a young woman, Ferda, to
demonstrate her newfound ability to write her name. She wrote her name
with much pride and showed it to me, and I was duly impressed. Seeing
my positive response, the director and a shelter volunteer both told me
that Ferda is an exception, that very few women are successful at learning
any literacy skills at the shelter for a variety of reasons. Several staff workers
observed that most women seemed severely depressed and see no future
for themselves, so it is difficult to motivate them to improve themselves
or learn something new. Usually the shelter residents have no money, no
skills, and little family support. Türkan noted that the women often do
not know anything but housekeeping and never expected to be anything
but housewives. The most common future they see for themselves after
the shelter is getting married again. Because so many of the women are
illiterate, they are unable to move from a life of dependency. Even if the
shelters could offer consistent literacy classes, these classes would not be of
much service, because the women usually stay for only a couple months
and then move on. Likewise, children who are of school age and stay with
their mothers at the shelters do not attend school, because they are not in
the same place for long enough to be enrolled. Thus, a stay in the shelter
can negatively impact the children’s education.
Moreover, the shelters may have done less to improve the lives of
women suffering from domestic violence than for other women. The nor-
mal practice of SHÇEK is to send the women back to the abusive situa-
tion they escaped from with no follow-up. This practice is followed not
by choice but by necessity, since Türkan and Birsen were the only two
SHÇEK personnel available to deal with women’s issues and domestic vio-
lence in all of Izmir province (2006 population: 3.7 million). These two
frontline workers were very dedicated to their work and were involved in
many research and community-outreach activities. But it was clear that
they could barely keep up with the new cases that came to them every day,
let alone provide any follow-up to the cases they handled. So, when a bat-
tered woman comes to them, they can place her in a shelter and provide
basic services, but once she leaves the shelter, they simply cannot keep
track of her. Most of the women go right back to the situation they fled
from—and there is no staff available to intervene on the women’s behalf
in the home setting to resolve the earlier tensions. Other women simply
“disappear.” With women at risk for honor killings, there is no way for
social services to protect the women outside the shelters—that is left up to
law enforcement.
It seems that so many end up where they started, perhaps even in a
worse situation. Surely, battered women may pay a heavy price for having
dared to leave in the first place. After all, a battered woman is at greatest
risk of being killed by her abuser precisely at the time she tries to resist or
leave her batterer (Kastenbaum 2008). These women often walk right back
into the household they fled from, putting them at extra risk for reprisal,
more severe abuse, or even death.
Furthermore, women who are escaping domestic violence may be stuck
if they refuse to go home. I met Esen during an early visit to one of the
Izmir shelters. Esen was a young woman who seemed very bright and had a
high school education, but she had been crippled by polio since childhood
and could not do any work requiring physical labor. She had fled from
her family in the southeast Turkish city of Diyarbakır with her two-year-
old son. She implied she fled from violence or threatened violence from
her husband, but she did not want to discuss her life in Diyarbakır. After
entering the shelter, she had given up her son to a foster family and would
not be able to get him back until she was financially independent. She felt
she was capable of doing work in an office, and because she is educated
she thought she could contribute to any sort of job that did not require
physical labor. But because of her handicap, she was having difficulty find-
ing a business that was willing to take her on. She had been living in the
shelter for a year when I interviewed her—despite the official three-month
limit on stays. Esen was desperate to find work when I talked with her so
she could get her son back. Her despair about her situation was palpable:
she often seemed close to tears as she talked about her son, whom she
visited only occasionally. She was losing hope about finding a job, and she
could see no way forward. She left the shelter only after I completed my
research, and so for reasons of privacy, Ummuhan could provide no details
on her whereabouts or that of her son.
Beyond Intimate Partner Violence
There is no doubt that the women’s shelters “do good” in general, filling
very important gaps in the social services available in Turkey. Yet I genu-
inely wondered, Do these shelters do any good in dealing with the prob-
lem of domestic violence? Do they even make the situation for battered
women worse? (Some of the frontline workers were asking themselves the
same questions.) My original inclination was to be critical of the state’s
ability to point to the shelters as a demonstration that it is effectively ad-
dressing domestic abuse in accordance with CEDAW. And I do believe
that it is misleading to characterize the shelters as institutions that deal pri-
marily with intimate partner violence in the same way shelters in Europe
or those set up by the Turkish women’s NGOs, such as the Purple Roof
Foundation, do.
Although the greatest problem with the women’s shelters in Turkey is
that there are not enough of them, the issue here is the institutional trans-
plantation from transnational and international models to a particular
local context. In Turkey, the legal transplantation was largely successful:
the legal models were appropriated almost in their entirety and met the
approval (more or less) of the parliament, the ruling classes, feminists,
and other social progressives. Many of these Turkish citizens resisted the
translation of these civil laws into traditional Turkish practices that gives
priority to the husband in the family and establishes the wife as a depen-
dent, that conceptualizes female bodies as repositories of family honor, and
so on. Such a translation would have blunted the message of social change
embedded in international discourse that reconfigures women as autono-
mous individuals with rights to bodily integrity and safety, independent
of the family context—precisely the change that Turkish activists were
seeking. As Merry (2006, 136) has argued, human rights activists often
confront a dilemma when transplanting international expectations into a
local framework: “If they frame human rights to be compatible with exist-
ing ways of thinking, they will not induce change. It is only their capacity
to challenge existing power relations that offers radical possibilities.”
For the institutional situation—those entities that actually apply
the laws and deal with their consequences—the translation process was
less straightforward. With the women’s shelters, the government also at-
tempted to translate their function to meet Turkish reality by establishing
regulations stipulating who may and who may not be accepted into the
women’s guesthouses that are considerably broader than those traditionally
established in Europe and North America. Women in transition—former
prostitutes, former drug addicts, economically dispossessed women—are

permissible guests in the Turkish shelters, whereas in Europe and North
America such women could most often find state assistance in other in-
stitutions established for specific purposes (e.g., homeless shelters, drug
treatment facilities, halfway houses). But the translation process was only
partially successful, since the de facto operation of the shelters in Izmir and
in Turkey in general goes well beyond—and sometimes directly contra-
dicts—the official regulations to include women who simply need help for
a whole array of problems. Recognizing that such women need assistance
and that they cannot take advantage of informal forms of charity with the
same ease that men can, the frontline workers, the police, and members
of SHÇEK open their doors to anyone they can because, as they so often
said, “What else can we do?” Not much, it turns out.
Because Turkey has so few institutional options for women with long-
term difficulties, the shelters and SHÇEK personnel become the one in-
stitution that can help, and so it does. Although the situation is changing
rapidly, Turkey has fewer social services available to the general populace
than are found in Europe and North America. Furthermore, Turks are
simply not used to looking to institutions of any sort to deal with issues
relating to families or women’s social welfare. Not only are Turkish women
not accustomed to looking to institutions for aid, but they have little rea-
son to trust that the state would protect them when the state is often also
a threat (especially for ethnic minorities or impoverished women). Thus,
when the European shelter model was appropriated into Turkey, it seems
to have become the only de facto institution to aid any woman with any
problem who was desperate enough to look to the social service agencies or
who, like the refugees, happened to fall into the hands of law-enforcement
officials.
Perhaps the best way to think of the state women’s shelters in Turkey—
or at least in Izmir—is to think of them as shelters from domestic violence,
however it is defined, and as shelters that deal with gendered violence in
all its forms.5 The shelters do provide refuge to women who suffer from or
are threatened by individual acts of gendered violence, such as rape, honor
killings, or domestic violence (whether from the intimate partner or the
extended family), though, as pointed out earlier, the institutional resources
to assist such women are lacking over the long run.
At least, however, the shelters do provide some refuge to women who
suffer from other, more structural forms of gendered violence. As Merry
(2006, 39) has pointed out, the causes of gender violence may be social,
economic, and political (see also Hemment 2004). Gendered violence
may involve abandonment of support and ensuing poverty (economic dis-

enfranchisement was probably one of the most common reasons women
sought out the shelters in Izmir), displacement and armed conflict (many
guests were “refugees” or immigrants from the impoverished and conflict-
ridden eastern region of Turkey), and state policies (the international
refugees). These shelters may therefore fall short of Western expectations
or definitions of what defines a successful response to domestic violence.
Instead, the Turkish shelters function by necessity, in response to the local
situation, as institutions that serve the needs of victims of violence against
women in the broadest sense of the term.
Ack nowledgment s
I wish to thank Yeşim Arat and Ayşe Gül Altinay for allowing me to present portions
of this chapter in a panel, “Gender-Based Violence: Prevention, Solidarity and Trans-
formation,” at the 2006 annual meetings of the Middle Eastern Studies Association
in Boston. I also thank Karen Dugger for providing a forum for discussing issues of
domestic violence in a cross-cultural context at the Institute for Teaching and Re-
search on Women January 2008 conference in New Delhi. And I would like to ex-
press my appreciation to the editors of this book, Hillary Haldane and Jennifer Wies,
for their guidance and thoughtful input. I wish to convey a special thank-you to all
those who made this research possible: Erol and Gaye Ertaş, Zekarya Ertaş, and the
Çiğli Rotary Club. Finally, I would like to convey my deep appreciation to Türkan,
Birsen, Ummuhan, and all the dedicated people of the Social Services and Child Pro-
tection Agency of Izmir Province.
Notes
1. The official name of the shelters is “women’s guesthouse” (kadın konukevi), but
I heard many other names used in reference to these houses: most often I heard
the term sığınma evi (shelter) but also occasionally heard barınma evi (also trans-
lates as “shelter”).
2. For a discussion of definitions of domestic violence, see Merry 2009, esp. 27–29.
3. Interestingly, the women’s shelter nearest to my university includes in its guide-
lines the stipulation that women who are battered—or threatened with in-
jury—by an intimate partner’s family (in-laws) may also qualify to seek refuge
in the shelter. But in talking with some professionals associated with the shelter,
I found they were not aware of ever having women who were escaping “in-
law” violence and were surprised that this provision was included in the shelter
guidelines.
4. The names of all victims of domestic violence are pseudonyms to protect the
women’s identities.
5. A women’s shelter I visited in New Delhi, India, seemed to operate on the same
principles as those in Turkey. On a chalkboard in the director’s office, the cause
of each guest’s presence in the shelter was listed. Only one guest was there for
domestic violence; the rest suffered from more structural issues, such as aban-
donment, economic dispossession, and homelessness.
Works Cited
Adelman, Madelaine. 2008. The “Culture” of the Global Anti-Gender Violence So-
cial Movement. American Anthropologist 110 (4): 511–14.
Amnesty International. 2004. Turkey: Women Confronting Family Violence. London:
Amnesty International.
Arat, Yeşim. 1998. Feminist Institutions and Democratic Aspirations: The Case of
the Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation. In Deconstructing Images of the
“Turkish Woman,” ed. Z. F. Arat, 295–309. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2006. Understanding Intimate Partner
Violence. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). 2005.
Responses to the List of Issues and Questions for Consideration in the Combined
Fourth and Fifth Periodic Reports: Turkey. www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/
docs/CEDAW-PSWG-2005-I-CRP.2-Add.7-Turkey-E.pdf.
Ecevit, Yıldız. 2007. Women’s Rights, Women’s Organizations, and the State. In Hu-
man Rights in Turkey, ed. Z. F. K. Arat. 187–201. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Ertürk, Yakin. 2008. Implementation of General Assembly Resolution 60/251 of 15
March 2006 Entitled “Human Rights Council”: Mission to Turkey. Report of the
Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes and Consequences.
United Nations, Human Rights Council, 4th sess.
Grewal, Inderpal. 2008. Postcoloniality, Globalization, and Feminist Critique.
Gülçür, Leyla. 1999. A Study of Domestic Violence and Family Life in Ankara,
Turkey. Women for Women’s Human Rights Reports No. 4. www.wwhr.org/
files/3_7.pdf.
Hemment, Julie. 2004. Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: De-
fining Violence against Women in Russia. Signs 29 (3): 815–40.
Karabat, A. 2008. Women to Sue Municipalities for Failing to Set Up Shelters.
Today’s Zaman Online, March 7, 2008. www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-
135798-women-to-sue-municipalities-for-failing-to-set-up-shelters.html.
Kastenbaum, Robert J. 2008. Death, Society, and Human Experience. Boston: Allyn
and Bacon.
Levin, Çelik Yasemin. 2007. The Effect of CEDAW on Women’s Rights. In Human
Rights in Turkey, ed. Z. F. K. Arat, 202–13. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating Inter-
———. 2009. Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Mor Çatı Kadın Sığınağı Vakfı. 2008. “Sığınak İstiyoruz!” İmza Kampanyası (“We
Want to Be Sheltered!” signature campaign). Available at www.morcati.org.tr.
Resmi Gazete. 2001. Özel Hukuk Tüzel Kişileri ile Kamu Kurum ve Kuruluşarinca
Açilan Kadin Konukevleri Yönetmeliği (Regulations for the Establishment of
Women’s Guesthouses by Private or Public Entities). Resmi Gazete Sayısı 24396,
May 8, 2001. www.mevzuat.adalet.gov.tr/html/20702.html.
Saltzman, Linda E., Janet L. Fanslow, Pamela M. McMahon, and Gene A. Shelley.
2002. Intimate Partner Violence Surveillance: Uniform Definitions and Recom-
mended Data Elements. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Shively, Kim. 2006. Women’s Shelters and Responses to Domestic Violence in Izmir,
Turkey. Kadın/Woman 2000 7 (1): 21–39.
Uçan Süpürge. 2005. Türk Ceza Kanunu Kadinlara Neler Getiriyor? (What Does
the Turkish Penal Code Bring for Women?). www.ucansupurge.org/arsiv/
www.ucansupurge.org/indexf6b4.html?option=com_content&task=view&id=
2140&Itemid=87.
Women for Women’s Human Rights (WWHR). 2002. The New Legal Status of
Women in Turkey. www.wwhr.org/images/newlegalstatus.pdf.
———. 2004. Shadow NGO Report on Turkey’s Fourth and Fifth Combined
Report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
www.wwhr.org/images/shadowreport.pdf.
———. 2005. Turkish Civil and Penal Code Reforms from a Gender Perspective: The
Success of Two Nationwide Campaigns. Istanbul: WWHR–New Ways.
World Health Organization. 2005. WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health
and Domestic Violence against Women. Summary report. Geneva: World Health
Organization.
6
Institutional Resources
(Un)Available: The Effects
of Police Attitudes and Actions
on Battered Women in Peru
M. Cristina Alcalde
In 1985, Brazil became the first Latin American country to create women’s
police stations specifically to respond to women’s complaints of violence.
Research on women’s experiences in Brazil’s police stations suggests that
some “police officers responsible for registering and investigating the in-
cidents frequently treated the victims with hostility and indifference” and
that “the line between acceptable and unacceptable treatment of women
remains fuzzy in the minds of [female] police officers” (Nelson 1996, 135,
140; Santos 2005). Three years later, and largely as a result of pressure
from women’s organizations, Peru established women’s police stations to
focus on women’s complaints of violence. By 2002, six women’s police
stations had opened in Lima, the capital, and seven more in other parts
of the country. Women’s police stations are staffed primarily by female of-
ficers. Regular police stations also include a family violence section. Based
on a broader qualitative study of thirty-eight heterosexual indigenous and
mestiza (mixed European and indigenous ancestry) women from poor and
working-class backgrounds in abusive relationships in Lima, Peru, this
chapter suggests that the situation some Brazilian women encountered is
mirrored in Peru, where many women I interviewed faced indifference,
hostility, and discrimination at police stations. After providing informa-
tion on police officers in Peru, this chapter examines women’s experiences
in police stations in Lima and the effects of police attitudes and actions
on women’s ability to protect themselves and their children from abusive
partners.
91
Among the women who spoke of interactions with police officers, fif-
teen described negative experiences they or women they had heard about
had had at police stations and said that, as a result, they were less likely
to go to the police; five mentioned placing complaints at police stations
but offered few or no details about these experiences; and two reported
that they were treated well at police stations and received the assistance
they needed. Of these two women, one had a brother who worked as a
police officer and who played an active role in helping his sister place a
complaint. This chapter underscores the racism, class bias, and gender
stereoÂ�types women may encounter in police stations in Lima, cautioning
us against the essentialism of equating female frontline workers, in this
case female police officers, with feminism and gender sensitivity. I propose
that women’s interactions with the police play a significant role in prolong-
ing the abuse of women in Lima.
The first part of the chapter presents a discussion of female police of-
ficers in Peru and their role as frontline workers, their backgrounds, their
views, and forms of marginalization. In the second part, the focus shifts to
the attitudes and behaviors women who sought assistance from the police
encountered and the effects these attitudes and behaviors had on those
women’s lives. I present two examples of discrimination based on race and
class and then focus on two gender-based ideas women encountered in
police stations that negatively affected their ability to protect themselves
from abusive partners. The first idea is that violence is a private, family
matter and a woman’s role is to keep the family together. The second idea is
that women are responsible, and therefore to blame, for men’s violence. In
discussing women’s experiences at police stations, I do not presume to pro-
vide a representative sample of all women’s experiences at police stations.
Instead, my primary goal is to contribute ethnographic depth to findings
of police unresponsiveness and ineffectiveness in Latin America and, more
specifically, in Peru (Flake 2005; Human Rights Watch 1999; Sagot 2005)
by examining local cases and the effects of police treatment on a woman’s
ability to leave an abusive partner.
Background and Context
In Latin America, close to 50 percent of women experience psychological

abuse and between 10 and 35 percent experience physical abuse through-
out their lives (Morrison and Biehl 1999, 3). In two separate studies of
Effects of Police Attitudes and Actions on Battered Women in Peruâ•…â•… 93
domestic violence in Lima, 51 percent of women interviewed had expe-

rienced physical and sexual violence (Güezmes, Palomino, and Ramos
2002) and 88 percent of women interviewed knew someone who had ex-
perienced intimate violence during the previous twelve months (Espinoza
Matos 2001). As in other parts of the world, in Peru the effects of men’s
violence include increased risk of poor health, such as injury, depression,
and the development of a chronic disease (Coker et al. 2002).
In 1993, Peru passed a family violence law. As a result of modifica-
tions in 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2003, the law now includes physical, psy-
chological, and sexual violence as forms of domestic violence, regardless
of an individual’s class, race, or gender.1 The police are the state entity
responsible for receiving domestic violence complaints, carrying out the
preliminary investigation, and notifying the parties involved. Women can
file complaints at specialized women’s police stations, Women’s Emergency
Centers, or family violence sections in regular police stations.
Women’s Police Stations and Female Police Officers
The world’s first women’s police station opened in India in 1973. Since
then, specialized women’s police stations have been established in South
Asia, Africa, and throughout Latin America to address violence against
women. Brazil opened the first Latin American women’s police station in
São Paulo in 1985. The day after the Brazilian station opened there five
hundred women lined up to file complaints (Santos 2005, 155). In Peru,
where the first women’s police station opened in 1988, the primary mission
of women’s police stations is “to receive, prevent, combat, and investigate
acts of family violence, to re-establish family harmony and unity, within
a human rights framework.”2 In 1996, police in Lima received 6,181 do-
mestic violence complaints. By 2001, the number had jumped to 32,821
(Fernández and Webb 2002, 260).
Despite the high demand for services provided by women’s police sta-
tions around the world, female police officers in them face discrimina-
tion and marginalization. By 2003 in India, where women’s police stations
had been around for three decades, women made up just 2 percent of the
entire police force and “general conditions for women on the force did
not inspire confidence” (Hautzinger 2007, 212). In Brazil, women’s police
stations rank low within the police hierarchy and “policewomen clearly
saw themselves as discriminated against, as women, in their police careers”
(224). In her work on women’s police stations in Brazil, Santos (2005, 36)
similarly notes that the creation of women’s police stations “did not elimi-
nate discrimination against policewomen and women’s police stations.”
In Peru, female police officers constitute 15 percent of the police force.
Like their male counterparts, the majority of female officers come from
working-class backgrounds. Police officers in Peru earn less than the aver-
age salary for civil servants and significantly less than employees in the
private sector, making it common for officers to seek a second job to make
ends meet (Instituto de Defensa Legal 2004). Police officers are also part
of an entity whose duties have been increasing even as the number of of-
ficers available to perform those duties has decreased. In 1990, Peru had
129,000 police officers and a population of approximately 22 million. In
2004, the number of officers had decreased to 90,000, though the popu-
lation had increased to 27 million (Instituto de Defensa Legal 2004). Of
the dwindling police force, one officer who works in the domestic violence
section of a police station commented, “[The number of ] police officers
will always be insufficient, [but] we have to have a strategy to reach the
civilian communities and have them support us. The State will always have
few resources, the solution lies in the leadership of the Comisariat [police]”
(Movimiento Manuela Ramos 2007, 46). As exemplified by this officer,
despite the obstacles confronted by the police, some officers highly value
the responsibility of working with and building positive relationships with
civilians.
Police officers as a group face several obstacles, but female police of-
ficers in particular confront sexism from within and outside the police.
Although women were first admitted to the police force in 1956, it was
only in 2009 that for the first time in the country’s history three regular
police stations (i.e., not women’s police stations) were headed by female
police officers. In March 2009, the police announced that Lima’s notori-
ously hectic and dangerous traffic would be directed exclusively by female
police officers. It was widely publicized that the rationale behind the deci-
sion was the belief that women officers are less corruptible and more disci-
plined than men (El Comercio 2009; La República 2009). And, although
the bulk of the responsibility for overseeing traffic was placed in the hands
of female police officers, the highest position within the traffic police was
reserved for General Arturo Davila, a man.
Gender stereotypes of women heavily influenced both the decision to
place traffic under the control of female police officers and the behaviors
female police officers confronted on the street. In 2004, of the 244 police
officers assaulted by angry motorists, more than 80 percent were women,
which led the government to launch the “No more violence against female
police officers” campaign (Grimaldo 2008). Today, female police officers
continue to face resistance by male motorists who view female police offi-
cers more as women, who should not have power over men, than as police
officers with the authority to stop, fine, and arrest.
Even though female police officers face marginalization and may be
especially vulnerable to assaults in their role as officers, female police offi-
cers are not necessarily attentive to the victimization of women in domestic
violence situations. In Brazil, Hautzinger (2007, 231) found that “many
policewomen internalized and reproduced sexist or machista values.”3 San-
tos (2005, 48) underscores the heterogeneity of views and attitudes she
found among officers in women’s police stations in Brazil by outlining
three basic positions officers held regarding feminism and violence against
women. One group, referred to as “feminist policewomen,” “made explicit
alliances with feminists, fully embracing the feminist definition of violence
against women as a crime.” A second group, “masculinist female police,”
“opposed any contact with feminists” and “did not view violence against
women as ‘real’ crimes.” For the third group, “gendered police,” “alliances
with feminist organizations were indirect and ambiguous” and they “em-
braced aspects of the feminist approach to ‘gender violence’ but did not, or
could not, make explicit alliances with feminists.”
In Peru, female police officers also hold a variety of views regarding
feminism and violence against women. Peruvian feminist organizations
have consistently rejected conciliation as a solution in domestic violence
cases in part by arguing that conciliation presumes two equal partners,
while situations of domestic violence are characterized by unequal power
relations between partners (Boesten 2006, 363). According to a recent
study on the Peruvian judicial and police system in which both police of-
ficers in charge of receiving and processing domestic violence complaints
and battered women were interviewed in three districts in Lima, police
officers in two of the three districts favored extrajudicial conciliation be-
tween a woman and her partner in domestic violence cases. In the third
district, however, one police officer clearly stated, “I do not agree with con-
ciliation, because I don’t think that after having been abused, she should
have to allow a man who is hurting her [to be] in her bed.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I don’t think
so” (Movimiento Manuela Ramos 2007, 43). In the three districts, women
complainants opposed conciliation (42).
Also in connection with domestic violence cases, another female officer
explained that some women want to but do not follow through with com-
plaints they initially filed. Their husbands, who are the ones who pay for
everything—the house, electricity, and water—“threaten them with leav-

ing and not paying anything,” and because these women depend on the
man, they regret the domestic violence complaint (Movimiento Manuela
Ramos 2007, 46). This officer’s statement underscores her understanding
of that economic dependency is one of the factors that contribute to wom-
en’s experiences of domestic violence. As the literature suggests, female
police officers’ attitudes and actions regarding domestic violence cases vary
widely.
The Effects of Police Officers’ Treatment

of Battered Women on Women’s Lives
Getting to the police station is itself a great challenge for many women.
To reach a police station, a woman must temporarily escape her partner’s
surveillance, knowing she may be vulnerable to additional beatings if he
discovers her plans to report the abuse. She may slowly and secretly set
aside money to cover transportation costs to and from the police station,
or, if she is unable to afford public transportation, she may walk long dis-
tances to the police station and risk being seen by her partner or someone
who might inform her partner of her actions. What if, after taking all these
risks, upon arrival at the police station, she is humiliated, told to go back
home, and blamed for the violence?
Arrival at the police station is only the first step in an often long and
complicated process. Women in Lima reported that the police would
not pay attention to them unless they had severe and visible injuries and
bruises, that police officers asked them for money for office supplies and
snacks to process or speed up their claims, that police officers blamed them
for the violence, and that police officers told them to go back home when
what the women needed was protection from what awaited them there. In
short, in women’s experiences, a great difference existed between laws and
practice, and between the rights they should have as citizens and the way
police treated them as poor women and wives.
Once she files the claim at the police station, a woman must then decide
whether she will return home, go to a shelter (if she is told of the existence
of one and if there is space for her and her children), or stay with family
or friends (if she has any in Lima). In the context of widespread poverty
and rural-to-urban migration where few family members or friends are
willing or able to offer a place to stay in Lima, it is not uncommon for
women to return home after filing a claim and face further violence as
they wait for the legal process to begin. After a woman places a claim, the
police notify the batterer that a claim has been filed against him and that
he must go to the police station to render his statement. The police also
refer the woman to a forensic doctor who will evaluate the injuries she
has suffered. A medical examination is often the most important piece of
evidence against the batterer, yet not all women are given appointments
for medical examinations on the same day or even week of the domestic
violence complaint. An extended period between a woman’s complaint
and the date of her forensic examination may negatively affect the woman’s
case because of the likelihood that her bruises will have disappeared and
injuries healed by the time of the examination. The claim will then go to
the family prosecutor, who will evaluate the claim and may issue orders
for petitioned protective measures. It was common for a woman to fear
that the violence would escalate once her partner discovered that she had
reported the abuse to the police.
In the United States, leaving a violent man is the most dangerous time
for a woman (DeKeseredy and Joseph 2006). According to the accounts of
women interviewed here, the same is true for women in Lima. Shortly af-
ter deciding to leave and filing a claim against their partner, many women
feel disillusioned by the impossibility of achieving a satisfactory arrange-
ment that ensures their safety in the short and the long term.4 If they did
not already know it, they soon learn of the prejudices and lack of funds
available to help battered women and their children and that the process
of filing a claim is a long one replete with bureaucratic hurdles.
Intersecting Identities of Race and Class
All of the women I interviewed agreed that they confronted more indiffer-
ence and discrimination at regular police stations than at women’s police
stations and that women’s police stations were “the best option,” while
also expressing dissatisfaction with police treatment in the latter. Several
of the women believed they were treated with disrespect and turned away
because they were poor and indigenous or mestiza in a society in which
whiteness and wealth are highly valued. Perhaps even more important,
how women were treated by the police had real, negative effects on their
ability to protect themselves and their children from abusive partners.
The case of Ester, a poor mestiza mother of three in her forties, helps
shift the focus from a unidimensional one on gender to a multidimen-
sional one on intersecting identities that also inform women’s experiences
at police stations. Toward the end of a meeting with me, Ester asked
whether I knew anyone at the main women’s police station who could
help her with the paperwork related to a domestic violence complaint she
had filed but feared was not being processed. She had been to the police
station several times since filing the complaint but was told each time to
come back later. I had just spent several days speaking with a policewoman
at the station named Office Ramirez, so I suggested to Ester that she ask
for Officer Ramirez on her next visit since she appeared to be very help-
ful. Like several other officers at the main women’s police station, Officer
Ramirez participated in the occasional workshops for officers facilitated by
Lima’s feminist nonprofit organizations. Officer Ramirez fits into Santos’s
(2005) category of “feminist policewomen” because she allied herself with
feminist organizations and defined violence against women as a crime.
A few weeks later, Ester told me that although at first the officers would
not help her, once she asked for Officer Ramirez and told her I had sent
her, things changed. Officer Ramirez told the other officers to help her
because she was “a relative,” and from that point on Ester was treated very
well. Although Ester was treated well and ultimately received the informa-
tion she needed, her experience points to the indifference women may face
at police stations if they do not have the personal contacts (which most
women do not have) that would elevate their social status in the eyes of
some officers.
Amada, another woman who was turned away by the police, summa-
rizes her reaction to two police officers—the (male) chief of the police
station and a female police officer—who refused to honor her request to
arrest her husband, who had violated a protective order and had beaten
her. When she arrived at the police station, her face was bruised and swol-
len. After the officers refused to arrest her husband, Amada reproached
them, stating:
How is it that some women, because they have friends here or because
they have boyfriends or I don’t know what, acquaintances, as soon as they
come in, as soon as they speak, all they have to do is open their mouths
and a police car is there. And I, because I am a poor woman, or because
I am not dressed up, or because the policemen haven’t fallen in love with
me, you don’t pay any attention to me.
Amada’s words eloquently demonstrate her awareness of her rights and

underscore the discrimination she encountered within the institution
responsible for protecting those rights. Both officers Amada spoke with
blamed her for the violence, misinformed her about laws, dismissed her
requests, and told her that the best thing for her to do was nothing, to
avoid exacerbating her husband’s violence. Fully aware of the importance
the police placed on hierarchies and respect within the organization and of
her low status as a poor, battered woman, Amada nonetheless rejected the
police officers’ interpretation of her situation. The police, however, refused
to arrest her husband and ultimately she returned home.
In what follows, I discuss the two main gender-centered ideas women
confronted at police stations: that violence is a private, family matter and
women’s role is to keep the family together, and that women are respon-
sible, and therefore to blame, for men’s violence.
It’s a Private Family Matter and Women

Should Keep the Family Together
In 2001, the “policeman of the year” shot and killed his wife (La República
2001). Although the honored policeman’s wife had filed several domes-
tic violence complaints against her husband, the police failed to consider
these “private” actions in honoring him as “policeman of the year.” This
incident is disturbing because of what it indicates about what is considered
private, and can therefore be easily ignored, in evaluating men charged
with protecting civilians. Further suggesting that the belief that violence
perpetrated by intimate partners is a private family matter is widespread
are the findings of a longitudinal study in a poor district in Lima. In that
study, the men who were interviewed expressed the belief that (women’s)
filing domestic violence complaints is not very useful and that a couple
should resolve its problems without resorting to outside institutions, such
as the police (Ríos and Tamayo 1990, 247).
Among the women I interviewed, Jimena, a twenty-six-year-old mes-
tiza elementary school teacher and mother of two called the police on
several occasions. As she explained, “I would even call the police station
when I had problems. [The police would ask,] ‘Señora, are you hurt? Can
you walk? Then come and place a complaint [in person].’ But how could
I leave if my husband was there? He wouldn’t let me leave. But the police
said it was a private matter.” As Jimena recounted the incident, the police
directly told her that men’s violence within the home is a private matter. As
a school teacher, she viewed herself as a public figure whose responsibili-
ties included being a positive role model for her students. She spoke with
her students about domestic violence and had even counseled students
on dealing with and reporting their experiences of domestic violence. Al-

though Jimena taught her students that violence against women was a
public issue, her experiences with the police reinforced the reality that
violence against women was, in practice, widely viewed as a private matter.
Beyond the belief in men’s violence against women as a private matter,
beliefs about the primacy of the family and the need to keep the family
together also affect women’s ability to lead violence-free lives. In Peru, the
belief that “the individual is worth little outside of kinship ties and is only
fully realized when she is part of a relationship which produces a nuclear
family” (Yanaylle 1996) is common. The cultural expectation that women
will marry and have a family, the stigma of separation and divorce, and
the fear of being a single parent prolong women’s time with abusive part-
ners. In this context, going to the police station constitutes “a major step
resulting from a transcendental decision indicating an understanding of
the public dimensions of their problem” (Sagot 2005, 1306). In police
stations, however, women may feel disempowered because their own con-
sciousness of violence as a public issue is challenged by those in positions
of power and authority over them—a situation exemplified by Jimena’s
case.
Twenty-six year-old Ana’s experiences illustrate both her wishes to es-
cape from her husband’s violence and the reality and effects of having the
police reinforce her husband’s power over her and her two young daugh-
ters (ages three and one). In the following excerpt, Ana describes her ex-
perience at the regular police station near her home, where she spoke with
officers from the family violence section, soon after she had given birth
to her second daughter. “I went to place lots of complaints.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I always
reconciled [with my husband] at the police station. They would make me
see, ‘Señora, what are you doing separating?’ .â•¯.â•¯. ‘What are you doing?’
they would say. ‘Look at those babies. Think, you alone can’t provide for
them.’ That. They always put my daughters in the middle of it. ‘What are
you doing?’ they would say. ‘Because of you, because of you your daugh-
ters are going to suffer.’â•›” Ana was constantly under her husband’s surveil-
lance, forced to work with him in his welding workshop every day and
locked in the house whenever he left home. She risked severe beatings each
time she managed to escape with her daughters to the police station. She
also visited the main women’s police station downtown, but the response
there mirrored the response she received at the regular police station in her
neighborhood.
The main message Ana received from this institution was that she
should go back home and worry about keeping her family together rather
than attempt to create a new life for herself and her daughters. As Ana
described the path leading to her arrival at the shelter at which we met,
the central role of her interactions with police officers at both regular and
women’s police stations became clear. Ana did not know of the existence
of shelters for battered women for at least one year after her initial visit to
a police station because police officers failed to inform her about them.
Police treatment of Ana directly affected Ana’s chances of leaving her
abuser. Ana had one daughter and was pregnant with her second daughter
the first time she visited the police station to report her husband’s abuse.
When I met her just two years later, she had two daughters and was preg-
nant with her third child. By the time we met, Ana and her daughters had
entered a shelter, yet Ana’s chances of permanently leaving her husband
had significantly diminished. She feared no one would offer a pregnant,
poor, abused woman with nowhere to live and two young daughters a job
and that she would not be able to work very long hours because of her
pregnancy and two young daughters. She also felt guilty about denying her
daughters the possibility of living with both parents, especially each time
one of her daughters asked where papi was.
Ana’s experience is only one of several negative experiences at police
stations that women reported during interviews. Another woman I inter-
viewed reported that police officers told her to hurry up and return home
with the children so that her husband would not find out she had gone to
the station and become even angrier and more violent; a third woman was
advised to be a better wife to avoid beatings; and a fourth woman was told
to stop talking back to her husband to prevent future episodes of violence.
In all of these cases, women failed to receive the protection they needed
and had a right to receive.
Blaming Women for the Violence
Women who experience intimate partner violence may blame themselves

for the violence, feeling they somehow provoked their husbands and thus
feel ashamed to ask for help (Panchanadeswaran and Koverola 2005). In-
stitutions can reinforce these feelings by questioning women’s behavior at
home and their efforts to seek help (Frohmann 1998), as well as by directly
blaming women for men’s violence.
Ana was directly blamed for the violence she experienced at a women’s
police station. When I asked Ana whether she had ever visited the main
women’s police station, she said, “The police officers in the women’s police
station .â•¯.â•¯. would tell me, ‘You are to blame. It’s your problem, don’t come
here [in search of help].’â•›” Each time Ana left her house to report her
husband’s violence, she placed herself and her daughters in danger of her
husband’s finding out she was trying to leave him. Like the other women
whose experiences I have described, Ana was dually victimized, first by her
partner and then by the police.
Amada, a thirty-six-year-old mother of three, went to the station with a
bruised and swollen face to ask for help after her husband beat her. Amada
reported that she was told by the police chief to “be very calm and that I
shouldn’t look to fight with him. Not to do anything because it would just
make it worse.” The police chief ’s statement exacerbated Amada’s power-
lessness within an abusive relationship and pointed to Amada’s behavior as
the cause of her husband’s violence.
Inés, forty-three years old and the mother of three, had experiences at
the main women’s police station that both embittered and empowered her.
It took Inés several years to decide to go to the police station to report her
husband’s ongoing physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. In part, she
was waiting for her children to get a little older so she would not deprive
them of a father during what she considered to be their formative years.
She was also hesitant to go to the police station because she had heard from
acquaintances that “when people went there they treated them badly and
so many of them did not want to return out of shame.” She thought, she
told me, “The police will say, ‘Why do you let yourself be hit?’ or maybe
use vulgar language. So then, that was my fear.” Inés eventually decided
she needed to report the abuse to be able to leave her husband and have
legal access to her belongings, regardless of how the police treated her.
During an interview, Inés said that when she went to the station to file a
claim, the psychologist there told her she should not cry about the violence
because it was clear that she enjoyed being hit and was therefore to blame
for the violence. Inés left the station feeling angry and disillusioned. As
she recounted the incident to me several years later, she said she saw now
that the experience made her so angry that it fueled her strength to keep
fighting to free herself from the violence she lived. At the time, however, it
did little to solve her problem. Similarly, Aurora, thirty-eight years old and
the mother of two, also felt certain that going to the police station would
only result in further victimization. Each time she had visited a police sta-
tion, a police officer had suggested she had done something to provoke her
husband. As a result of these experiences, Aurora feared police stations.
Women are commonly blamed for staying in abusive relationships. The
reality, however, is that women have few options but to return to their
homes after filing a complaint at a police station. For example, thirty-

six-year-old Carmen Rosa went to the police station to file a complaint
against her husband and as a way to begin the process of separating from
him. The police officer who handled her complaint was scheduled to go
on vacation for a month the following day and told her that because he
had been assigned to her case she now had to wait one month, until he re-
turned from vacation, to continue the filing process. After she complained
about the waiting period, she received a referral to the forensic doctor.
The appointment she was given, however, was for three weeks later. All
her bruises would have disappeared by her appointment date. The delay
in the appointment with the forensic doctor is significant in that it further
disadvantaged Carmen Rosa and postponed the possibility of her perma-
nently and legally leaving her husband. Carmen Rosa had no option but
to return to her husband. Ultimately, she attempted to protect herself from
further violence by appeasing her husband and reconciling. As in other
cases, Carmen Rosa was dually victimized, first by her partner and then by
the police.
Conclusions
In focusing on women’s interactions with officers in police stations, my

intention has not been to suggest that the police as an institution are solely
to blame for the violence women experience or that all police officers treat
women in ways that prevent them from finding alternatives to living with
violent partners. Significantly, several women I interviewed noted that
they encountered less discrimination in specialized women’s police stations
than in regular police stations. Nonetheless, police stations played a sig-
nificant role in prolonging the amount of time the women I interviewed
remained in abusive relationships.
An analysis of women’s experiences in police stations is essential to
our understanding of battered women’s experiences in Lima because, after
trying to get help from their families, many women turn to the police.
In their interactions with police officers, women receive responses that
trivialize the danger they experience. More specifically, women confront
attitudes that disregard their welfare, encourage them to uphold the family
despite the violence, and blame them for the violence men inflict on them.
Women’s experiences in regular police stations and in women’s police
stations make clear that staffing police stations with women has its merits
but cannot guarantee female victims the right to be heard or protected
from their partner’s violence (Hautzinger 2007; Nelson 1996). All women
do not share the same opportunities or ideas, and gender solidarity cannot
be assumed once we take into consideration issues of race, class, education,
and economic standing (see Mohanty 1991). In Lima, as in other settings,
individual police officers interpret existing laws through the filter of cul-
tural values and norms, as well as individual prejudices, when interacting
with individuals of the same, or different, race, class, or gender.
My findings that some police officers’ biases negatively affect battered
women’s options for protecting themselves from abuse and leaving abusive
partners mirror cross-cultural findings (for Brazil, see Nelson 1996; Santos
2005; for China, see Tam and Tang 2005; for Mexico, see Hijar 1992; for
the United States, see Abraham 2000; Anderson et al. 2003; Wolf et al.
2003). This chapter provides ethnographic depth at the local level of Lima,
Peru, for broader cross-cultural findings of police unresponsiveness and
ineffectiveness. In the light of cross-cultural findings of inadequate police
responses, in exploring why women stay or return to abusive partners, we
should remember that, for some women, “in the absence of real protec-
tion, it is rational to want to put more faith in the promises and apologies
of their batterers” (Anderson et al. 2003). But for women like Ana and
Amada, even in the absence of these promises and apologies, there is little
or no possibility other than to stay with or return to an abusive partner.
Ack nowledgment s
A Fulbright Institute of International Education grant supported me during my ini-

tial fieldwork for this research. I am especially grateful to Jennifer Wies and Hillary
Haldane for their vision for this book and for their continuous work to bring this
book to life. I would also like to express my profound gratitude to the women in
Lima who spoke with me about their experiences at police stations, and to the police
officers who took the time to speak with me and explain how things work.
Notes
1. The law applies to violence between spouses, convivientes (those living together
but not legally married), former spouses, former convivientes, and those who have
had children together, even if the man and woman never lived together.
2. The full text of the mission statement of the women’s police stations is available
at the police stations’ official website, www.comisariademujeres.org.pe.
3. Writing on the revictimization of battered women in women’s police stations
in Brazil, Hautzinger (2007, 29) notes that “when police perceive that female
complainants themselves originate from sectors of the population they identify
as marginal, they frequently direct considerable attention to pointing out to the

women how the improper or immoral lives they lead set them up for the abuses
they experience.”
4. In Mexico, many women prefer not to report their partner’s violence against
them because of the legal problems and extended bureaucratic requirements
women face when trying to file a claim (Hijar 1992). In Peru, many women face
a similar situation.
Works Cited
Press.
Anderson, Michael, Paulette M. Gillig, Marilyn Sitaker, Kathy McCloskey, Kathleen
Malloy, and Nancy Grigsby. 2003. “Why Doesn’t She Just Leave?”: A Descriptive
Study of Victim Reported Impediments to Her Safety. Journal of Family Violence
18 (3): 151–55.
Boesten, Jelke. 2006. Pushing Back the Boundaries: Social Policy, Domestic Vio-
lence, and Women’s Organizations in Peru. Journal of Latin American Studies 38
(2): 355–78.
Coker, Ann, Keith Davis, Ileana Arias, Sujata Desai, Maureen Sanderson, Heather
Brandt, and Paige Smith. 2002. Physical and Mental Health Effects of Intimate
Partner Violence for Men and Women. American Journal of Preventive Medicine
23 (4): 260–68.
DeKeseredy, Walter, and Carolyn Joseph. 2006. Separation and/or Divorce Sexual
Assault in Rural Ohio: Preliminary Results of an Exploratory Study. Violence
against Women 12 (3): 301–11.
El Comercio. 2009. Solo las Mujeres Policías Dirigirán Tránsito en Lima, February
28.
Espinoza Matos, Maria Jesus. 2001. Violencia en la Familia en Lima y el Callao.
Lima: Ediciones del Congreso del Perú.
Fernández, Graciela, and Richard Webb. 2002. Perú en Números 2002. Lima: Insti-
tuto Cuánto.
Flake, Dallan F. 2005. Individual, Family, and Community Risk Markers for Domes-
tic Violence in Peru. Violence against Women 11 (3): 353–73.
Frohmann, Lisa. 1998. Constituting Power in Sexual Assault Cases: Prosecutorial
Strategies for Victim Management. Social Problems 45 (3): 393–408.
Grimaldo, Mirian Pilar. 2008. Valores en un Grupo de Policias de Transito de la Ciu-
dad de Lima, Peru. Revista Diversitas 4 (2): 291–304.
Güezmes, Ana, Nancy Palomino, and Miguel Ramos. 2002. Violencia Sexual y Fisica
Contra las Mujeres en el Perú. Lima: Flora Tristan.
Hijar, Martha. 1992. Violencia y Lesiones. Salud Pública 15:15–23.

Human Rights Watch. 1999. “Peru.” In Human Rights Watch World Report 2000,
517. New York: Human Rights Watch.
Instituto de Defensa Legal. 2004. Perfil del Policia Peruano. Lima: Instituto de De-
fensa Legal.
La República. 2001. PNP Inicia Cacería en Piuria Para Atrapar al “Policia del Año.”
January 21.
———. 2009. Mil 600 Mujeres Policías Controlarán Tránsito en Lima. Novem-
ber 3.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses. In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. C.
T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres, 51–80. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Morrison, Andrew, and Maria Loreto Biehl. 1999. Too Close to Home: Domestic Vio-
lence in the Americas. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.
Movimiento Manuela Ramos. 2007. Evaluación de la Ruta Critica del Sistema
Â�Political-Judicial en los Casos de Violencia Familiar en los Distritos de San Juan
de Miraflores, Villa El Salvador, y Villa Maria del Triunfo. Lima: Movimiento
Manuela Ramos.
Nelson, Sara. 1996. Constructing and Negotiating Gender in Women’s Police Sta-
tions in Brazil. Latin American Perspectives 23 (1): 131–48.
Panchanadeswaran, Subadra, and Catherine Koverola. 2005. The Voices of Battered
Women in India. Violence against Women 11 (6): 736–58.
Ríos, José Maria García, and Giulia Tamayo. 1990. Mujer y Varón: Vida Cotidiana,
Violencia, y Justicia: Tres Miradas desde El Agustino, 1977–1984–1990. Lima: Edi-
ciones Raíces y Alas.
Sagot, Montserrat. 2005. The Critical Path of Women Affected by Family Violence
in Latin America. Violence against Women 11 (10): 1292–1318.
Santos, Cecília MacDowell. 2005. Women’s Police Stations: Gender, Violence, and Jus-
tice in São Paulo, Brazil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tam, Suet Yan, and Catherine So-Kum Tang. 2005. Comparing Wife Abuse Percep-
tions between Chinese Police Officers and Social Workers. Journal of Family Vio-
lence 20 (1): 23–38.
Wolf, Marsha, Uyen Ly, Margaret A. Hobart, and Mary A. Kernic. 2003. Barriers to
Seeking Police Help for Intimate Partner Violence. Journal of Family Violence 18
(2): 121–29.
Yanaylle, Maria Elena. 1996. “Tiene Ventiocho Años y Aún es Virgen: Femineidad
y Estereotipo de la Mujer sin Pareja.” In Detrás de la Puerta: Hombres y Mujeres
en el Perú de Hoy, ed. Ruiz-Bravo, Patricia, 73–90. Lima: Pontificia Universidad
Católica del Perú.
7
Child Welfare and Domestic
Violence Workers’ Cultural
Models of Domestic Violence:
An Ethnographic Examination
Cyleste C. Collins
The Violence against Women Act (VAWA), first passed in the United States
in 1994 and reauthorized in 2000 and 2005, and the policy changes that
resulted have helped bring public and institutional attention to gender-
based violence. An entire network of social services has been created to
respond to the issues victims of gender-based violence face. Although most
victims of gender-based violence never seek direct assistance relating to
their victimization (Brookoff et al. 1997), the possibility that they will en-
counter frontline workers in the mainstream social service system at some
point is high (Bell 2003). These workers, as victims’ first points of contact
with mainstream social services, have the potential for helping victims in
several ways.
Frontline workers, defined here as human service professionals working
in child welfare offices or domestic violence offices, can help shape victims’
ideas about domestic violence, whether or not they self-identify as victims
(Grauwiler 2008), as well as connecting victims to critical services (Purvin
2007).1 These professionals also have the potential to retraumatize victims
and their families further by responding to them by blaming or judging
them for their predicaments (Danis and Lockhart 2003; Purvin 2007).
A number of studies have found that it is common for frontline workers
to hold biases and believe stereotypes about domestic violence (Bograd
1982; Danis and Lockhart 2003; Ross and Glisson 1991). Such biases and
stereotypes might be made manifest by workers’ failing to identify victims
with whom they come into contact, actively discounting their experiences,
107
outwardly blaming them, or simply not referring known victims to ser-

vices that can help them (Eisikovits and Buchbinder 1996; Kok 2001).
Some research has suggested that tackling these issues requires iden-
tifying workers’ ideas about the causes of and appropriate treatment for
domestic violence (e.g., Davis 1984; Davis and Carlson 1981; Henderson
2001; Minsky-Kelly et al. 2005), but the question of workers’ beliefs about
domestic violence has become more complex since the passage of the
VAWA as the awareness of domestic violence has become more commonÂ�
place. Screening programs and trainings in these organizations have in-
creased because different human service areas, especially welfare offices
and health care facilities, have been identified as important potential refer-
ral sources. Some programs train their frontline workers on the dynamics
of domestic violence, the barriers that victims of domestic violence en-
counter, and available services and teach them how to identify victims and
offer appropriate referrals when they come into mainstream social service
agencies for help.
Despite the implementation of trainings about domestic violence to
increase referral rates, studies are still finding that relatively few domestic
violence victims make use of available services and programs (Brookoff
et al. 1997). Whether victims do not receive referrals to available services
through the mainstream social service systems with which they come into
contact (Kok 2001, Levin 2001) or whether they choose not to use the
available services, the discrepancy between estimates of the numbers of
victims who enter the welfare system and those who take part in domestic
violence services suggests that victims might not be aware of these services
and programs.
Some welfare offices have addressed the low referral problem by train-
ing staff to screen for domestic violence by placing domestic violence ad-
vocates in welfare offices. Once victims are identified, they are referred to
these advocates. The practice of incorporating domestic violence advocates
in welfare offices is still relatively new, but the success of such programs
so far has been limited. For example, research has found that only small
numbers of victims tend to be referred to these advocates (Kok 2001), and
that while some advocates are seen as being very helpful in navigating the
system, others are unclear with victims about the variety of services, forms,
and requirements needed to obtain services and do not refer clients to
outside programs (Postmus 2004).
Several studies have found that even introducing domestic violence ad-
vocates into welfare agencies can be problematic. Saunders and colleagues
(2005) found that victims can have such poor relationships with their wel-
Domestic Violence Workers’ Cultural Models of Domestic Violenceâ•…â•… 109
fare case managers that they are afraid to reveal their victimization or they
may be pessimistic about being believed or helped if they do disclose their
abusive situations. Other recent work has suggested that while collabora-
tions between domestic violence and child welfare agencies are increasingly
common, those relationships do not always translate to changes in practice
(Banks et al. 2009).
It might be that increased attention to domestic violence issues
through training has made workers more aware of common domestic vio-
lence stereoÂ�types even while they continue to believe them. Training often
focuses on myths surrounding domestic violence, and this focus might
sensitize workers about the most appropriate ways to talk about domestic
violence, even if their underlying beliefs do not actually change. Thus,
although social service professionals such as welfare workers might not
directly endorse domestic violence stereotypes (e.g., that the victim is at
fault for her plight), domestic violence and welfare workers tend to misun-
derstand one another and appear at times to work at cross-purposes.
Domestic violence research and services have a long history of concern
about collaboration and communication between different human service
sectors. Much of this research has been large-scale and focused on iden-
tifying areas of difference using surveys (Davis 1984; Davis and Carlson
1981; Worden and Carlson 2005). The aforementioned increases in ser-
vice provider knowledge about domestic violence, however, suggests that
traditional survey methodologies might not be the most appropriate way
to tap into providers’ underlying domestic violence beliefs. Much previous
research in this area has lacked a strong theoretical orientation and has
relied on the results from surveys.
While surveys are often useful in understanding broad outlines of an is-
sue, and can allow the researcher to generalize results when sampling large
populations, they have several drawbacks. Chief among these drawbacks
is the assumption that the researcher and informant share ideas about the
domain of interest, in this instance, domestic violence. Typically, the re-
searcher defines the terms of the domain and asks informants to respond to
questions related to that topic. The counterpart to a strict quantitative ap-
proach is pure qualitative research that explores informants’ experiences in
a more open-ended format that allows informants’ own ideas and perspec-
tives to emerge. The following research combines qualitative and quantita-
tive approaches and methods to investigate two distinct groups of workers’
beliefs using data collection techniques and analysis that reveal perspec-
tives of informants in their own words through ethnography with the goal
of uncovering workers’ underlying beliefs about domestic violence.
Theoretical Orientation: Cognitive Anthropology

and the Cultural Consensus Model
This study adopts an emic point of view, in which the informant’s own
perspective and language are used, rather than that of the researcher. Such
an approach makes few assumptions about how the informant thinks of
or perceives the world. The theoretical orientation is rooted in cultural
consensus theory (see Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986) and employs
the concept of “cultural models,” defined as socially distributed, shared
schematic representations of reality that are used in thinking and behavior
(Shore 1996). While culture here is defined as shared knowledge, sharing
frequently varies both between and within informant groups; that is, intraÂ�
cultural diversity is common (Pelto and Pelto 1975). A cultural model,
then, has both shared components and unique, idiosyncratic components.
The premise is that if we can better understand the distribution of cul-
tural models and how they influence behavior, we can potentially work to
change that behavior.
The cultural consensus model developed by Romney, Weller, and
Batchelder (1986) has been useful in previous studies that have examined
the relationships between culture, health, and health behavior (Chavez et
al. 1995; Chavez et al. 2001; Dressler, Dos Santos, and Balieiro 1996),
culture and poverty (Dressler et al. 2004; Dressler et al. 2007), and culture
in organizations (Caulkins and Hyatt 1999; Jaskyte and Dressler 2004). In
this study, the cultural consensus model was used to assess frontline work-
ers’ cultural models of domestic violence.
From the Front Lines: Service Providers’ Beliefs

about the Causes of Domestic Violence
Recent research using the cultural consensus model supports the idea that
different human service providers share beliefs on some aspects of the
causes of domestic violence but disagree on others. A study of college stu-
dents’ beliefs about the causes of domestic violence found that social work
students think about particular dimensions of the causes of domestic vio-
lence differently from other students (see Collins and Dressler 2008a). The
follow-up to that study expanded the sample to include professional social
workers and other human service professionals (see Collins 2005; Collins
and Dressler 2008b). The research discussed in this chapter is part of that
larger study, in which the extent to which different professionals share
ideas about domestic violence was explored. The research was designed as
a local-level ethnographic analysis and was conducted in four stages. Data
were collected using free lists, pile sorts, and ratings—methods frequently
used in cognitive anthropology in general, and cultural models research
in particular (see Weller and Romney 1988). Here I describe the findings
for two of the most important groups of service providers to victims of
domestic violence: child welfare workers and domestic violence workers.
In the first stage of the research, informants were interviewed about
what they believed causes domestic violence. Informants generated lists of
causes. Domestic violence workers’ lists tended to be shorter than those
of other workers and included terms that were macrostructural, including
“weak policy,” “inadequate support systems,” and “power and control.”
In contrast, child welfare workers’ lists revealed that they thought about
domestic violence in terms of micro issues, most frequently listing terms
related to individual characteristics, such as addiction and mental health,
especially drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness. On one hand, all
child welfare workers listed drug use/abuse and alcohol abuse as causes of
domestic violence, while no domestic violence workers did. On the other
hand, every domestic violence worker informant listed power and control
as causes of domestic violence, while no child welfare workers listed power,
and only one listed control as a possible cause. These initial differences in
domestic violence and child welfare workers’ beliefs about domestic vio-
lence suggested not only that the two groups might think about domestic
violence in fundamentally different ways but also that their interaction
with victims could thus be affected. This idea continued to be explored
through the subsequent stages of the research.
In the second stage of the research, informants were asked to organize
their ideas more formally by completing pile sorts and, in semi-structured
interviews, identifying overarching themes that they used in thinking
about the causes of domestic violence generated in the first stage. The
findings from this second stage of the research confirmed those from the
first phase; here, domestic violence workers offered explanations that were
fundamentally different than those of child welfare workers for how they
grouped the causes of domestic violence. Specifically, child welfare workers
tended to identify particular terms, including “low self-esteem,” “depres-
sion,” and “blaming oneself ” as characteristics of victims, while domestic
violence workers described those same terms as applying to victims, but as
a result of experiencing domestic violence. Thus, domestic violence work-
ers tended to be more specific, locating the terms in the context of the
victim’s domestic violence relationship as well as in a temporal context.
In another example, terms such as “job strains,” “money problems,” and

“family pressures” were described as “tensions leading to victimization,”
“characteristics typical of victim experiences,” or an “explanation for why
victims stay.” Domestic violence workers also tended to focus on macro-
structural factors, such as acceptance of violence in the culture, gender in-
equality, inadequate support systems, and weak social policy as key causes
of domestic violence, while child welfare workers tended to see these is-
sues as irrelevant to domestic violence. While cultural consensus and other
analyses (see Collins and Dressler 2008b for details) demonstrated that
child welfare workers strongly agreed with one another with regard to how
important different factors are in causing and contributing to domestic
violence, post hoc analyses indicated that domestic violence workers’ and
child welfare workers’ overall beliefs about importance were statistically
significantly different, and in fact, did not overlap.
Investigating exactly what the two groups of workers disagreed on
revealed that child welfare workers tended to rate alcohol abuse, anger,
power, poverty, drug use/abuse, stress, and witnessing abuse as important
contributors to domestic violence, while domestic violence workers tended
to rate these terms as much less important (see Figure 7.1). Also, as dem-
onstrated in an earlier stage of the research, the two groups of workers con-
ceptualized the roles that these terms played in divergent ways, a difference
the quantitative analyses were unable to detect. Thus, follow-up in-depth
interviews sought to explore those differences in greater detail.
In the fourth stage of the research, frontline workers whose cultural
consensus scores from the larger study indicated the greatest divergence of
beliefs were selected and interviewed about how their ideas about domestic
violence developed and how they use them in their everyday work. The
interviews were conducted to examine, explore, and flesh out child welfare
and domestic violence workers’ differing beliefs about domestic violence,
and how these beliefs are put into practice on a micro level with their clients.
Four domestic violence workers and two child welfare worker infor-
mants participated in the interview process. Domestic violence and child
welfare workers were selected for inclusion for interviews based on their
scores on a measure of agreement through cultural consensus analysis
(Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986). The two child welfare workers
with the highest cultural competence scores (and who therefore demon-
strated strong agreement with the “typical” child welfare worker in the
sample) were asked to participate in the interviews.
The domestic violence workers were also selected for inclusion in
the study on the basis of their cultural competence scores from the third
30.00 Infidelity
Low self -esteem
Accepting status quo
Poor coping skills Depression
Anger Jealousy
Money problems
Stress
Mental illness
Poverty Job strains
20.00
Alcohol abuse Power

Domestic violence key
Drug use/abuse Family pressures Education
Having been abused Stigma

Fear
Denial
Witnessing abuse
10.00
Blaming self
Feeling isolated or alone Inadequate support
Financial dependence Accepting violence in culture Low public awareness
Control Gender inequality Weak policy

Relationship problems
0.00
0.00 10.00 20.00 30.00
Child welfare key
Figure 7.1. Domestic violence and child welfare workers’ beliefs about the
importance of different factors in contributing to domestic violence. The circles
represent the divergence of agreement between the two groups. The circle in the
lower right quadrant is a group of terms that domestic violence workers thought were
very important but child welfare workers thought were very unimportant as causes
of domestic violence. The upper left circle is the group of terms that child welfare
workers rated as very important but domestic violence workers did not. Items closer
to zero are considered more important, and items further from zero are less important.
stage of the research. Two domestic violence workers who had the highest
level of agreement with child welfare workers and two who had the lowest
levels of agreement were selected for interviews. The child welfare work-
ers were recruited from the local branch of the state welfare agency. The
domestic violence workers worked for a local nonprofit domestic violence
agency or were employees of a local university’s women’s resource center.
The interviews were conducted to examine the extent to which infor-
mants’ beliefs about domestic violence were evident in their descriptions
of their interactions with domestic violence clients in their everyday work.
The frontline workers were asked several questions, including how they
developed their ideas about domestic violence in their work and how they
deal with “typical” domestic violence cases, as well as how they see them-
selves as different than other human service professionals on domestic vio-
lence issues. The interviews were tape recorded, transcribed, and analyzed
for thematic content.
Frontline Beliefs about Domestic Violence: Structural/Social

Constraints in Contrast to Personal/Individual Choices
Consistent with findings from the previous stages of the research, domestic
violence and child welfare workers responded differently when asked to
talk in a relatively unstructured way about their beliefs about domestic
violence. One child welfare worker expressed substantial cynicism about
her experiences with victims of domestic violence. She said:
I guess, you know, what, what I have just found here .â•¯.â•¯. is even if the
woman leaves the male because he’s abusing her, she’s likely to find an-
other male to abuse her. That’s most likely who she’s gonna end up with
next time.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. You know, and we joke here .â•¯.â•¯. is there a club they all go
to? .â•¯.â•¯. I mean, how do these women find these men that were just like
the husband they just left? What is it?
In acknowledging that victims sometimes return to abusive relationships,

this worker recognized that domestic violence tends to be cyclical. At the
same time, her comment, while said partly in jest, suggests that child welfare
workers might not fully understand the dynamics of domestic violence and
may even hold domestic violence victims at least partly responsible for their
abusive relationships, especially if they end up with another abusive partner.
This same child welfare worker went further, stating that, at some point,
child welfare workers have to draw the line in working with domestic vio-
lence victims and referring to the possible consequences of their clients’
remaining in a domestic violence situation. She said, “And so I think, you
know, yes, there have been workers here that have said, you have got to leave
this man or we’re going to have to take the children.” The workers seem to
suggest that domestic violence victims practically choose violent partners
and that in so doing, willfully endanger their children. This response is
consistent with the findings in previous stages of the research in which child
welfare workers identified causes of domestic violence that lie within the
victim or the abuser themselves, or within both, and may also, or instead,
have pointed to character or personality flaws, as opposed to situational or
structural constraints that might lead to domestic violence.
In contrast to child welfare workers’ seeing victims of domestic vio-
lence as being flawed for “choosing” violent relationships, and feeling
cynical about their experiences with domestic violence cases, domestic vio-
lence workers talked about how the circumstances of domestic violence
victims’ lives trap them in their relationships. This difference was revealed
in one domestic violence worker’s discussion of her experiences working
with community groups to improve their understandings of victims in
particular and domestic violence in general.
And I have a lot of people, when I go and speak to churches .â•¯.â•¯. the older
women, they’ll say, well, I just don’t understand why she just doesn’t take
her kids and leave. You know, I just do not understand that. And I ex-
plain to ’em .â•¯.â•¯. flat out, look, if you didn’t have a job and you didn’t have
any money, and you had two kids, no friends, and no family, and you
didn’t know how you were gonna feed your kids tomorrow, I wouldn’t go,
either. You know? And so that’s how I try to explain it to them.
Such an explanation demonstrates a deeper, more complex under-

standing of the issue than that of the child welfare worker. In particular,
domestic violence workers mentioned having a heightened awareness of
the issue, and that, especially as educators, they were keenly aware of how
other people perceive domestic violence. This comment also speaks directly
to the structural constraints that domestic violence workers identified
throughout the study. While domestic violence workers steered away from
discussing characteristics of victims that contribute to domestic violence,
they commonly pointed out structural and social constraints as well as the
circumstances of victims’ lives that maintained the domestic violence rela-
tionship or kept victims from leaving. It also indicates domestic violence
workers’ desire to change people’s image of the typical domestic violence
victim, emphasizing that domestic violence is not due to personal or indi-
vidual flaws but instead to structural constraints. As one domestic violence
worker said, “That’s not how it is, it affects all races, all socioeconomic,
you know, groups. I mean, it affects everybody, and we see that, because
we deal with it every day.” Such a response suggests the domestic violence
worker’s desire to encourage others to identify with and empathize with
the victim and her situation.
Putting Beliefs into Practice: Establishing Rapport

in Contrast to Making Referrals
The workers were asked to describe the procedures they follow in dealing
with domestic violence cases to better understand how their beliefs are
manifest in their daily work. The domestic violence workers emphasized

the importance of establishing rapport, specifically, showing victims that
they care and dealing with them using sensitivity and compassion. They
discussed the importance of timing, and that an assessment of victims’
situation, especially their safety, is critical. The domestic violence workers
said that assisting victims in creating a safety plan is a priority, and that
educating them about domestic violence, while quickly identifying needs,
potential options, and appropriate resources are all part of their protocol.
The first meeting is considered essential for establishing rapport, gaining
victims’ trust, and making them comfortable enough to open up about
their situations. They also try to send victims the message that they are
not to blame for their situations. One worker in particular said that her
first priority is making victims and their children feel comfortable in the
shelter, assuring them they are safe, supporting them, and making sure
they know their situation is not their fault. She said:
You have to be very careful, as to, you know, when the lady walk[s] in
the door, certainly she’s afraid, .â•¯.â•¯. [she] don’t know if she made the right
decisions, .â•¯.â•¯. and she’s looking to you for a lot of answers; .â•¯.â•¯. you gonna
have to be very sensitive, .â•¯.â•¯. caring, compassion[ate], all of that .â•¯.â•¯. as
to when you first make contact with them, especially [for] them coming
into shelter; .â•¯.â•¯. time is important .â•¯.â•¯. when they come in .â•¯.â•¯. you have to
move very quickly as far as if they need a PFA [order for protection from
abuse], .â•¯.â•¯. or they just need safety, and you have to really assure them
that they are safe, that he’s not going to come here to take them or take
the children.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. and so, that’s the main thing, and then, just to kinda
educate them. So, your time with them and what you say to them is very
important, the initial contact with them is very important.
Repeating the theme of the importance of the initial contact, another

domestic violence worker said that the first thing she does is “tell them it’s
not their fault, let them talk to tell about [their] situation so I can identify
what types of abuse it is and make a more informed decision on what to
do, what services are available. Let them know they aren’t alone.” The do-
mestic violence workers noted that this first contact is important because
of victims’ vulnerability following a domestic violence episode. This vul-
nerability involved their emotional states as well as their physical safety.
The domestic violence workers frequently referred to the cycle of vio-
lence, pointing out that following a domestic violence incident, there is
typically a “honeymoon” period in which the abuser apologizes and the
couple reconciles before the tension builds and the cycle of violence is
repeated. Reaching, educating, and otherwise “arming” victims with re-
sources, whether they return to their abusive relationship, enter shelter, or
choose another course of action was considered important. One domestic
violence worker put it this way: “I don’t think that we need to make deci-
sions for clients or pass judgment because of something, .â•¯.â•¯. [but we hope
to] “help them be self-sufficient.” This response suggests that one goal of
domestic violence workers is to empower victims to take control of their
lives and reduce dependence on their abusers.
While domestic violence workers talked about focusing on providing
support and being caring and compassionate toward victims, they also em-
phasized that a key part of their job is providing education about domes-
tic violence and resources—both to victims and to members of the wider
community. One worker said that “educating about domestic violence,
what it is, explaining the laws, giving information” is at least as important
as any other function of her job. Domestic violence workers often refer-
enced their own domestic violence–specific education and training and
how it had shaped their views and affected their work. In particular, they
discussed learning that the causes of domestic violence are rooted in power
and control and embedded in social issues, such as gender inequality and
patriarchy, and that social and structural factors, rather than individual
ones, tend to keep victims and perpetrators locked in abuse cycles.
Child welfare workers described their approaches to victims somewhat
differently. One worker hesitated in describing the “typical” procedures
used, saying that there were no specific policies in place in her agency.
I don’t know that we have procedures that if we are aware of this, we do

this, this, and this. We do try to be very, very sensitive; .â•¯.â•¯. we try to be
very sensitive that when we’re offering services, we’re not also putting
them in a situation where they may get abused that night, or indicating
that something might be going on.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. And we try to provide training
to staff around here .â•¯.â•¯. [about] how to begin to recognize some of those
signs, and how to respond without creating a worse environment.
This worker does mention the need for sensitivity and concern with vic-
tim safety, especially being aware of the potential for repeated abuse. This
worker went on to say, “If they decide to go back, then it’s their choice, but
I think we have to give them different options.”
One worker mentioned that her first priority is to counsel victims to
leave the situation at least temporarily. In contrast to the domestic violence
workers’ approach of offering support, educating, establishing rapport,

and developing a safety plan, child welfare workers placed the onus on the
victims for taking responsibility for their situations. One worker described
her approach this way:
For most of the women I’ve encountered, I always encourage them [that]
the first thing they need to do is get out.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Each situation is different, it
may not always be where they need to divorce so much as it is they need
to separate from each other and get some personal issues worked out on
both sides .â•¯.â•¯. and then I always make sure that I have information of
where they can go to get resources. [The local domestic violence agency]
is the most obvious choice in this town, but I just tell them, get on the
Internet, call people, do what you have to do.
This statement contrasts with that of the domestic violence workers who
counseled women that they were not at fault. Although most child wel-
fare workers were trained social workers, their approaches focused little
on establishing an atmosphere of trust and compassion. Instead victims
were told they must protect their children “or else.” Child welfare workers,
unsurprisingly, always brought the child’s safety into the picture and often
referred to the possibility of working with the perpetrator as well as the
victim and her child or children. Another child welfare worker said:
The social workers here, myself included, are very much aware of some
resources in the community, both for the perpetrator and for the victim.
Obviously, because we work with children and our focus and mandate is
the protection of children, if it’s a child that’s involved or who could be
the .â•¯.â•¯. recipient of the abuse, even accidental, if we feel like the children
can’t be protected, then we’re going to proceed with our protocol, and the
protocol of the court for removing those children.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Even when .â•¯.â•¯. we
have an adult victim who chooses to stay with the perpetrator .â•¯.â•¯. we have
children that want to return to the home, you know—we begin then, to
really try to take a look at, through our treatment team meetings, and the
service plan that we develop .â•¯.â•¯. really helping the family, uh, both the
adult victim and adult perpetrator, of, what were the factors that lead up
to this? What pushed you to the point that you reacted in this way? .â•¯.â•¯.
[We begin] to really take a look at, was it stresses related to job, is it men-
tal limitations that limit your ability to parent children at a difficult stage,
you know, trying to really take a look, a broader look, at what leads up to
the abuse .â•¯.â•¯. then try to match up what services need to address that.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯.
We’ve really been able to open up and take an individualized look at each
family and each situation, and, and if it’s job readiness classes, or if it’s
anger management classes, or if it’s an appointment at the employment
office, you know, is it housing? Is it transportation, you know, are these
some of the things that lead up to it, versus the idea that I’ve just got a
mean, controlling person who chooses to maintain control by beatin’ the
fool out of somebody.
In keeping with earlier stages of the study, child welfare workers tended
to focus on personal and individual factors leading to domestic violence.
Child welfare workers did, however, consider a family’s individual stressors
that are related to social and structural causes, such as economic issues,
but they specifically avoided the explanations of power and control and
other larger, social and structural issues that domestic violence workers
overwhelmingly thought were so important. These issues were simply not
at the forefront of child welfare workers’ awareness in domestic violence
cases.
Divergent Perspectives: Domestic

Violence and Child Welfare Workers
Although domestic violence and child welfare workers are employed in

different agencies and have very different jobs, they all have contact with
families involved in domestic violence situations. Because the sample of
child welfare workers was drawn from a large, central child welfare agency,
most had very similar job duties and worked together on specific cases.
They were trained social workers, and as such, their focus was specific
to protecting children and not necessarily supporting or comforting the
child’s parent or parents. As one child welfare worker put it, “I think when
it comes to the children, we react a little bit faster than we do with the
adults, because children, for the most part, are pretty helpless, and if their
parents are not going to look out for them, then someone else has to. So, as
far as the children go, .â•¯.â•¯. I feel like we’re always on top of that.” Another
worker said:
Since I work with children, it’s of .â•¯.â•¯. the utmost importance that the
children are in a safe, stable home. And in order to do that, they can’t be
that unless the parents are stable.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I would always .â•¯.â•¯. get the parents
to do what they need to do to get things together, because I couldn’t, I
wouldn’t feel comfortable, or any of them that I know would feel com-
fortable, putting a child back in a home where the parents are fighting
with each other and have undealt-with issues.
In keeping with their social work training, child welfare workers viewed
the family as a system. Domestic violence workers, in contrast, dealt pri-
marily with making the adult female victim and her children safe and did
not mention working with male perpetrators at all. Thus, the child welfare
workers mentioned seeing the entire family as their client, while domestic
violence workers see the mother and her children as their primary client
or clients.
When asked how child welfare workers are different or unique, one
child welfare worker said, “[Domestic violence workers are] just looking
at this one perspective of it, whereas with us, we’re trained more so to look
at the big picture.” One child welfare worker said she believed that child
welfare workers tended to take a more “holistic” approach than domestic
violence workers, focusing on the whole family rather than one or two
individuals within the family. Another child welfare worker explained that
child welfare workers’ approach is different than that of other social service
professionals because child welfare workers tend to see the interconnected-
ness of people’s troubles:
It may just be, depending on what your profession is, you’re just look-
ing at this one perspective of it, whereas with us, we’re trained more so
to look at the big picture.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. It’s not that one piece stands alone, every
piece somehow connects, .â•¯.â•¯. and I think that may be what one difference
is.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I know particularly from the medical profession from what I’ve
seen, is, they focused on this child needs this, this child needs that, and
they’re not seeing other things that came with it.
Domestic violence workers disagreed most with the child welfare

workers’ characterization of themselves as taking a more holistic view of
domestic violence situations and the family system. One domestic vio-
lence worker, when asked about her thoughts on how child welfare work-
ers handle domestic violence cases, said: “Well, it’s their job to make sure
those kids are safe. You know, and that’s, that’s the main thing, I mean,
I’m sure .â•¯.â•¯. domestic violence is one of .â•¯.â•¯. the main reason[s] they take
kids into foster care.” Domestic violence workers acknowledged that it was
perfectly understandable for child welfare workers to be most concerned
about children because of their jobs. One domestic violence worker, in
particular, when asked to comment about the difference between child

welfare workers and domestic violence workers, said:
With the child welfare worker, they’re working with the children, and .â•¯.â•¯.
removing children from the home and things like that.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. As a domestic
violence worker, you’re seeing the whole picture.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. You get the story
from the victim.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Working with the children, I get to .â•¯.â•¯. hear the
children’s stories, and know .â•¯.â•¯. [how] they see, and how they feel about
certain things.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. I work with children to try to see how the domestic
violence is actually affecting them, and whether it’s causing them prob-
lems in school, or if they’re acting out violently, or things like that.
Thus, when asked directly about differences between the two groups, do-
mestic violence workers and child welfare workers responded that they
are quite different. Their responses revealed, however, that the two groups
actually have very similar styles, since both seek to support the family as
a whole.
Finding Common Ground: Bridging Gaps

and Breaking Down Barriers
Overall, the findings from the interviews indicated that child welfare
workers’ approaches to domestic violence cases were more focused on chil-
dren and making referrals outside of their agency, while domestic violence
workers saw a need for educating both victims and the community about
the cyclical nature of domestic violence, identifying possible resources,
focusing on their advocacy role, and perhaps most important, providing
much-needed emotional support. With regard to overall causes, the inter-
views revealed that child welfare workers think about domestic violence
in terms of family systems problems, while domestic violence workers,
as women’s advocates, tend to approach the issue with regard to gender
inequality and society’s role in perpetuating intimate partner violence. Do-
mestic violence workers also focused on the adult victim, offering counsel-
ing and support, working with her on her legal needs and helping her craft
a safety plan. Child welfare workers, in contrast, tended to focus on ensur-
ing that the children in the family were protected, with substantially less
emphasis on the adult victim. Child welfare workers discussed the need for
identifying resources for individual case needs, as well as filing protective
services reports, if necessary. Child welfare workers said that they tend to
look directly at what lead up to the domestic violence situation, as long

as those factors are in line with their own beliefs about domestic violence,
and factors that cause people to want to stay together, all issues that speak
directly to those examined in this study.
This study helped to construct a picture of the different ways frontline
workers—specifically, child welfare and domestic violence workers—think
about and approach domestic victims. As demonstrated in earlier stages
of the study and supported by the interviews of the last stage, frontline
workers show distinct differences in their beliefs, approach, and techniques
for dealing with domestic violence cases, from their initial thoughts on the
causes of domestic violence, to how they organize, categorize, and evaluate
their ideas about the causes, and finally, to how they use these ideas in their
everyday work. The beliefs that emerged from the quantitative and qualita-
tive data provide support for the idea that different frontline workers think
about domestic violence differently and tend to approach such cases in
fundamentally different ways in their everyday work.
Compared with earlier studies, the multiple, iterative stages of the re-
search better illuminated the similarities and differences between the two
groups of frontline workers and provided a stronger basis from which to
observe the differences between the two groups. While the two groups of
workers did not necessarily have different cultural models, the elements of
their models did vary, demonstrating intracultural diversity. Furthermore,
the findings indicated that domestic violence workers’ models were more
elaborate, suggesting that the model might be contested—that is, that it
contains elements of both agreement and disagreement (see Caulkins and
Hyatt 1999). Comparisons between the two groups of workers through-
out the study are summarized in Table 7.1.
This research supports previous studies that have found that victims
fear that child welfare workers, because their primary focus is on the well-
being of the child, might be vigilant to possible threats to child safety and
therefore be more likely to recommend that the child be removed from
the home in domestic violence cases (e.g., Postmus 2004; Purvin 2007).
The workers in this study indicated that they concentrate on the needs of
children and that a mother’s staying in an abusive relationship is a matter
of grave concern. Child welfare workers’ discussions of individual char-
acter flaws and pathologies as principal causes of domestic violence and
domestic violence workers’ focus on structural causes in their interviews
were also consistent with quantitative findings earlier in the study. The
finding that welfare workers tended to be uncertain or uneducated about
the aspects of domestic violence is also supported by previous phases of the
Table 7.1. Comparing Domestic Violence and Child

Welfare Workers throughout Stages of the Study
Domestic violence
Stage/method objective workers Child welfare workers
1. Free listing; generating Power and control Alcohol abuse and drug
causes of domestic violence as major causes use/abuse as major causes
2. Pile sorts; interviews; Structural causes; Personal/individual

organizing causes temporal arrangement pathology
of issues
3. Taking surveys; Opposite agreement Strong, consistent

analyzing, sharing with child welfare; small agreement with one
group of university another on importance
women’s resource center
with strong agreement
4. Interviewing; Providing comfort, Counsel women about

employing ideas safe environment for getting out, protecting
disclosure; focus on children; focus on
compassion, safety referrals
plans, education
Overall Focus on adult victim; Focus on children;

in-depth understanding cynicism about dynamics
of dynamics of domestic of domestic violence;
violence; expanded, simplified categorizations,
elaborated descriptions, descriptions of
with understanding of domestic violence
other people’s views/biases
research. Other research has come to the same conclusions. Collins and
Dressler (2008b), for example, found that social work students tended to
be skeptical about the efficacy of domestic violence interventions and to
blame the violence on personal, internal issues in the person rather than
in their environments. Some scholars have argued that it is imperative
that child welfare workers understand the structural conditions that make
victims vulnerable to domestic violence (e.g., Purvin 2007) as well as to
the welfare system itself (Pélissier Kingfisher 1996).
The cycle of violence has an impact on frontline workers as they work

to continually assess the victims’ needs and most appropriate interven-
tions, meeting each victim where she is in her process. Child welfare work-
ers had a good deal of experience with domestic violence victims. Though
they acknowledged that victims commonly leave and then return to their
abusive partners multiple times before leaving permanently, this behavior
was perceived as abnormal, and in some sense, victims were seen as willing
partners in their abuse. The workers thus displayed little true understand-
ing of the dynamics of violence relationships. These workers expressed
their frustration when victims returned to abusive partners or were abused
in different relationships, but domestic violence workers tended to view
this same phenomenon in a larger context of the cycle of violence and the
trajectory of the victims’ experiences.
Furthermore, in working with domestic violence victims and their
families, both sets of workers found themselves in a position to reproduce
and maintain stereotypes, ideologies, and folk models about the causes of
domestic violence, or to counter those mainstream beliefs with education
and information about the issue. It is clear that despite undergoing train-
ing (conducted by domestic violence workers), not only do child welfare
workers continue to hold stereotypical and misinformed ideologies about
victims but also they are likely to communicate those messages to victims
themselves in their frontline work. Domestic violence workers, in contrast,
see it as explicitly their role to educate victims and others in a direct effort
to counteract such ideas. These efforts are also clearly reflected in their
frontline work, according to their own accounts.
The use of theory, methods, data collection techniques, and analytic
approaches taken from the ethnographic analytic techniques of cognitive
anthropology helps to give a voice to the experiences of frontline work-
ers working on the local level. This study has uncovered, using their own
words, the vocabulary these workers use to think about what causes domes-
tic violence, how they organize these thoughts, the extent to which their
ideas coincide with those of other workers, and perhaps most important,
how these ideas play out in their everyday work with victims of domes-
tic violence. The rigor of the anthropological data collection techniques
employed here combined with a theoretical approach speaks directly to
understanding how child welfare and domestic violence workers concep-
tualize the interplay between micro and macro issues. A trend in medical
and social services is toward frontline workers’ addressing people’s needs
according to evidence-based principles rather than the assumptions that
researchers and practitioners make about people in practice. Because of
this new focus, training continues to be important. Emic approaches such

as those described in this research can inform such efforts and ultimately
improve the plight of victims of domestic violence.
The findings from this ethnographic analysis suggest that despite in-
creased training and knowledge, workers still experience frustrations and
perhaps a basic disagreement on a fundamental level regarding the causes
of domestic violence. For child welfare workers to continue to attribute do-
mestic violence to individual flaws, such as alcohol abuse, low self-esteem,
and mental illness is potentially dangerous to victims as domestic violence
continues to be pathologized rather than characterized as an important
structural issue rooted in social inequalities (Magen, Conroy, and Del Tufo
2000). Recent research on training child protective workers on domestic
violence indicates that these workers often lack knowledge about domestic
violence lethality and how to deal with frustrations in domestic violence
cases (Button and Payne 2009).
Frontline workers in the two professions examined here must unite and
strive to improve services for domestic violence victims, recognizing that
an improved situation for a domestic violence victim who is a mother will
necessarily improve the situation for the child as well. Offering support,
advocacy, and meeting the client where she is are critical features of such
an improved service model. Hope lies in promising collaborative models
being piloted in cities across the country (see Friend, Shlonsky, and Lam-
bert 2008; Moles 2008). Advances in training, implementing improved
intensive (and extensive) screening procedures (Hazen et al. 2007; Magen,
Conroy, and Del Tufo 2000; Moles 2008), and continuing education are
excellent starts toward the goal of bridging the divide between two sets
of frontline workers working in the same locality that can do much to
improve the lots of traumatized families.
Ack nowledgment s
This research was conducted with the funding from the University of Alabama
GraduÂ�ate Council Fellowship. The work would have been impossible without the
cooperation of my informants, many of whom work to improve the lives of women
and children in Alabama who are struggling financially, emotionally, and in other
ways. Some informants gave me a great deal of their time, participating in all four
phases of the research, and for that I am very grateful. Special thanks go to the Ala-
bama Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Alabama Department of Human
Resources, and the DCH Health System for their support and allowing me to use
their facilities. Many thanks go to William Dressler for his guidance, and Kathy
Oths, Jo Pryce, Debra Nelson-Gardell, Paul Stuart, and Daniel Goldmark for their
helpful advice and comments at various stages of this research.
Note
1. The term domestic violence is used throughout this study because it is the termi-
nology with which workers were most familiar. The agencies that served victims
of gender-based violence used the term within the agency and in their communi-
cations with the community.
Works Cited
Banks, Duren, Andrea L. Hazen, Jeffrey H. Coben, Kathleen Wang, and Janet D.
Griffith. 2009. Collaboration between Child Welfare Agencies and Domestic
Violence Service Providers: Relationship with Child Welfare Policies and Prac-
tices for Addressing Domestic Violence. Children and Youth Services Review 31
(5): 497–505.
Bell, Holly F. 2003. Cycles within Cycles: Domestic Violence, Welfare, and Low-
Wage Work. Violence against Women 9 (10): 1245–62.
Bograd, Michele. 1982. Battered Women, Cultural Myths, and Clinical Interven-
tions: A Feminist Analysis. Women and Therapy 1 (3): 69–77.
Brookoff, Daniel, Kimberly K. O’Brien, Charles S. Cook, Terry D. Thompson, and
Charles Williams. 1997. Characteristics of Participants in Domestic Violence:
Assessment at the Scene of Domestic Assault. Journal of the American Medical As-
sociation 277 (17): 1369–73.
Button, Deanna, and Brian K. Payne. 2009. Training Child Protective Services
Workers about Domestic Violence: Needs, Strategies, and Barriers. Children and
Youth Services Review 31 (3): 364–70.
Caulkins, Douglas, and Susan B. Hyatt. 1999. Using Consensus Analysis to Measure
Cultural Diversity in Organizations and Social Movements. Field Methods 11
(1): 5–26.
Chavez, Leo R., F. Allan Hubbell, Juliet M. McMullin, Rebecca G. Martinez, and
Shiraz I. Mishra. 1995. Structure and Meaning in Models of Breast and Cervi-
cal Cancer Risk Factors: A Comparison of Perceptions among Latinas, Anglo
Women, and Physicians. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9 (1): 40–74.
Chavez, Leo, Juliet M. McMullin, Shiraz I. Mishra, and F. Allan Hubbell. 2001.
Beliefs Matter: Cultural Beliefs and the Use of Cervical Cancer-Screening Tests.
Collins, Cyleste C. 2005. Cultural Models of Domestic Violence: Perspectives of
Human Service Professionals. PhD diss., University of Alabama.
Collins, Cyleste C., and William W. Dressler. 2008a. Cultural Consensus and Cul-
tural Diversity: A Mixed Methods Investigation of Human Service Providers’

Models of Domestic Violence. Journal of Mixed Methods Research 2 (4): 362–87.
———. 2008b. Cultural Models of Domestic Violence: Perspectives of Social Work
and Anthropology Students. Journal of Social Work Education 44 (2): 53–74.
Danis, Fran, and Lettie L. Lockhart. 2003. Domestic Violence and Social Work Edu-
cation: What Do We Know, What Do We Need to Know? Journal of Social Work
Education 39 (2): 215–24.
Davis, Liane V. 1984. Beliefs of Service Providers about Abused Women and Abus-
ing Men. Social Work 29 (3): 243–51.
Davis, Liane V., and B. E. Carlson. 1981. Attitudes of Service Providers toward Do-
mestic Violence. Social Work Research and Abstracts 26 (4): 34–39.
Dressler, William W., Mauro C. Balieiro, Rosane P. Ribeiro, and José Ernesto Dos
Santos. 2007. Cultural Consonance and Psychological Distress: Examining the
Associations in Multiple Cultural Domains. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 31
(2): 195–224.
Dressler, William W., José Ernesto Dos Santos, and Mauro C. Balieiro. 1996. Study-
ing Diversity and Sharing in Culture: An Example of Lifestyle in Brazil. Journal
of Anthropological Research 52 (3): 331–53.
Dressler, William W., Rosane P. Ribeiro, Mauro C. Balieiro, Kathryn S. Oths, and
José Ernesto Dos Santos. 2004. Eating, Drinking, and Being Depressed: The
Social, Cultural, and Psychological Context of Alcohol Consumption and Nutri-
tion in a Brazilian Community. Social Science and Medicine 59 (4): 709–20.
Eisikovits, Zvi C., and Eli Buchbinder. 1996. Pathways to Disenchantment: Battered
Women’s Views of Their Social Workers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 11 (3):
425–40.
Friend, Colleen, Aron Shlonsky, and Liz Lambert. 2008. From Evolving Discourses
to New Practice Approaches in Domestic Violence and Child Protective Services.
Children and Youth Services Review 30 (6): 689–98.
Grauwiler, Peggy. 2008. Voices of Women: Perspectives on Decision-Making and
the Management of Partner Violence. Children and Youth Services Review 30 (3):
311–22.
Hazen, Andrea L., Cynthia D. Connelly, Jeffrey L. Edleson, Kelly J. Kelleher, John
A. Landverk, Jeffrey H. Coven, Richard P. Barth, Jennifer McGeehan, Jennifer
A. Rolls, and Melanie A. Nuszkowski. 2007. Assessment of Intimate Partner
Violence by Child Welfare Services. Children and Youth Services Review 29 (4):
490–500.
Henderson, Angela. 2001. Factors Influencing Nurses’ Responses to Abused Women:
What They Say They Do and Why They Say They Do It. Journal of Interpersonal
Violence 16 (12): 1284–1306.
Jaskyte, Kristina, and William W. Dressler. 2004. Studying Culture as an Integral
Aggregate Variable: Organizational Culture and Innovation in a Group of Non-
profit Organizations. Field Methods 16 (3): 265–84.
Kok, Anne C. 2001. Economic Advocacy for Survivors of Domestic Violence. Affilia
16 (2): 180–97.
Levin, Rebekah. 2001. Less Than Ideal: The Reality of Implementing a Welfare-to-
Work Program for Domestic Violence Victims and Survivors in Collaboration
with the TANF Department. Violence against Women 7 (2): 211–21.
Magen, Randy H., Kathryn Conroy, and Alisa Del Tufo. 2000. Domestic Violence
in Child Welfare Preventative Services: Results from an Intake Screening. Chil-
dren and Youth Services Review 22 (3, 4): 251–74.
Minsky-Kelly, Debbie, L. Kevin Hamberger, Deborah A. Pape, and Marie Wolff.
2005. We’ve Had Training, Now What? Qualitative Analysis of Barriers to Do-
mestic Violence Screening and Referral in a Health Care Setting. Journal of Inter-
personal Violence 20 (10): 1288–1309.
Moles, Kerry. 2008. Bridging the Divide between Child Welfare and Domestic Vio-
lence Services: Deconstructing the Change Process. Children and Youth Services
Review 30 (6): 674–88.
Pélissier Kingfisher, C. 1996. Women in the American Welfare Trap. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Pelto, Pertti J., and Gretel H. Pelto. 1975. Intra-Cultural Diversity: Some Theoretical
Issues. American Ethnologist 2 (1): 1–18.
Postmus, Judy L. 2004. Battered and on Welfare: The Experiences of Women with
the Family Violence Option. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 31 (2):
113–23.
Purvin, Diane M. 2007. At the Crossroads and in the Crosshairs: Social Welfare
Policy and Low-Income Women’s Vulnerability to Domestic Violence. Social
Problems 54 (2): 188–210.
Romney, A. Kimball, Susan C. Weller, and William H. Batchelder. 1986. Culture as
Consensus: A Theory of Culture and Informant Accuracy. American Anthropolo-
gist 88 (2): 313–38.
Ross, Martha, and Charles Glisson. 1991. Bias in Social Work Intervention with
Battered Women. Journal of Social Service Research 14 (3, 4): 79–105.
Saunders, Daniel G., Mark C. Holter, Lisa C. Pahl, Richard M. Tolman, and Col-
leen E. Kenna. 2005. TANF Workers’ Responses to Battered Women and the
Impact of Brief Worker Training: What Survivors Report. Violence against
Women 11 (2): 227–54.
Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Mean-
ing. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weller, Susan C., and A. Kimball Romney. 1988. Systematic Data Collection. Thou-
sand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Worden, Allisa Pollitz, and Bonnie E. Carlson. 2005. Attitudes and Beliefs about
Domestic Violence: Results of a Public Opinion Survey. Journal of Interpersonal
Violence 20 (10): 1219–43.
8
Gender-Based Violence:
Perspectives from the Male
European Front Line
Uwe Jacobs
This chapter is primarily a first-person account of direct service work and

an attempt to reflect on motivations and issues encountered. It is second-
arily the perspective of one who has created and directed a program for
survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) who have fled to seek political
asylum protection in the United States. This chapter is issued from a rela-
tively protected and privileged front line and removed from the primary
trauma of GBV.
During the past five years, my colleagues and I at Survivors Inter-
national, in San Francisco, California, have assisted several hundred
asylum seekers who suffered rape, trafficking, domestic violence, female
genital cutting, and persecution on account of their gender, sexual ori-
entation, or transgender identity. GBV, from our point of view, includes
all these forms of violence inflicted on women and sexual minorities in
the context of political, social, cultural, and economic structures that per-
petuate oppression, exploitation, and violence through either direct harm
or the refusal to protect against violence. We are health professionals and
social service providers—frontline workers—who assist refugee survivors
of GBV by providing medical and psychological treatment, case manage-
ment, advocacy, and access to self-help activities and resources. We work
with immigration attorneys who represent these survivors in their quest
to obtain political asylum, and we provide medical-legal and psycho-legal
documentation and perform expert witness testimony in immigration
courts. Through our research, comparative studies, and firsthand experi-
ences, we have demonstrated that the effects of GBV are equivalent to
those of political torture perpetrated by state actors.
129
Our perspective on GBV is one of conceptualizing the rights of women

and sexual minorities as inalienable human rights, where freedom from
violence and persecution has to be demanded and achieved as a restorative
act and within the context of international human rights law. Survivors of
GBV, from this perspective, are entitled to refugee status under U.S. asy-
lum law and deserve access to medical and psycho-social assistance as they
rebuild their lives in their new country of refuge. This conceptualization is
not to be separated from the context of our work, which takes place in a
country of refuge and exclusively with survivors, rather than in communi-
ties where the violence took place. While this context is in some important
respects still adversarial, nevertheless it holds a certain position of privilege
because no compromises need to be made with local community actors in
the survivors’ communities of origin. Survivors have no further need to get
along with husbands, other family members they depend on, or officials
who have refused to protect them. In cases where abusive husbands have
come after survivors in the United States, they are able to obtain protec-
tion for themselves and their children from local law enforcement.
The roughly twenty health professionals at Survivors International,
consisting predominantly of clinical psychologists and clinical social work-
ers, may here be defined as frontline workers in the sense that we come
face-to-face with survivors of GBV in order to engage with them in a pro-
cess of examining their histories of violence and its consequences in both
clinical and forensic settings. In many cases, in-depth confrontations with
the details of survivors’ trauma histories result directly from the pressures
of the legal claim to asylum. Survivors cannot ask for protection without
a full disclosure of their victimization, which tends to be retraumatizing
and shameful. One of the principal challenges for frontline workers in
this situation is to engage survivors in a paradigm of forced exposure and
investigation, which is illustrated and analyzed in a later section.
The Political Context
For most of my time spent in the field of human rights, I have focused
on the issue of torture as perpetrated by agents of the state. In my over
ten years of work with survivors of torture, during which time I became
a specialist in evaluating political asylum seekers, I was increasingly faced
with individuals who had fled their home countries after having been
abused by their husbands and other family members, as well as by others
in their communities. Like political refugees, the women and gay men
Perspectives from the Male European Front Lineâ•…â•… 131
have no freedom, protection, or recourse where they came from, and their
lives were shattered by cruelty and violence. As some of us in the torture
rehabilitation field began to serve more of these survivors, it soon became
apparent to us that the level of violence they had endured was often on par
with what many survivors of state-sponsored torture had experienced. We
had to ask ourselves whether we would do the right thing and respond.
We decided to add GBV to the mission of our organization and to seek
specific funding for undertaking more work in this arena. The broadening
of our mission was made in the hope that a single-issue organization that
had worked exclusively on torture for fifteen years would be able to com-
municate that GBV is a form of torture, even though it may not meet a
legal definition that requires perpetrators to be state actors.
Refugee and asylum law in the United States and the world over was
not written with the rights of women and sexual minorities in mind. The
international laws that define the status of refugees and govern their pro-
tection came out of the experiences of the Holocaust and other genocidal
campaigns, as well as the use of torture by dictatorial regimes. In this
context, GBV appeared to be a domestic affair until women and sexual
minorities began to flee their countries of origin to save their lives and
build lives in freedom elsewhere. The effort to bring asylum protection
to survivors of GBV has required much ground-breaking advocacy and
fundamental rethinking of what may constitute a form of persecution
(Musalo and Knight 2000). In the United States, asylum seekers must
demonstrate a “well-founded fear of persecution” on account of race, re-
ligion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social
group.” The legal battles on behalf of GBV survivors have revolved around
the argument that they are members of particular social groups enduring
systematic persecution.
The effort to support GBV survivors is thus embedded in the power-
ful politics of immigration rights. These politics are driven by enormous
economic and ethnocultural forces. Women who flee from GBV and who
have frequently suffered from violence in a context of abject poverty are
faced with the added burden of proving, even if implicitly, that they did
not enter the United States “only” to escape from poverty, since poverty is
not grounds for asylum protection. The double jeopardy of gender-based
injustice and economic injustice is thus compounded misery at home and
an added burden of proof later, when petitioning for protection abroad.
If a well-to-do woman flees violence and asks for asylum protection else-
where, she is not likely to be suspected of trumping up a “common” story
of domestic violence to obscure that she “really” came to get a job and
send money back home. She is more likely to have been educated and have
some idea of what her rights are, more likely to have access to competent
legal representation, more capable of explaining the depth and details of
her situation, and—for all these reasons—in a better position for her quest
for protection.
For GBV survivors seeking asylum, however, the price of asking for
protection is submission to painful legal, physical, and mental scrutiny.
What is known in psychology as forced exposure is usually the least helpful
thing for a victim of trauma. The confrontation with painful and shameful
memories in an adversarial legal context is retraumatizing because expo-
sure does not occur in a context of interpersonal safety or in doses that are
therapeutic. The helping mental health professional does not escape from
this equation of trading exposure for the goal of immigration relief but has
the consequences of worsening symptoms as a result of legal proceedings
on his or her hands to deal with. More important, in the process of docu-
menting the consequences of violence, we also have to ask for the story,
whether we would otherwise, in a purely therapeutic context, ask for it or
not.
Coming Face-to-Face with Violence:

Personal Reactions
In examining the personal experiences of the frontline mental health pro-

fessional in relation to GBV survivors, I begin with an ad hoc e-mail I
sent out to colleagues one evening about two years ago, here reproduced
without editing.
Dear All—
I apologize in advance for being melodramatic but I feel the urge to com-
municate about my day at the office after a 2-week absence because now
it feels less routine than it will again tomorrow. As I am writing on a
psychoÂ�logical evaluation report for a domestic violence victim from Mexico
this evening, which was due today but which the attorney had neglected
to tell me, as it is often the case, I am thinking back to the other woman
from Mexico I saw this morning, who also got savagely brutalized by her
ex-husband. It took considerable time to arrive at the decision that it was
safe to let her go and not hospitalize her in relation to her desire to kill
herself. She has made two prior attempts and she has three children to care
for. I listened for a long time to her stories about being behind on the rent,
making promises she can’t keep to her kids about buying them clothes, get-
ting cheated and abused at work, which is the street sale of flowers, about
walking the streets at night looking for work, not being able to sleep and
eat etc. It was interesting to see her arrive looking very much together and
presenting like the school teacher she used to be. She displayed a sense of
humor and intelligence and I thought that she was probably coping quite
well until I asked her about her symptoms. When she had to admit that she
had every single one of them to the max, she began to sob uncontrollably
and then launched into the account of her incredible reality, which in-
cluded the wish to end it all. Finally, I told her that I had seen many before
her on a first visit at the end of their ropes and that it usually gets better as
we tackle one problem at a time etc. She took this in and left, saying that
this gave her some hope and that she would be back. In this task, I wasn’t
alone, however. Anna is setting her up with all kinds of social service help
and she will go and get free food, clothes, medical visits etc.
Then I ran into the attorney from next door who looked ashen. I asked
him what was the matter and he told me he had just met with a woman
who survived domestic violence and he was doing her asylum case, and
how difficult these stories were. He said he decided to get into therapy for
the secondary trauma. These stories are not unusual for us at all but I see
them today in the context of working on a grant that would allow us to
continue to serve these women and to spread the message. I am running
into all kinds of resistance from my friends in the torture rehabilitation
movement who are afraid that if we do this work for survivors of gendered
persecution in an organized manner, the torture definition will be watered
down, or that the suits in Washington who fund most of our sister agen-
cies (but not us) won’t like it because they are against giving asylum on the
basis of gender claims, or that it will become further evident that some of
our sister agencies are already surreptitiously serving these survivors with
torture rehabilitation money because they, too, realize that some of these
survivors are much more affected by the violence they have suffered than
some folks who got clubbed at a demonstration and held in jail overnight
somewhere (for example).
The experience that moved the lawyer I mention to seek therapy is

typical. Who can emotionally contain the accounts of beatings, insults,
rape in front of the children, getting kicked in a pregnant abdomen to
the point of a miscarriage, being thrown down the stairs, being dragged
around the house by the hair like a rag doll and beaten to a pulp, all rolled
into the case of just one wife and experienced every day for years on end?
Can we imagine running away to avoid some form of female genital cut-
ting, seeking protection from the police, only to be raped by the police and
returned to the people who are preparing to do the cutting? Any response
ranging from rage to helplessness to despair appears merely human.
What privileges us in our role is that we can channel these difficult
emotions into responses that are highly technical and professionally orga-
nized. If all goes well in our endeavor, and it frequently does, we are able
to witness inspiring levels of resiliency and the most heartening transfor-
mations in the lives of survivors. Ultimately, I was able to provide expert
witness testimony in immigration court on behalf of one of the women I
describe in the e-mail message. She was granted immigration relief by a
compassionate judge and her former husband’s attempts to create difficul-
ties for her with the custody of her children were successfully thwarted.
She has made tremendous efforts to heal and to help her children recover
from the trauma they suffered. She brings one of her daughters, now an
adult, to our weekly support group. There she acts as a big sister for new-
comers who are beginning the same, difficult process.
The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity, and Class
In having consulted with women who work face-to-face with GBV survi-
vors, I have reflected on the power differentials that are at work in these
relationships. They include dynamics of class, gender, and ethnicity, with
the disempowerment of the survivor at the center.
A common scenario is this: a Latina went through hell in her home
country, having endured a lifetime of poverty, lack of education, and years
of severe abuse, including death threats. She makes the gut-wrenching de-
cision to leave her children with her sister and to try to enter the United
States. With what little money she has scraped together, she pays the coyote
(smuggler). The coyote gets her across the border but also rapes her. Once
she has arrived, she stays with relatives without immigration documents.
She tells no one about the depth of her past misery, keeps her head down,
and tries not to be anyone’s burden. She has never heard of political asylum
protection and simply assumes the identity of another undocumented im-
migrant living in fear of discovery and deportation.
That the survivor’s fear of deportation is also one of getting abused
or killed is rarely processed in any conscious manner. Once she discovers
that she has a right to asylum, she has missed the one-year filing deadline.
To overcome that deadline requirement, she must produce psychological
documentation that certifies “mental illness” to establish the “extraordi-

nary circumstance” that allows for the requirement to be waived. She now
has to submit to the same questions from her lawyer, the asylum officer,
the immigration judge, and the prosecutor for the government about the
details of her life and the abuse she was subjected to. Additionally, she has
to cooperate with a mental health expert.
Although this mental health expert is only trying to help, there is no
way to do that without putting her through yet another investigative
procedure: interviews, questionnaires, psychological tests, and so on. The
more thorough the examination, the more weight it stands to be given
by the adjudicator. Simple therapeutic or emotional support will not do.
Survivor and health professional are locked into an investigative process
that has both supportive and retraumatizing aspects. The frontline worker
and the client can shift to the genuine emotional concerns of the survivor
only after the force field of the legal case has been navigated.
Compared with the survivor’s situation, the one of the mental health
worker seems easy. I understand this as both a male clinician and a consul-
tant for my female colleagues. They have described to me feeling torn in all
kinds of directions. Using the example of the Latina client, my colleagues
find themselves wondering whether the client is “gaming the system” to get
legal papers. And if she were, then what? All of us struggle with becoming
the arbiter, in a sense, of how much misery and emotional suffering is
required for a case of persecution or an “extraordinary circumstance,” as if
the trauma symptoms present were not perfectly “ordinary” in these cases.
At times, I bear witness to my female colleagues’ experiences at the
front lines. I have listened to them describe both expected and unexpected
personal reactions, for instance, a colleague’s feeling critical of clients for
running away and leaving children behind, then feeling critical of her-
self for her own attitude. She may disclose to me that, at times, the seÂ�
verity of what she has heard overwhelms her, makes her cry, and gives her
nightmares.
My role then is serving as a link in a chain of empathy and support:
the survivor tells the story and cries; the clinician listens, helps and cries
sometimes, and then she tells the story, too; the consultant listens, lends
emotional and technical support, and cries less. In the end, through this
chain of solidarity, the work gets accomplished, the survivor gets her pa-
pers and improves in her suffering, and the clinicians at the front line see
the kind of change that looked unattainable some time earlier. This chain,
of which we are all a part, helps us considerably in working through trau-
matic material and in containing cynicism and burnout.
A European Male Perspective
Some of the most painful encounters with GBV survivors I have had were
with those who reacted to my male presence with either guardedness or
outright terror. I have avoided these encounters where possible or kept
them brief, conducted them in the presence of other, female staff, and
allowed them to last only long enough for necessary clarifications before
giving assurance that the survivor will be interviewed by women from this
point forward. Nevertheless, the survivor shows outward signs of fear, sits
as far away as she possibly can, seemingly ready to run, and in no way re-
lieved by assurances of safety. This kind of interaction can leave a clinician
feeling despondent because the impulse to offer help and create a support-
ive environment, with which we identify as healers, is negated. One ends
up feeling like a perpetrator, or at least someone who lacks understanding
and sensitivity. Interpersonal violence, unlike impersonal forms of trau-
matic experiences, destroys trust in fundamental ways.
One of the symptoms of secondary trauma I have observed in myself is
a kind of deep disgust I have felt with my fellow men. It reminds me of an
interview I once listened to in which a domestic violence expert was asked,
“Why do men abuse women?” and her answer was, “Because they can.” This
response reflects a kind of cynicism and misanthropy I have felt in dealing
with human rights violations generally, here directed specifically at men. It
has moved me at times to assert that men are generally unfit to advance our
civilization and that the only hope we have is to put power into the hands
of women. Such sentiment might be seen as natural, because of what we
have seen men do throughout history, but I feel that, in the end, it is a sign
of trauma and has to be analyzed as such and put into proper perspective.
More precisely, this is to say that the impulse to give up on men is not limited
to women and, since it is a psychological defense against emotional distress
and cognitive dissonance, is not likely to be helpful.
A related painful lesson has been the degree to which women are
caught up in the cycle of male domination and violence. One woman who
had tried to escape from female genital cutting and forced marriage told
the story of her grandmother’s way of telling her that her rebellion would
not be tolerated: she asked her granddaughter’s young son to urinate on
his mother’s head to show her who was boss. A good friend and female
clinician worked on this case, and she stated to me that she found this to
be one of the hardest traumatic narratives to digest. It makes me wonder,
too, whether the woman would have told me this story or not because of
my gender.
The first torture survivor I had ever worked with was an African
woman who had suffered, among other things, acts of sexual violence by
male prison guards, which she found extremely difficult to remember and
discuss. She had been referred to me by a female supervisor of mine. In do-
ing more than a year of psychotherapy with her, I came to realize that her
capacity to relate to me was more determined by the idealized relationship
she had with her father, who had, according to her, always been good to
her. By contrast, she continued to suffer from a very difficult relationship
with her mother and she had, in life in general, more trouble relating
to women than to men. I was in some ways astonished to find that this
pattern of relating, established early in life, had not been fundamentally
altered by her subsequent victimization.
Since then, I have come to see much more of the same. Many survivors
of torture and abuse retain a way of discerning who is trying to help them,
regardless of their gender, ethnicity, class, or other group characteristics.
The way in which we deal with “the other” is complicated and highly vari-
able. There is no doubt that having an individual who shares key charac-
teristics with us, whom we perceive as “our own” by our side can be invalu-
able and comforting. Women will need women and gay men will need
gay men somewhere along the path of recovery. Plenty of abused women
absolutely require female therapists, and who would wish to deny them the
need or the request? Similar considerations apply to culture, ethnicity, and
language. Still, in my experience, women have benefited from nonabusive,
healing relationships with male professionals and have reported that some
of their healing came specifically as a result of relating to a man in this way.
These truths co-exist side by side with the overwhelming facts of men’s
domination and abuse of women and these are difficult to digest. Keen
awareness of this emotionally confusing reality may help us to not get
mired in self-hate and paralysis or blind romanticism. Apart from self-
defense, the male observations offered here spring from the hope of build-
ing a common humanity, one of pluralism rather than sectarianism. Such
a conception has plenty of space for groups who take care of their own
because they are their own; it is merely not limited to this approach.
Self-conscious privilege need not deter us from being clear and direct
about the underpinnings of what we offer. The values I bring to the work
here described are grounded in the Enlightenment, and in this instance
without apology. From this point of view, no differences can be split when
it comes to the principles of liberty and equality and the necessity of ratio-
nal discourse when these issues are being settled.
Conclusion
In view of the painful material covered in these pages, it is gratifying to

end on a note of hope. The first African American President of the United
States and his administration moved to issue new guidelines for women
seeking asylum protection on the basis of domestic violence, explicitly rec-
ognizing that such women may constitute social groups eligible for protec-
tion under asylum law. There are many who will need this protection and
who depend on increased recognition of their situation by lawyers, health
professionals, and the public at large. Sadly, there will also be those who
suffered GBV but are, for any number of technical reasons, not eligible for
asylum protection. At the very least, however, increased awareness of GBV
can lead to efforts at general support and healing.
The work toward universal protection of human rights is ultimately
one of an emerging consciousness in an emerging global community. The
rights to freedom of women and sexual minorities today remain less clear
in the global citizen’s mind than the rights of political prisoners or the
rights of children. The efforts of frontline advocates and healers combat-
ing GBV have a critical function in forging a network of international
solidarity that will gradually change this imbalance. The domination and
abuse of women and girls and sexual minorities will be seen as inextricably
linked to tyranny in general and will serve as tyranny’s markers, along with
censorship of the press, prisoners of conscience and torture. As existing
gender and religious power structures hold on, this vision is still summarily
rejected in many parts of the world. However, individual rights to freedom
are indivisible and so is the idea that no one group has the right to domi-
nate another. There are no exceptions, for if there were, they would negate
the entire principle.
For this simple reason, further progress in building communities that
reject and seek to abolish GBV is inevitable. In the future, the efforts of
the frontline workers described in this book will likely be prized by soÂ�cieÂ�
ties that have come to consider the relative absence of GBV as one more
indicator of what it means to be compassionate. Until then, the efforts to
combat and eradicate GBV must take care to be inclusive and diverse, as
diverse as the workers and projects described in this book and beyond.
Work Cited
Musalo, Karen, and Stephen Knight. 2000. Gender-Based Asylum: An Analysis of

Recent Trends. Interpreter Releases 77 (42): 1533–43.
9
Cultural Politics of a Global/Local
Health Program for Battered
Women in Vietnam
Lynn Kwiatkowski
As many anthropologists and other scholars have shown, wife battering is

a practice that is shaped by complex cultural and social contexts involving
historical and modern cultural ideologies, and economic, political, and
other social processes (Adelman 2003, 2004; Alonso 2002; Burbank 1994;
Erez, Adelman, and Gregory 2009; Gutmann 1996; Hautzinger 2007;
McClusky 2001; McWilliams 1998; Merry 2006, 2009; Mrsevic 2000;
Plesset 2006). In Vietnam, discourses of wife battering and domestic vio-
lence have become more public and diverse in recent years. Wife battering
can no longer be understood only through local cultural logics particular
to contemporary Vietnamese communities. Instead, transnational dis-
courses of wife battering have penetrated several areas of Vietnam society
and have intersected with local ideologies and practices.
In recent years, personnel from international organizations, local and
national government institutions, and local nongovernment organizations
(NGOs) have been working collaboratively in Vietnam to address the
needs of battered women. Recognizing that battered women’s health and
well-being need to be addressed within a larger social context, a new inter-
national health program in Hanoi, the Violence against Women Health
Program, combines hospital and clinic care with community-based pre-
vention programs.1 Through a local-level, ethnographic analysis, this chap-
ter analyzes the perspectives of the participants in this international health
program, including international organization personnel, local NGO
workers, health professionals, and community leaders, to understand the
diverse ways that global and local cultural ideologies intersect as the pro-
gram’s participants attempt to accommodate these sometimes competing
139
ideologies. The approach to analyzing the perspectives of individuals work-

ing with battered women that I take in this chapter is situated in the realm
of anthropological studies of gender violence that have recently addressed
the transnational circulation of discourses of gender violence.
In Vietnam, the way in which people conceptualize what they con-
sider to be appropriate responses to wife battering is shifting (Romedenne
and Loi 2006). This shift is occurring particularly as Vietnamese scholars,
government-sponsored mass organization leaders, and local Vietnamese
NGO workers move between national boundaries and accumulate and
offer knowledge and resources that address wife battering, and generate
transnational networks of support. Sally Engle Merry (2006) has discussed
this transnational circulation of people and ideas through the international
human rights movement against violence to women. She asserts that this
international social movement “provides a valuable site for understanding
how new categories of meaning emerge and are applied to social practices
around the world” (1). In Vietnam, new cultural conceptions of gender
and violence have been emerging with the transnational circulation of dis-
courses of gender violence (Merry 2006, 2009).
The recent expansion in Vietnam, since the mid-1980s, of inter-
national health and development organizations and NGOs has also been
an important catalyst of change in moral conceptions of and responses
to wife battering. Addressing these transnational processes in a local-level
ethnographic study that assesses the perspectives of gender-based-violence
frontline workers is crucial to understanding wife battering in contempo-
rary Vietnam. In this instance, the frontline workers include local NGO-
based professional counselors, health personnel, and community leaders
who directly assist battered women through the international health pro-
gram. This approach can also help us to understand the interplay between
international, national, and local community realms, as individuals and
groups aiding battered women and preventing wife battering negotiate
contested meanings of this form of gender-based violence in societies. It
can also help us to better conceptualize wife battering as an ongoing and
shifting cultural and social process that implicates actors from the global
to the local level.
An anthropological approach to the study of wife battering that con-
siders transnational processes highlights the ways that historically specific
global practices involving wife battering are played out in local communi-
ties. In Vietnam, community, state, and international actors intersect with
each other within programs that are often initiated or supported by inter-
A Global/Local Health Program for Battered Women in Vietnamâ•…â•… 141
national sponsors and are intended to reshape the experience of wife bat-
tering. In assessing changes stemming from global discourses and practices
that address wife battering, we must pay close attention to how powerful
local understandings of family and marriage, and political conceptions
of society, nation, and development held by individuals working directly
with battered women intersect with global processes.
It is also important to recognize that within one society there may be
multiple and sometimes conflicting approaches to wife battering imple-
mented by frontline workers. The emergence of multiple approaches to
wife battering may occur particularly in a period characterized by openness
to experimentation, which we can find among government institutions
in contemporary Vietnam, as well as among local NGOs that have been
emerging as part of the growing civil society in Vietnam. By addressing
this diversity, we can draw from an anthropological approach to gender
violence that asserts that culture is not a fixed entity that stands in the way
of change (Merry 2006) but that instead, the process of change can be
observed to involve cultural negotiation and contestation among a variety
of actors.
An examination of the discourses and practices of individuals and
groups involved in assisting battered women within the Violence against
Women Health Program operating in Vietnam allows for an analysis of the
intersection of global and local forces through a local-level ethnographic
analysis. For instance, state discourses and practices have played a pow-
erful role in recent decades in constructing conceptions of womanhood,
marriage, family, and wife battering in Vietnam (Pettus 2003). Yet, in re-
cent years, international health and development processes operating in
Vietnam have also emerged to play an important role in influencing and
regulating individual and collective experiences of these same conceptions.
Methodology
The analysis in this chapter is based on research I conducted during two

research periods in 2004 and 2007. During this time, I assessed inter-
national organization, government, and local NGO programs that were
addressing wife battering. I focused on an international health program
that initially was located in two communes of Hanoi and a nearby bio-
medical hospital. Later, the program expanded to another hospital and
additional communes. I conducted qualitative, ethnographic research in a
women’s counseling center of the hospital and in two of the communes in

which the program was operating. I conducted twenty-eight in-depth in-
terviews with battered women and approximately fifty in-depth interviews
with Vietnamese individuals and international health and development
personnel who were actively responding to wife battering.2
In this chapter, I examine wife battering in Vietnam as a particular
form of gender-based violence. While at times I use the term domestic
violence, I have chosen to emphasize the term wife battering in this chapter
to specify that the form of domestic violence I am addressing is husbands’
abuse of and violence against their wives. The use of this term also points
to the gendered nature of the violence I am analyzing. In Hanoi, while a
number of terms are used to discuss this form of violence, a Vietnamese
term commonly used among frontline workers, and Vietnamese people
more generally, to discuss a husband’s abuse of his wife is đánh vợ (or đánh
đập vợ). This term refers to the beating or hitting of a wife. Many frontline
workers of the international health program revealed that before partici-
pating in the program’s training they had only a limited view of what vio-
lence against a wife or violence in the family (bạo hành trong gia dình, or
bạo lực trong gia dình) directed at a wife entailed. In addition to a husband’s
beating or hitting of his wife, they now understand violence against a wife
to include sexual, emotional, and economic abuse, and a husband’s com-
mitting adultery. This perspective is held by the frontline workers I discuss
in this chapter.
Vietnam and Change
Political-economic processes in Vietnam have had a significant influence

on domestic violence, and wife battering specifically, as well as battered
women’s health (Kwiatkowski 2008). Madelaine Adelman (2004) has
identified a political economy of domestic violence that positions domestic
violence within a cultural-historical context to understand the intersec-
tion between domestic violence and the organization of the polity, the ar-
rangement of the economy, and the dominant familial ideology expressed
through a state’s policies. In Vietnam, the state has been recently under-
going a shift from a centrally planned and state subsidized economy to
a market economy that operates through state regulations (Tran and Le
1997). Policies associated with this shift, referred to as đổi mới, or Renova-
tion, were formalized by the Vietnamese state in 1986. This transition has
involved greater integration of Vietnam into the global market economy

and has also led to increased involvement of international organizations in
Vietnamese social life.
Approaches to wife battering have also been changing in Vietnamese
society in the context of this political-economic shift. While violence
perpetrated by one family member against another has been outlawed at
least since the emergence of the communist government in Vietnam, the
Vietnam National Assembly approved the first antiÂ�–domestic violence law,
called the Law on Domestic Violence Prevention and Control, in No-
vember 2007 (National Assembly 2007). Dialogues among international
organizations and local individuals and groups, including NGOs, mass
organizations, and government leaders, resulted in the development of the
new law. Participants in these dialogues included Deputies to the Viet-
nam National Assembly, international organization personnel, Vietnam-
ese scholars, local NGO personnel, health professionals, other Vietnamese
professionals, and individuals from other Asian countries who had experi-
ence with domestic violence laws and programs.
Also, personnel working through state agencies and state-supported
organizations had long been the only members of institutions available
to provide assistance to battered women and their families. By the late
1990s, international and local health and development organizations be-
gan to establish programs in greater numbers in the country. By the early
twenty-first century, many international organizations and local NGOs
had implemented programs that address wife battering, as well as other
forms of gender-based violence.
Wife Battering and International Health

and Development Programs
The promotion of Vietnamese women’s health through the Violence

against Women Health Program was initiated in a Hanoi district in 2002.
I visited the program in 2004 and 2007. It has been supported by two
international organizations and the government’s Hanoi Health Service
and has involved counseling and other forms of assistance from a local
NGO. Funding from the Vietnam Women’s Union has also been drawn
on by volunteers to aid in supporting community-level clubs organized in
communes participating in the international health program.3 The pro-
gram provided education for government biomedical health personnel
employed by a general hospital of the Hanoi District, enabling them to

offer a wide spectrum of services to battered women. Some of the trainings
were conducted by foreigners, including an Australian social worker and
an American counselor. The program taught the health personnel to iden-
tify battering, to provide basic counseling for battered women, and to refer
the women to other health personnel who were trained to counsel battered
women more extensively. This training aimed to reorient the Vietnamese
biomedical personnel’s common practice of providing only physical treat-
ment for battered women and introduced a contemporary Western health
and social approach to aiding battered women. The program also involved
education for individuals who would train other health personnel; and the
creation of a curriculum for this education, monitoring indicators, and
medical record forms for treatment of battered women and other patients
who experienced gender-based violence.
The program also established a women’s counseling center on the hos-
pital grounds. The program trained and then employed counselors in the
women’s counseling center, to whom health personnel referred battered
and other women who were in need of counseling. Although rare, spouses
and men who batter could also be counseled at the center.
In addition to the hospital-based resources, the international health
program trained health personnel at nearby commune health clinics to
counsel and care for battered women who live in the communes and co-
ordinate their services with other local government officials. In the same
communes, the program also established women’s and men’s clubs that
addressed and tried to prevent wife battering. This program included en-
suring that battered women in the communes received appropriate health
care and social services.
Within two of these communes where I conducted research, members
of the local Women’s Union had been addressing wife battering before
the establishment of the international health program. In recent years, the
work of the local Women’s Union members in this area has included pro-
viding information to women about their legal rights, assisting battered
women, reporting some cases of battering to police officers, and partici-
pating in government reconciliation committees. In wife battering cases,
government reconciliation committees have been oriented toward ending
gender violence perpetrated by a husband and reconciling the spouses (Vu,
Vu, and Nguyen 1999).
This international health program was a pilot project that, in 2006,
was extended to other Vietnamese communities, with, as I noted earlier, a
new counseling center having been established in another Hanoi hospital

and community-level programs linked to this counseling center estab-
lished in additional communes. Funding for this project, which included
two phases and evaluations of the project, ended in 2009. Personnel from
hospitals outside of Hanoi also have requested information from this pro-
gram, to establish their own health program to address wife battering in
their province.
Choice
In discussing gender violence, Merry (2009) argues that we must under-

stand interpersonal violence, such as wife abuse, in the context of larger
systems of power and inequality, and other forms of institutional or so-
cial violence. Further, international discourses of gender violence, such as
United Nations discourses, as well as some local government and NGO
gender discourses, frame gender violence as a human rights violation. For
instance, in Vietnam, a representative of the international organization
that funded the health program for battered women said to me that while
the project was institutionally under the reproductive health rubric, she
viewed domestic violence more as a human rights issue. Merry (2006, 220)
also wrote that “human rights are part of a distinctive modernist vision
of the good and just society that emphasizes autonomy, choice, equality,
secularism, and protection of the body.” Susan Bordo (1997) argues that a
contemporary popular postmodern discourse about the body in the United
States emphasizes and celebrates individual choice and self-determination
in a wide range of contexts and criticizes this view for effacing the mate-
rial and social realities that shape and constrain the choices we are able to
make.
Additionally, in discussing development processes in Nepal, Stacy
Leigh Pigg (1997, 281) argues that development programs do not “act on
a stable field of indigenous understandings and practices.” Thus, in Viet-
nam, cultural ideologies and practices associated with gender, marriage,
and violence are not fixed or homogeneous. Therefore, new conceptions
of wife battering being introduced into Vietnam society through inter-
national organizations are contributing to ongoing constructions of these
cultural ideologies. For instance, Vietnamese women’s ability to make
independent choices, as well as the kinds of choices women are able to
make, has expanded over the past century. Still, cultural norms and po-
litical and economic realities have constrained many women’s ability to

make choices. Following Bordo, Vietnamese women’s choices, therefore,
are not completely free and self-determined.
This point is relevant since choice is a key term found in the inter-
national organization personnel’s discourses about wife battering. The
concept of choice has introduced a new way of conceptualizing how to
approach battered women and the violence the women are facing. One
example of this emphasis on choice is found in a 2001 document entitled
International NGO Perspectives on Reproductive Health in Vietnam: An In-
vitation to Dialogue. This document is pertinent to this discussion since
one of the contributing international organizations to this document was
the international organization that funded the health program in Hanoi
discussed here. The document, which includes domestic violence under
the rubric of reproductive health, reads, “International standards and goals
set out at the ICPD [International Conference for Population and Control
(held in Cairo in 1994)] emphasized the need for reproductive health poli-
cies and programs which highlighted choice, information and empower-
ment as key ways to ensure lasting improvements in reproductive health”
(INGOs 2001, 8).
These ideals continued to be promoted through internationally spon-
sored reproductive health and gender-based violence programs in Vietnam
during the early twenty-first century. Vietnamese counselors at the wom-
en’s counseling center have stressed the importance of providing women
with the ability to make their own choices about how to approach the
violence they are experiencing, rather than pressuring women to return to
their husbands as part of a process of reconciliation. One of the counselors
of the women’s counseling center said:
Even though some doctors and nurses referred battered women to People’s
Committees, the Women’s Union, or the police before this program was
instituted, it did not result in any improvement for the women. These
government organizations are the last to help the battered women.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. In
the People’s Committee, there were so many departments .â•¯.â•¯. [but they]
had no commitment, between the different authorities, to the management
or treatment of the battered women.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. The People’s Committee and
Women’s Union took care of battered women, but it was a cycle. When
battered women were beaten they told the Women’s Union, but then they
went home again, and they went to the reconciliation committee to keep
the peace, but things did not improve for the women.
In contrast to the government emphasis on reconciliation of husband

and wife, “the substantive development of this [international health] pro-
gram,” one of the counselors at the women’s counseling center stressed, “is
that after the women enhance their knowledge, they can choose how to
solve their problem by themselves, not by others.” A pamphlet, entitled
Guide for Health Personnel Working with Victims of Gender Violence, which
was distributed to health personnel participating in the training program,
provided the following instruction: “[Health workers] should not tell the
patient what they must do, but instead help her to learn the different op-
tions, so that she can make her own decision about the matter.”
The counselors regularly provided information to battered women who
visited their office about divorce law and laws that prohibit violence within
the family.4 The counseling center also offers free legal information and
assistance to battered women that could facilitate the process of divorcing
their husbands, if the women chose to do so. While the counselors also try
to reconcile couples, they emphasized that they prioritized focusing their
efforts on battered women’s stated choices. Allowing women to choose a
means of addressing their husband’s abuse was viewed as a key shift in ap-
proach from previous ones. This process has involved a decision to pursue
divorce for some women visiting the counseling center. For instance, one
counselor said to me, “We have helped women to obtain a divorce, as
in the case this morning, but we try to reconcile first. Mostly here, we
provide counseling about emotional issues and laws, and after we provide
the counseling, women themselves can choose to divorce or not. Their
choice of help is their own decision. We have seen many get divorced.” In
one case, a woman visited the counseling center a few times while I was
present, seeking assistance in filing for a divorce. The counselors helped
her to obtain a divorce application, and she came to the center for as-
sistance in filling out the application. The counselors told me the woman
also asked to learn how to speak in the court in a manner that would
help her to acquire a divorce. Counselors went to court proceedings with
battered women if they did not feel comfortable going alone. Sometimes
the counselors were even asked to testify on the women’s behalf. In most
cases, the testimony of the counselors, who are also physicians, focused
on women’s medical injuries. One of the counselors said at another time,
“For battered women who have some knowledge [about legal procedures],
it is not difficult for them to go to court. But for farmers who have little
knowledge, it is difficult because they do not know where to go, what their
rights are, and, with pressure from their family and emotional feelings for
their husband and children, it is very difficult.”
In 2007, a counselor said that approximately 5 to 7 percent of bat-

tered women who visited their counseling center acquired a divorce. Di-
vorce has been increasing in the nation at large. A survey, conducted by
the Vietnam government Committee for Population, Family, and Chil-
dren, was reported in 2007 to have found that the number of divorces in
Vietnam increased from twenty-two thousand in 1994 to between fifty-
three thousand and fifty-five thousand in 2005. The survey also found
that domestic violence accounted for 60 percent of the divorces (Vietnam
News 2007).
While divorce rates have been increasing in Vietnam, especially in ur-
ban areas, not all battered women may have the resources or social net-
works that would enable them to make this choice, even if they desired
to divorce. Some battered women I spoke with did not feel that they had
the economic resources or social support to live independently, or that
they would be awarded custody of their children if they divorced. Some
women held a cultural view that their children would be harmed emotion-
ally by the divorce of their parents. Women I interviewed were influenced
by personnel of government groups or institutions, or family members to
remain with their husbands. For instance, a counselor at the counseling
center said that many victims who visit the clinic would like to divorce,
but because of problems related to their economic situation, children, and
housing which are not easily solved, they must maintain their marriage.
He also said that after receiving assistance from members of the commu-
nity, including personnel of government institutions, family, or friends,
many battered women often give up their pursuit of a divorce.
Complexities of Local Responses to

International Health Approaches
As I noted earlier, anthropological approaches to examining the discourses

and practices of international health and development program partici-
pants address the complexities and contestations surrounding local inter-
pretations and appropriations of these discourses and practices. While the
program was conceived of and implemented as a holistic program that
brought health into the realm of the larger society, personnel and vol-
unteers working within the hospital and community club sectors of the
program did not always implement the program with the same orienta-
tion. Subsequently, the international organization personnel’s discourse
that emphasized allowing battered women independent choice in how to
approach the battering was not employed by volunteer leaders at the com-
munity level through the community clubs that the international health
program helped to establish.
In each commune, program participants attempted to form at least one
women’s Club for Family Happiness, and a Club for Male Farmers, which
would address the problem of gender violence. The male farmers club was
generated as a part of the larger local Farmers Union mass organization.
These clubs worked in conjunction with the hospital-based counseling
center and local government officials. One of the communes had two clubs
for women: the Club for Volunteers for Family Happiness, which included
a network of volunteers who were working with the international health
program to address and prevent wife battering; and the Club for Family
Happiness, which had as its members battered and nonbattered women,
including the members of the Club for Volunteers for Family Happiness.
The groups advocated for greater surveillance of men’s behavior in their
homes and in their interactions with their wives, by both women and men
in the commune; prevention activities; counseling of battering men; and
provision of support, counseling, and other forms of assistance to battered
women. The leaders of the women’s clubs are also commonly Women’s
Union leaders, who integrate information about wife battering into other
commune club meetings.
While the counseling center emphasized a battered woman’s choice
in deciding how to address the battering she is experiencing, the clubs
emphasized reconciliation of a battered woman with her husband, and
encouraged the women to remain within their families. Some battered
women turned to the police and the legal system or were led to these
government institutions by club leaders or leaders of the local Women’s
Union. Since leaders of the women’s clubs tended to be Women’s Union
leaders, some were also members of reconciliation committees. The club
leaders said that if a case of wife battering was very serious, they would
support divorce. But reconciliation was the most common avenue pursued
by club leaders. A professional of one of the international organizations
sponsoring the program also recognized this tendency by the club leaders
when she said, “It seems that they [the clubs] are still like the reconciliation
committee.” One leader of a women’s club said to me:
Yes, the most important thing in the program is to keep the family to-
gether. But in cases in which it is useless to keep [the family together],
then we will help them to get divorced, to be liberated. [Keeping the
family together is important] because in Vietnamese culture, the family
is the most important element in all people’s lives, that is why we want
to keep families together. If they can solve the problem in the family it is
best, not only for the Women’s Union but for all of the unions, in order
to help families to have a happy family and keep the family together; so
children will not be in a situation of living without a mother or father; to
decrease the rate of divorce; and so that children can be brought up well.
And reducing the divorce rate will help to decrease the rate of social evils.
Another women’s club leader, who was also a local Women’s Union leader,
relayed to me her concerns about battered women’s well-being following
a divorce. These concerns influenced other women’s club and Women’s
Union leaders to emphasize reconciliation of spouses in cases involving
wife battering.
The Women’s Union always reconciles [spouses] in order to maintain

families’ happiness. There are a few cases of divorce.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. Women usually
have the most disadvantages when they divorce. So we never want to
solve [wife battering] through divorce. Especially in the view of Viet-
namese people, divorced women usually have a bad reputation. They
are regarded as having had many faults, so their husbands just left them.
However, we had to solve some cases through divorce. But there are very
few cases like this.
While the clubs met with the counselors of the women’s counseling
center and medical personnel often, I interviewed several battered women
referred to me by the leaders of the women’s club and Women’s Union who
did not know about the women’s counseling center. One of the profession-
als of an international organization supporting the health program told me
that the club leaders do not regularly refer battered women to the women’s
counseling center, because they said that they handle the cases themselves.
The community has not greatly shifted its conception of the importance of
the stability of the family. Women’s Union and other government leaders
and community members continue to implement programs around the
ideas of the reconciliation of spouses and the happy family, an idea also
promoted by the government. Some battered women were still being told
by some club leaders that it was their fate to suffer in their families. The
international organization professional said about the club leaders: “I am
concerned about their capacity, since they may not have learned the [inter-
national health program] ideas. They may just work like the reconciliation
committee worked, because they have their support.”
Within the same communes, unlike the women’s club leaders, some
health clinic personnel do refer battered women to the women’s counseling
center. As one commune physician noted, in discussing the care she gives
to battered women she treats, “I talk to them and give advice. In cases of
patients who trust us, we advise them to go to the health care center and
give them the address if they still have problems .â•¯.â•¯. [the address of ] the
[women’s] counseling center.”
In contrast to the women’s club’s and Women’s Union leaders’ empha-
sis on family unity, a counselor of the women’s counseling center argued,
“in Vietnam, the family is an extended family, and maybe this is good, but
also there is pressure [from the family] that outweighs women’s rights.” The
common extended-family form in Vietnam may, in part, influence local
club members to focus on maintaining family unity, while simultaneously
working to end wife battering.
Community members targeted by international development pro-
grams are not homogeneous in their views or interests. On one hand,
women’s clubs and Women’s Union leaders do not emphasize battered
women’s making individual choices. On the other, commune-level health
clinic personnel refer women to a counseling center that prioritizes a wom-
an’s choice. We can see divergent local discourses and approaches to wife
battering among frontline workers within the same international health
program.
International program personnel and volunteers sometimes only par-
tially accept ideas introduced by the programs and, thereby, potentially
give the battered women they serve mixed and contradictory messages.
The personnel and volunteers of this international health program also
faced contradictory messages, since the new international program ap-
proach that emphasized women’s choice did not replace the government
approach. With women’s club leaders participating in both approaches
simultaneously, as club leaders and Women’s Union leaders, they seemed
to draw on the approach that they had more experience with and that
they perceived to provide a better solution, in order to maintain battered
women’s economic stability and moral social standing. Still, the women’s
club leaders drew on elements of the international health program that
they perceived to provide beneficial outcomes for battered women, such
as focusing on preventing wife battering, ending battering that women in
their communes were facing, and providing social support, health care,
and other forms of assistance to battered women. As Pigg (1997, 281)
writes, members of communities targeted by development “are already as-
suming and seeking certain kinds of relationships to development.” This
international health program demonstrates the multiple ways in which

transnational ideas and approaches introduced into a new culture can be
apprehended by local program participants.
Choice and Social Constraints
The concept of choice was integrated into the everyday implementation

of the international health program for battered women in varying ways
and degrees among a variety of actors in the program. Furthermore, per-
sonnel of the international organizations involved did not seem to con-
ceptualize battered women’s process of making choices as being located
within a broader context of social and material constraints, such as class
inequalities, or power exerted through government institutions or through
cultural ideologies of gender and family. The focus of the international
health program was specifically on gender violence. In a few cases, the
counseling center did aid women economically through the help of the
Women’s Union small loan program and local government officials’ provi-
sion of funds. These approaches, though, appeared to be limited, since
most of the women I spoke with who visited the counseling center did not
report having received economic assistance.
Even a Vietnamese counselor of the women’s counseling center said
that a serious problem women face is difficulty in financially supporting
their families if they divorced their husband. Vietnamese women’s choices
are also often made relative to or in conjunction with their families, as
Tine Gammeltoft (2007) argues in regard to many pregnant Vietnamese
women’s decision-making following their receiving a prenatal diagnosis.
Battered women I interviewed often spoke of their natal families and
whether they could depend on them for economic and moral support or
whether they and their children would pose a burden on their parents and
siblings.
The international health program club leaders at the community level
considered the negative economic and social ramifications of divorce for
battered women and drew on their experience as local Women’s Union
leaders and members of reconciliation committees to assist battered
women to reconcile with their husbands. Unless the economic and social
constraints that battered women face are considered and addressed practi-
cally within international health programs, or other programs for battered
women, local program participants may be hesitant to advocate the con-
cept of choice as they assist battered women.
NGO Personnel, Government Law,

and Women’s Rights
The contested ideas of preserving battered women’s rights and keeping

families intact through reconciliation processes were found in local Viet-
namese NGO organization perspectives as well. One local Vietnamese
leader of an NGO that was involved in training participants of the inter-
national health program had been influenced by international conceptions
of human rights. She asserted:
The Women’s Union is very good in implementing activities, but some-

times they lack skills. They are very concerned about keeping the family
together, not about individuals’ safety or human rights. They are not con-
cerned with human rights or women’s rights.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. The government officials
talk a lot about the reconciliation approach, but this approach focuses on
maintaining the marriage, and they think about the whole family. They
are not concerned with the rights of the woman, and the people who use
this approach have no skills in counseling. They just focus on analyzing
who is right and who is wrong; their counseling is not based on the rights
of those involved. They are not concerned about what they want. The
people who apply this approach have a limited knowledge about gender
and just advise women to accept the situation according to traditional
values; .â•¯.â•¯. this approach can be successful for a short time, but women
have to suffer for a long, long time. They just focus on the security of the
society, such as no fighting in the community, and they don’t see things
underneath that the woman has to suffer.
Another counselor within this local NGO said the following about
Â�government-sponsored reconciliation committee members: “If they obey
the ideology of tradition, they think it is necessary to reconcile [the couple],
and then that is what they will do. But if they know about women’s rights,
then things will be different. The main aim of all reconciliation groups will
be to do what the women want.” The local NGO leader and counselor
have adopted modern conceptions of human rights, individual bodily
safety, and choice in regard to gender-based violence. This NGO provided
another local space for conceiving of battered women’s options in terms of
human rights and choice in the international health program, ideas that
did not necessarily correspond with local community views of battered
women’s position in the family and society.
The Vietnam government provides yet another local space within which
some global discourses have been integrated with local cultural ideolo-
gies and social structures. The new Law on Domestic Violence Prevention
and Control, approved in 2007, is viewed by some as linking Vietnam to
the larger global community. For instance, one counselor of the women’s
counseling center said, “This law is a great step to respect and improve
human rights, especially for women. It proves that Vietnam now has been
integrating into the world.”
Through the new domestic violence law, the Vietnam government has
addressed some of the issues I have raised. Still, while international orga-
nization and local NGO personnel influenced the development of this
law, the international organizations’ emphasis on prioritizing battered
women’s choices is not found in the law. Instead, this new law “encour-
ages international cooperation in domestic violence and control on the
basis of equality,” while it simultaneously continues to promote reconÂ�
ciliation of conflicts and disputes through families, clans, institutions,
and grassroots reconciling teams (National Assembly 2007, 3, 5). The law
also provides for community criticism targeted at perpetrators of domes-
tic violence who are sixteen years old or over, and who have continued to
perpetrate domestic violence following attempts at reconciliation by rec-
onciliation teams.
While at least one shelter has been established by international orga-
nizations through the Women’s Union, the new domestic violence law
also encourages the organization of “reliable addresses in the community”
(National Assembly 2007, 11). These can be described as shelters or safe
houses located within communities where battered women are living, and
to which the women can go in times of crisis for temporary residence.
Reliable addresses were initiated in Vietnam by NGOs. There are different
models for these houses. The house can be that of a family in a community,
which is designated and supported by government leaders and the police
to protect battered women who seek their assistance. In some of these
houses, battered women do not usually sleep overnight, since their doing
so may be viewed as inappropriate if a married man lives in the house. But
in other models women can sleep in these houses. Some of these programs
are funded by international development organizations.
Houses designated as reliable addresses within the communities of the
battered women are viewed by many in Vietnam as more culturally ap-
propriate than shelters for battered women, since there is a lower degree
of separation of the women from their community and family. One NGO
leader pointed out that a woman is expected to live with her family, and
therefore it would be very difficult for a battered woman to reintegrate
into her community and with her family after living in a shelter, because
the woman would be living apart from both and the address of the shelter
would not be widely publicized. The NGO leader also asserted that if a
battered woman lived in a shelter and then returned home, she would face
more danger, because her husband would be angrier than he had been
before she left their home and therefore more violent.
One program has organized intervention teams, made up of local com-
munity officials, leaders, and members who are trained to counsel battered
women and men who batter and who work in conjunction with the houses
designated as reliable addresses. The intervention teams actively intervene
in wife-battering cases during a crisis. They call on the husband to join the
intervention team and his wife to solve the problem immediately, rather
than wait until a later time. Yet, there is some concern about the safety
of the battered women and the family living in houses designated as reli-
able addresses, since the batterer continues to live nearby, within the same
community.
In regard to economic problems battered women face, a section of the
new law on domestic violence states that one of the responsibilities of the
Vietnam Women’s Union is that of “Organizing vocational training, credit
and saving activities to support victims” (National Assembly 2007, 12).
This mandate for the Women’s Union may aid in increasing the limited
funds already being provided to battered women by the local Women’s
Union organizations and thereby aid in reducing the economic constraints
battered women encounter.
The government ideology of maintaining family integrity and the
government approaches that involve family and community members’ ad-
dressing the problem of domestic violence, counter the more individualistic
approaches espoused by international programs. While the international
health program encourages community participation in preventing and
eliminating domestic violence, it also advocates a more individualistic ap-
proach to decision making and conflict resolution by battered women.
It was sometimes difficult for international organization personnel to in-
tegrate these divergent views. For instance, a representative of the inter-
national organization that provided funding for the international health
program held ambivalent views of the proposed new law on domestic vio-
lence. When I spoke with her in 2007, she said:
I am frustrated that the reconciliation process is still in the law, because

they are placing an illusory happy family above individual rights. But I do
not want to exclude family needs. On the other hand, I’ve come to realize
that we need to be careful as outsiders about not recognizing the value

placed on family and community in Vietnam by dichotomizing the indi-
vidual and the family. And by taking these issues head on, we undermine
ourselves and Vietnamese local groups who may be trying to seek a deli-
cate balance, and also may themselves see things differently than us. We
need to understand the value of the family and the collectivity, and try to
think of ways to talk about it that bring out the point of reconciliation
occurring at the cost of anybody’s rights.
In this discussion, we see an international organization actor grappling

with integrating her perspectives of wife battering into the cultural and so-
cial context within which she is operating, as she introduces concepts asso-
ciating gender violence with individual human rights into Vietnam society
and implements programs that are based on these new ideologies. This
discussion depicts the kinds of culturally and politically based sÂ�truggles,
negotiations, and compromises that occur as international organization
personnel introduce transnational ideologies into new social spaces. These
kinds of cultural, political, and even economic negotiations also can be
found to occur among local frontline workers, as they interpret and imple-
ment internationally inspired programs for battered women within the
cultural and social contexts in which they work and live.
Power and Ambiguity
Some anthropologists have argued that participation in international de-

velopment programs can disempower individuals as their lives become
reorganized and managed by the development apparatus (Escobar 1995;
St. Hilaire 1993). In the international health program addressing wife bat-
tering in Vietnam, the implications of participation as personnel and as
volunteer community leaders in the program were ambiguous, with some
aspects of the program empowering these participants, and others leading
to feelings of frustration or dismay.
For instance, association with the international health program pro-
vided individuals who worked at the commune level with a new form of
authority in relation to men who battered their wives. For some female
volunteers in the clubs, overcoming their husband’s resistance to the pro-
gram accorded them the ability to exert agency in preventing wife batter-
ing. However, the infusion of Vietnamese cultural ideologies of family into
program practices, practical considerations, and problems of dependency
on national or international support simultaneously disempowered some

of the same participants.
During my research, I attended two meetings of the women’s clubs: a
Club for Volunteers for Family Happiness meeting, and a Club for Family
Happiness meeting.5 At the monthly meetings of the Club for Volunteers
for Family Happiness, women come together to share their experiences
of educating men and women about wife battering, and of intervening in
battering cases. At the Club for Family Happiness, volunteers discussed
similar issues, but in addition some battered women attending the meeting
shared their own experiences of battering. Goals of the meetings gener-
ally included learning from one another, assisting one another in problem
solving, providing support for battered women, and generating solidarity
among volunteers as they address wife battering.
Although women in Vietnamese communities may already be highly
aware of cases of wife battering within their neighborhoods, the organi-
zation and integration of the women into these state-sanctioned clubs
provided them with a legitimacy that allowed them to overtly intervene
in cases of wife battering. Members of the Vietnam Women’s Union had
the authority to intervene in cases of wife battering for decades before
the introduction of this international health program, particularly when
they served on reconciliation committees. Yet, through the mechanism of
the new women’s clubs, the women’s intervention had a different charac-
ter. Through the development of the new women’s clubs, the number of
women who were sanctioned to intervene in cases of wife battering was
greatly increased. Between fifty and sixty women attended one meeting
that I observed, and approximately thirty women, and two men, attended
another meeting I observed. One intervention strategy of the women’s
clubs is very similar to that of the Women’s Union, in that the women
assist battered women who seek out the help of the club volunteers. How-
ever, a different strategy involves club volunteers’ seeking out cases of wife
battering in their community. During a women’s Club for Volunteers for
Family Happiness meeting held in the month of July, the president of the
club said, “Women, in August, try to find more and more violence, and try
to ask other women to arrange their time to attend this meeting monthly
and weekly in the small groups. Try to counsel the husbands who are so
violent and see whether they beat their wife or not.” Through this state-
ment, women are encouraged to seek out cases of violence before battered
women request their assistance. During one of the women’s club meetings,
the president reported that women in the club had counseled fifty-one
couples during that month. One member of the club said during the meet-
ing, “Now there are more volunteers who can counsel many people and
reconcile the problems in their family.”
This international health program has allowed community women
working as volunteers to assert some authority in relation to batterers,
with their authority legitimated by the state and the internationally spon-
sored program. This authority may only entail speaking to male batterers
to alert them of the women’s awareness and surveillance of their abuse of
their wife. Yet, with the introduction of the international health program,
female volunteers, as well as male volunteers of the men’s clubs, can assert
power to change men’s violent actions toward their wives in an arena from
which they had previously felt restricted. Before their involvement in the
international health program, many of the volunteers had perceived wife
battering to be a private problem of families. Speaking about the inter-
secting work of the leaders of the international health program’s women’s
clubs and the Women’s Union, a woman who is both a women’s club and
a Women’s Union leader said, “After having this [international health]
project, we informed and mobilized women, so that now they understand
that being beaten is not their problem alone. Instead, it is necessary to
denounce the husband’s behavior and for the whole society to intervene. It
is not a private affair.”
A few women said during the club meeting that their own husbands,
or the husbands of other women, had initially prohibited their participa-
tion in the clubs. One woman said, “Some women are prohibited by their
husbands from coming to the club meetings. They are banned by their
husbands, but after some time they realize that they [their wives] should
come to the club.” Women in these cases overcame their husbands’ re-
strictions in order to pursue their own interests and needs, as women and
as members of their community. This process can also be viewed as em-
powering women as they seek to work with battered women and male
batterers.
Additionally, medical surveillance by health clinic personnel working
directly with battered women has increased in the communities targeted
by this international health program. A doctor of a commune health clinic
said that since she had received training to recognize signs of wife battering
and to respond to them, she and her fellow doctors and nurses have been
looking for and finding signs of violence on the bodies of women in their
commune. She said, “We also have a counseling center here for battered
women. People come here for an annual exam. If the doctors and nurses
find signs of violence, they transfer the women to the hospital, where the
doctors know better and more treatments to cure them, and they have
more advice to give to the women to stop the violence.” This doctor was
referring to the hospital that houses the women’s counseling center I am
addressing.
A counselor of the women’s counseling center said that the center’s staff
held meetings with government officials and mass organization leaders of
the communes for each battered woman whom they treated in order to
seek further social approaches to assisting the women. This process, in
turn, increased local government officials and leaders’ awareness of men
who batter their wives in their community, thus increasing the state’s sur-
veillance of these men. This program could potentially weaken the power
of men in the community to abuse their wives.
With their new authority to seek out wife battering, rather than pas-
sively wait for battered women to approach them, both female and male
volunteers and health personnel working directly with battered women
and men who batter have become more active in meeting battered wom-
en’s needs. Their power to effect change in the male batterers’ behavior may
be undermined to some degree, however, by the volunteers’ emphasis on
family unity over women’s choice.
A frustration expressed by the international health program club lead-
ers was the cutting, and later renewal, of program funds to help support the
activities of the commune clubs. More significant, however, was providing
club meeting participants with funds that could compensate for their loss
of work during the meeting period. One female club leader said that their
commune’s women’s Club for Family Happiness no longer functioned,
“Because after two years, the project ended, and the club was no longer ac-
tive; .â•¯.â•¯. if we want to form a club like that, we need funding.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. In fact, if
we want to be active, we have to have funding to invite experts and to give
[funds] to members who come to the meetings, since this affects the time
that they have to work.” The latter was viewed as especially important for
poor participants. The club leaders felt that the funding provided an incen-
tive for women and men to attend the club meetings. The international
health program funding had been terminated following what was later
determined to be the first phase of the program. After this initial phase,
a professional at the international organization that funded the program
said that the organization personnel decided that “the time was right and
advantageous to expand the program to two more communes and another
hospital.” Still, during the second phase of the program, club leaders said
they needed further funding. When I asked one club leader, who is also a
Women’s Union leader, whether there were changes that could be imple-
mented to improve the health care provided for battered women, she said,
“It is necessary to have funding in order to assist them, and then they will
be more enthusiastic [to attend the club meetings].”
Another difficulty the frontline workers cope with is a heavy workload.
This same club leader also said, “There are both advantages and disadvan-
tages [to the program]. The advantages are that all agencies participate in
the program and support each other, and we have the sponsorship of [the
international organization]. The difficulties are that we have much work,
which overlaps, and sometimes we feel overwhelmed.”
While the international health program is oriented toward aiding bat-
tered women, and promoting women’s ability to cope with their problems,
the difficulties that the female club leaders faced as they implemented the
program created a sense of dismay and frustration as they worked with
limited resources and time.
Conclusion
Global and local ideologies have intersected in multiple ways in Vietnam,

as diverse participants of an internationally influenced health program
working with battered women have attempted to meet and accommodate
these sometimes competing ideologies. While international organizations
are powerful forces introducing new meanings of gender inequality, gender
violence, marriage, and family into Vietnamese society, Vietnamese in-
dividuals working with battered women appropriated new concepts and
invested them with their own meanings to generate diverse and at times
competing approaches to wife battering. The international health program
has aided the battered women it served in many ways and has opened up
a new approach to addressing wife battering in both the biomedical and
community realms. Yet, while the international health program for indi-
viduals affected by gender violence advocated providing women with the
right to choose their own course of action, the program did not include
initiatives to address structural and cultural constraints, such as class in-
equalities, or power exerted through government institutions or cultural
ideologies of gender and family, on women’s ability to make choices in
a comprehensive manner. International development programs may also
have ambiguous impacts on local participants who serve as frontline work-
ers to assist battered women, such as according them new forms of power
while simultaneously limiting their ability to successfully implement the
program’s goals.
Although a focus of studies of international health and development

programs has been on local participants and workers’ responses to the pro-
grams, international organization professionals may also reinterpret their
own approaches in ways that come to meet the contemporary needs of bat-
tered women. It is important to also recognize that a single interÂ�nationally
sponsored program addressing wife battering, or gender violence more
broadly, may have different influences on battered women because of
multiple interpretations that different social actors may have of program
ideologies and approaches, and to possible changes in the views of these
actors over time.
Ack nowledgment s
I am highly grateful to Dr. Le Thi Quy, director of the Research Center for Gender
and Development, at the Hanoi University for Social Science and Humanities, and
Dr. Nguyen Thi Hoai Duc, director of the Institute for Reproductive and Family
Health, of Hanoi, who provided me an affiliation with their institutions and offered
their generous guidance and support during my research in Hanoi. I thank my re-
search assistants, Le An Ni and Trinh Phuong My, for their tremendous assistance to
me. I extend my deep appreciation to the many members of the Vietnamese com-
munities in which I conducted research who shared their knowledge and valuable
insights with me. I am also grateful for the very perceptive and helpful comments of
the editors of this volume. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Grant
Number R49/CCR811509), the Colorado Injury Control Research Center of Colo-
rado State University, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Infor-
mation Technology, Colorado State University, provided generous funding for my
research in Vietnam. This chapter’s contents are solely the responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily represent the official views of these institutions.
Notes
1. This program name and the names of organizations and individuals in this
chapter are pseudonyms, which I use to maintain the confidentiality of the indi-
viduals I interviewed.
2. I conducted additional research in Hanoi and a town in the former Ha Tay prov-
ince in 1997 and 2000, focusing on culturally informed perceptions of wife bat-
tering and masculinity. (In 2008, Ha Tay province merged with the city of Ha-
noi.) This earlier research has also informed my analysis in this chapter.
3. The Vietnam Women’s Union is a government-related mass organization that has
a network that operates throughout the country. It is “a women’s social-political
and developmental organization” that advocates for women’s rights and gender
equality (Vietnam Women’s Union 2002, 2).
4. Currently, this information includes the recently approved Law on Domestic
Violence Prevention and Control, but this law had not yet been adopted at the
time of my research.
5. I was unable to attend a meeting of a men’s club, because they met less fre-
quently than the women’s clubs, and no meetings of the men’s clubs took place
while I was conducting my research.
Works Cited
Adelman, Madelaine. 2003. The Military, Militarism, and the Militarization of Do-
mestic Violence. Violence against Women 9 (9): 1118–52.
———. 2004. The Battering State: Towards a Political Economy of Domestic Vio-
lence. Journal of Poverty 8 (3): 45–64.
Alonso, Ana Maria. 2002. “What the Strong Owe to the Weak”: Rationality, Domes-
tic Violence, and Governmentality in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. In Gender’s
Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America, ed. R. Montoya, L. J. Frazier, and
J. Hurtig, 115–34. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bordo, Susan. 1997. Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture. In The
Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, ed. R. N. Lancaster
and M. di Leonardo, 335–58. New York: Routledge.
Burbank, Victoria Katherine. 1994. Fighting Women: Anger and Aggression in Aborigi-
nal Australia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Erez, Edna, Madelaine Adelman, and Carol Gregory. 2009. Intersections of Immi-
gration and Domestic Violence: Voices of Battered Immigrant Women. Feminist
Criminology 4 (1): 32–56.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the
Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gammeltoft, Tine. 2007. Prenatal Diagnosis in Postwar Vietnam: Power, SubjecÂ�
tivity, and Citizenship. American Anthropologist 109 (1): 153–63.
Gutmann, Matthew C. 1996. The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs), Vietnam. 2001. Inter-
national NGO Perspectives on Reproductive Health in Vietnam: An Invitation
to Dialogue. Hanoi.
Kwiatkowski, Lynn. 2008. Political Economy and the Health and Vulnerability of
Battered Women in Northern Vietnam. In The Economics of Health and Well-
ness: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Donald C. Wood, special issue, Research
in Economic Anthropology 26: 199–226.
McClusky, Laura J. 2001. “Here, Our Culture Is Hard”: Stories of Domestic Violence
from a Mayan Community in Belize. Austin: University of Texas Press.
McWilliams, Monica. 1998. Violence against Women in Societies under Stress. In
Rethinking Violence against Women, ed. R. E. Dobash and R. P. Dobash, 111–40.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating Inter-
———. 2009. Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Mrsevic, Zorica. 2000. Belgrade’s SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of
Violence: A Report. In Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life
after Socialism, ed. S. Gal and G. Kligman, 370–92. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
National Assembly, Socialist Republic of Vietnam. 2007. Law on Domestic Violence
Prevention and Control, Law No.: 02/2007/QH12. Hanoi.
Pettus, Ashley. 2003. Between Sacrifice and Desire: National Identity and the Govern-
ing of Femininity in Vietnam. New York: Routledge.
Pigg, Stacy Leigh. 1997. “Found in Most Transitional Societies”: Traditional Medical
Practitioners between Culture and Development. In International Development
and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. F. Coo-
per and R. Packard, 259–90. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Plesset, Sonja. 2006. Sheltering Women: Negotiating Gender and Violence in Northern
Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Romedenne, Magali, and Vu Manh Loi. 2006. Domestic Violence: The Vietnamese
Shift. Hanoi: United Nations Population Fund and Swiss Agency for Develop-
ment Co-operation.
St. Hilaire, Colette. 1993. Canadian Aid, Women and Development: Re-baptizing
the Filipina. Ecologist 23 (2): 57–60.
Tran Thi Van Anh, and Le Ngoc Hung. 1997. Women and đổi mới in Vietnam. Ha-
noi: Woman Publishing House.
Viet Nam News. 2007. Divorce on the Rise; Spousal Abuse Blamed. June 29, p. 5.
Vietnam Women’s Union. 2002. Vietnam Women’s Union. Hanoi: Vietnam Women’s
Union.
Vu Manh Loi, Vu Tuan Huy, and Nguyen Huu Minh. 1999. Gender-Based Violence:
The Case of Viet Nam. Hanoi: World Bank in Viet Nam.
10
Global Civil Society and the
Local Costs of Belonging:
Defining Violence against
Women in Russia
Julie Hemment
In May 1998, activists from crisis centers all over Russia gathered in Mos-
cow for a conference to discuss the formalization of their thus far loose
network into a national association. The conference was a veritable gala.
I was stunned to see almost all of my Moscow-based women’s movement
acquaintances, as well as representatives of the main international founda-
tions and agencies (the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the
American Bar Association, the British Embassy, Amnesty International).
Everybody who was anybody in the field of women’s community activism
and development was there.
At the conference, the theme of universalism sounded loud. The first
speakers—mostly representatives of international agencies—emphasized
cross-cultural commonality. One of the first to the podium was a British
woman, a representative of an expatriate club and a longtime benefactor
of antiviolence campaigns. As she put it, “Violence against women is not
a Russian problem but an international problem, affecting women of all
religious and national backgrounds. We are all vulnerable to violence from
men; most of us in this room will have experienced violence at some stage
in their lives.” She offered words of encouragement to the new network—
“My point is that we were where you are now.” Her remarks were intended
to bring the women in the room together. They were met, however, with
weary frustration by some attendees. Nadya, an activist of a Moscow-based
group with whom I was well acquainted, muttered, “I always switch off
165
when foreigners speak”; another woman groaned, “Men are people too.”1
Dissent such as this erupted at the margins (during the coffee breaks, in
the corridors, in whispered asides). This remark and these objections, how-
ever, remained unheard.
This chapter focuses on interactions between Russian women’s groups
and transnational feminist campaigns during the 1990s. This vignette
highlights some of the key tensions of transnational women’s activism that
this chapter explores: the divisiveness of Western aid, the ambiguous role
of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the local costs of belong-
ing in transnational or global campaigns. During the 1990s, the campaign
against violence against women was one of the most prominent campaigns
of the Russian women’s movement. Almost all the main women’s organiza-
tions participated in it, in some form or another. (Indeed, I was attending
the Moscow conference as both researcher and advocate, representing the
women’s group I worked with to set up a crisis center.) The ubiquity of the
issue in Russia testified, however, less to local perceptions of needs than
to the success of transnational campaigns and the work of international
donor agencies. Beyond limited, elite circles, the work of crisis centers was
not understood.
This point raises thorny questions about women’s activism and social
movements in contemporary conditions of globalization. The effectiveness
of the global women’s movement surely rests on its ability to heed local
concerns. I argue, however, that the campaigns and the logic of grants
and funding that drive them impede this process. The framing of violence
against women screens out local constructions of events and deflects at-
tention from other issues of social justice, notably the material forces that
oppress women. This is a troubling outcome for a movement that intends
to challenge the global inequities that contribute to women’s marginaliza-
tion. It suggests that we need to be more attentive to the context within
which feminist initiatives are nested. Examining my own participation in
the campaigns as a Western scholar and activist, I argue that we need to
interrogate our use of Western feminist models and concepts in order to
be responsive to local knowledge and to achieve truly democratic trans-
national engagements.
Russia offers an interesting vantage point from which to interrogate
these processes. Russian women’s rights activists are relative newcomers to
the international stage; bar a few early connections during the Soviet pe-
riod, they first entered into dialogue with Western feminists following the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.2 As walls and boundaries were dis-
mantled and democratization got under way, feminist scholars and activ-
Defining Violence against Women in Russiaâ•…â•… 167
ists rushed to join in solidarity with Russian women; a mass of horizontal

relationships formed under the rubric of sister city schemes, academic ex-
changes, and later, NGO activity. This context helps to explain the tone
of the British speaker’s remarks. The excitement that was generated by the
democratic “revolutions” in the Eastern bloc gave rise to a dizzying sense
of possibility and a climate of liberal triumphalism that legitimated this
stance and these kinds of interventions.3 Contrary to what she supposes,
however, we were not where they are now. Russian women’s activism is
shaped by a distinct history and a distinct set of gender alignments. What
is more, activism around women’s issues emerged not only in the context
of the euphoria of democratic change but in the context of intense eco-
nomic dislocation, too.4 Women’s groups formed in response to the devas-
tation wrought by “shock therapy,” the market-oriented economic reforms
implemented in the early 1990s by democratic Russian politicians under
the tutelage of U.S. and western European economists. These structural
adjustment policies led to the dismantling of the social security system and
sharp cutbacks in the health care system, affecting women disproportion-
ately. These changes inform their perceptions of needs and definitions of
problems.
The best way to evaluate the effectiveness of transnational campaigns
is to examine their local manifestations; this “place-based ethnography”
does just that (Escobar 2000). Drawing on nineteen months of ethno-
graphic fieldwork conducted between 1997 and 2001, I examine the new
crisis centers from the two vantage points my research afforded me—high-Â�
profile foundation-sponsored events and interactions with provincial
women’s groups. Presenting insights gained in the context of an action
research project that I undertook with one group, this chapter highlights
local contestation about the campaigns, exploring the competing concep-
tions of the “crisis” facing Russian women that the campaigns displaced.
In highlighting these alternative constructions, it examines the extent to
which activists were able to translate the issue of gendered violence and to
root it in their concerns.
Whence the Transnational Campaigns?
Before considering these local understandings and concerns, I examine the

campaigns themselves. The presumed transparency of the issue in inter-
national development circles is interesting in itself. Since the 1990s, the
campaign against violence against women has had broad resonance across
locations. It is assumed to address a universal problem, the content of

which is taken for granted, as my opening vignette suggests.
By the late 1990s, violence against women had grown from a feminist
issue that concerned women’s groups to an international development is-
sue. It had won broad acceptance at the United Nations and is still pri-
oritized by international foundations that work with women’s community
groups. The campaigns are determinedly transnational. The formulation
(or framing, to use the language of recent social movements theory) of
violence against women is deliberately inclusive, pitched in terms that
encompass diverse social practices—from spousal abuse to female genital
mutilation. How was this change achieved?
Gendered violence has long been a concern of local women’s move-
ments. In the United States and western Europe, the battered women’s
movement was a prominent component of second wave organizing. The
first women’s crisis centers were survivor-led grassroots organizations. The
provision of shelters—secret safe houses where female victims of domestic
abuse could take temporary refuge—was central to these early campaigns.
Elsewhere, women’s groups organized around local manifestations of vio-
lence—in India around campaigns against dowry deaths, in Latin America
against the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated by authoritarian regimes.
Until the late 1980s, gendered violence was a feminist issue and was
not regarded with much seriousness at the international level. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, because of the efforts of activists of the international
women’s movement, the framing of violence against women went global.5
Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998), in their influential account of
the development of transnational advocacy networks (networks of activists
that coalesce and operate across national frontiers), explain how the issue
achieved such currency. Violence against women emerged in the 1980s as
a framing that had the power to unite women from the global North and
global South. Until that point, attempts to unify in global campaigns had
been largely unsuccessful. Women’s rights activists of North and South
had been deeply divided and unable to achieve a common agenda. While
Northern (or “first world”) feminists had been preoccupied with issues of
gender discrimination and equality, Southern (or “third world”) women
were more concerned with issues of social justice and development, which
affected both men and women, though in different ways. Violence against
women was a framing that could encompass a broad range of practices and
hence bring about dialogue between women from different locations.
Its success at the international level was due largely to the innovation
of linking women’s rights to human rights, bringing together two power-
ful constituencies for the first time—human rights activists and feminists.
Feminist activists first pushed the issue to international prominence at the
1993 Vienna UN human rights conference. Their strategizing coincided
with international concern about the systemic use of rape in war in Bos-
nia, and it was effective. In 1994, the UN High Commission on Human
Rights appointed the first special rapporteur on violence against women,
and rape in warfare was recognized as a crime against humanity by the
Hague Tribunal.
The UN Fourth World Conference on the Status of Women in Bei-
jing, 1995, was a pivotal moment for the success of the framing. Com-
bating violence against women emerged as a central policy agenda of the
international women’s movement and of international development. The
campaigns have galvanized support across diverse constituencies, among
politicians and donors. In the late 1980s major U.S. foundations decided
to make violence against women a funding priority, channeling funds to
NGOs that address the issue.6 As one American male coordinator of a
crisis center training I attended explained to his Russian trainees, “[In the
United States] we’ve found that domestic violence is an easy theme to go to
the public with. People give readily. We’re at the point where it’s politically
correct to support this type of organization.”
Clearly there is much to celebrate here. Indeed, many feminist scholars
regard the prominence of the campaigns as an unqualified success. The
campaigns have been analyzed in terms of the increased influence and ef-
fectiveness of transnational social movements or transnational advocacy
networks.7 Such accounts are in keeping with celebratory accounts of
NGOs and civil society; here, transnational social movements represent
the positive, liberatory side of globalization. However, there are alternative,
less sanguine ways to view this.
While it is true that transnational campaigns such as these unite wom-
en’s groups across different locations, they do so at a cost. Aihwa Ong
(1996) provides a critical reading of the “strategic sisterhood” that is the
basis of this and other North–South alliances in the post-Beijing confer-
ence era. She presents it as an alliance driven by the desire of Northern
women that ignores geopolitical inequalities and that is insensitive to non–
first world cultural values. She argues that transnational campaigns are
based on a distinctly individualist formulation of “rights” that is Western
specific.8 The skepticism among activists that I detected in my research
points toward similar frustrations in the postsocialist context.
Building on this and other critiques, I wish to introduce a note of
caution in my account of the campaigns. First, I suggest that the very
success of the framing can also be regarded as its weakness. Although the
framing certainly yields cross-cultural clarity, it does so at a cost. At the
transnational level, it works insofar as it is a catchall. However, this catch-
all quality screens out crucial nuances in the ways people define violence
against women in different local contexts. In this chapter, I go on to argue
that in postsocialist “democratizing” contexts, as in “developing” ones, the
framing deflects attention from issues of redistributive justice.
Second, it is important to consider the political-economic context of
the campaigns. The issue achieved prominence at a time of crucial shifts
in global development agendas. The rise of NGOs and the success of the
campaigns took place at a time when a neoliberal vision of development
had achieved hegemony. This vision has introduced “a new kind of re-
lationship between the state and civil society and advanced a distinctive
definition of the political domain and its participants—based on a mini-
malist conception of both the state and democracy” (Alvarez, Dagnino,
and Escobar 1998, 1). Concerns about these processes have been raised by
both scholars and activists, in Southern or “developing” contexts as well
as the postsocialist one (see, e.g., Alvarez 1998; Feldman 1997; Kamat
2002; Lang 1997; Paley 2001). Support for NGOs is provided within this
new rubric and comes with strings attached; NGOs that accept donor
support are required to take on the responsibilities of the retreating state,
picking up the slack for the radical free market.9 What is more, the sudden
influx of grants and funding brings about dramatic changes in organiz-
ing. Ironically, “NGO-ization” has demobilized social movements. It has
contributed to the formation of new hierarchies and allowed former elites
to flourish. In many cases it also signals the triumph of Washington- or
Geneva-based agendas over local concerns.10
The gendered violence campaigns do not operate outside this
Â�political-economic context. Indeed, the forces that enable them, the logic
that drives them, and their effects demonstrate their complicity. Concern
about violence against women originated in the second wave political slo-
gan “The personal is political,” which challenged the inviolability of the
home and politicized it. The radical critique of patriarchy and gender-
based economic inequality, however, that was fundamental to the battered
women’s movement in the United States and western Europe has fallen out
of the transnational campaigns. In a grotesque inversion, the campaigns
reprivatize the problem of domestic violence by focusing on interpersonal
relations between spouses to the exclusion of structural factors outside,
specifically the economic upheavals that most women believe pose the
greatest threat to themselves and their families.11 In a disturbing way, the
work of the campaigns thus overlaps with the privatizing intent of neo-
liberalism. Indeed, this overlap helps to explain the success of the issue
among donors in the West. It is easier to garner support and international
outrage around issues concerning sex and that position women as victims
than around issues of social justice (Snitow 1999).
Accounting for the Rise of Crisis Centers in

Russia: Foundations, Funding, and Feminists
For complex reasons, violence against women is not an issue that local
groups were likely to have raised by themselves. The issue was discursively
created by the meeting of Western feminists and Russian women activists
in the early 1990s. These feminist-oriented Russian women set up the first
crisis centers, in Moscow and St. Petersburg and then in provincial cit-
ies. In the decade of their existence—a decade of rapid and tumultuous
transformations in Russia—the crisis center network has undergone sig-
nificant change. Donor support has been a key factor in its development,
and feminist-oriented Russian activists have played a crucial role as brokers
of ideas.
Since their arrival in Russia in the early 1990s, donor agencies have
channeled a proportionally small but ideologically significant portion
of civil society aid to women’s groups. They met with a diverse range of
women’s organizations. While some set up during the mid-1980s, when
Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms permitted the formation of
independent groups for the first time, most were founded in the early to
mid-1990s in response to the dislocations of the market I have described.
And while some had their roots in official Soviet-era women’s organiza-
tions (zhensovety), others regarded themselves as determinedly indepen-
dent from the former regime. A small but prominent minority identified
as feminist. These groups of highly educated women were mostly clustered
in institutes and universities. Familiar with Western academic literature,
they brought insights from Western feminism to bear on Soviet gender
relations and on the effects of political and economic reform. They were
also committed to practice and spearhead attempts to bring about unity
among women’s groups, organizing two Independent Women’s Movement
forums in 1991 and 1992. This latter group found itself particularly well
positioned to take advantage of the new opportunities of democratization
aid. Members’ knowledge of foreign languages, experience of travel, and
familiarity with liberal democratic and Western feminist concepts made
for easy dialogue with the representatives of donor agencies. The crisis
centers they founded, often in collaboration with Western feminist activ-
ists, were greeted enthusiastically by international donor agencies and were
among the first women’s projects to receive support.
Although these initiatives won a great deal of international attention,
they were less successful at home. The Independent Russian Women’s
Movement was marginal in Russia and did not have broad support. On
the contrary, most men and women regarded women’s groups with sus-
picion and hostility, particularly those that identified as “feminist.”12 For
complex reasons, there is no commonly shared perception of gender dis-
crimination in Russia or other former socialist states. As many scholars
have noted, the commonly held notion is that the socialist state “spoiled”
both men and women, emasculating men and making women too ag-
gressive and assertive, denying them natural expression of difference and
self-realization (samorealizatsiia).13 Men and women perceived themselves
to be equally victimized by the state. As Watson (1997, 25) puts it, “Under
state socialism, society was excluded as a whole, and citizens, far from feel-
ing excluded relative to each other, were held together in a form of political
unity.”
I found that among feminist-oriented women’s projects, crisis centers
were regarded with particular incomprehension and skepticism. Indeed,
even some women activists involved in the campaigns admitted that they
did not think gendered violence was the most pressing issue facing Russian
women and expressed concern that so many resources were put into it.
There was plenty of conflict in the private realm in the USSR. How-
ever, women with violent spouses were unlikely to recognize their experi-
ence in terms of gendered violence. Crisis centers are premised on a set of
property relations that are bourgeois and on an alignment of public and
private that is liberal democratic. They presume that women are economi-
cally dependent on men and stuck in the private sphere. This presumption
was not true for Soviet women, who were brought into the workforce and
guaranteed formal equality by the socialist “paternalist” or “parent” state
(Verdery 1996, 63). Soviet-era property arrangements also complicate the
picture. The nationalization of all property meant that there was no ide-
ology of private ownership to give Soviet citizens the illusion of domes-
tic inviolability. Many Soviet citizens lived in the notorious communal
apartments, sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities with their neighbors.
What is more, few married couples lived autonomously as nuclear families.
Chronic housing shortages meant that many people lived with extended
family, grandparents, in-laws, and siblings. For all these reasons, domestic
conflict most commonly expressed itself in the form of tension over rights
to living space, interpersonal strife, or alcoholism. Although patterns are
certainly changing with the introduction of a free market, lack of housing
remains the most chronic problem. Indeed, the persistence of this problem
helps to explain why women’s shelters have not taken off in Russia.14
A further obstacle to crisis centers has been that during state socialism
the private sphere was constituted as a kind of “refuge” for both men and
women. It was considered to be a site of authenticity against the mor-
ally compromised public sphere, and its integrity was jealously guarded
by women and men alike (Verdery 1996). In the late 1990s, the private
sphere remained a (reconstituted) refuge for most Russian people, a site
of precious and sustaining networks that offset the violence and chaos
that were perceived to be “outside” (mafia, crime, corruption, poverty).
Although levels of familial violence appear to have increased in the post-
Soviet period, most women do not consider it the most pressing prob-
lem.15 Furthermore, as many crisis center workers acknowledge, Russian
women who have experienced sexual or domestic violence are commonly
mistrustful of attempts from outside to intervene.
Until 1995, crisis centers were marginal offshoots of the Independent
Russian Women’s Movement, and though they were celebrated in inter-
national circles, their work was little understood at home. Despite this lack
of fit, in the mid-1990s, the antiviolence campaigns in Russia underwent a
qualitative shift. As “violence against women” became an international de-
velopment issue, more funds were allocated to it and crisis centers moved
from being small, rather peripheral offshoots of the women’s movement
to become third sector heavyweights, a central plank of the independent
women’s movement and a showpiece of foundation-NGO relations.16
The transnational campaigns brought a key resource to Russian
women’s groups—a model around which to organize. This model is ac-
companied by skills and methods that can be transferred and taught. For
activists, the crisis center model offers a blueprint and a framework. Neat,
easy to learn, it has become a kind of do-it-yourself NGO kit. Foundation
support has financed the production of easy-to-use materials—brochures,
posters, and handbooks, including one titled, How to Create a Women’s
Crisis Center.17 The Moscow-based network offers trainings, assisted by
foundation support. Along with crisis counseling and nondirective listen-
ing skills (the hallmark skills of crisis centers), they teach management,
NGO development, and public relations.
Russian crisis centers have adopted what they call the “international
model” and work to a specific set of standards. Through telephone hotlines
and individual consultations, they provide free and confidential legal and
psychological counseling to female victims of sexual or domestic violence.
Counselors undergo eighty hours of training, run by staff of the most ex-
perienced centers with input from feminist psychologists, scholars, and
lawyers.
What does all this mean to Russian activists? While I insist on the
need to situate my study of Russian crisis centers within this “broader
political geography” (Gal and Kligman 2000, 4), I do not mean to sug-
gest that the global blocks out the local or to describe the flow of ideas as
unidirectional. Recent scholarship of globalization has argued persuasively
against this kind of determinism, and feminist scholars are prominent in
the discussion (see, e.g., Gibson-Graham 1996; Grewal and Kaplan 1994).
Russian women activists draw on international aid and Western models
as resources, translating them as necessary. In the process, projects and
campaigns are transformed, not imported statically. How do these “travel-
ing discourses” (Gal and Kligman 2000) arrive, what are the processes of
“translation” they undergo (Tsing 1997), and with what do they interact
as they are “glocalized”?
In the course of my research in 1995–1997, I found that the notion of
crisis center did have a kind of local resonance. Once again, the violence-
against-women framing caught on because of its catchall quality. Here,
however, the keyword was not violence (nasilie) but crisis (krizis). One of
the things that struck me in the course of my research was the ubiquity
of the notion of crisis center (krizisnyi tsentr). I came across many women
(out of the loop of trainings and unfamiliar with the international model)
who expressed their intent to set one up or described their work (uncon-
nected with sexual or domestic violence) to be “something like a crisis cen-
ter.” I came to relate this rhetorical persistence to the fact that the whole of
Russian society is perceived to be in crisis—with good cause. In addition
to the perception of social and economic breakdown, the Russian crisis is
also perceived to be a psychic condition—there is a great deal of talk about
the neuroticization of society.
The Perspective from the Provinces: Competing

Crises and the Displacement of the Economic
Zhenskii Svet (Women’s Light) is a small university-based women’s group,

dedicated to women’s education and consciousness raising. It was founded
in the provincial city Tver’ in 1991, long before the arrival of Western
foundations, in the first wave of independent organizing in Russia. Its

founder was Larisa, a professor of history who had written her disserta-
tion on the Western women’s movement, one of Russia’s few self-identified
feminists.18 One of the reasons I originally made contact with this group
was that it claimed to have a crisis center.19 But I arrived to find that this
was not so. While the notion of crisis center did exist within the group, it
had not quite taken root. The idea had been introduced to the group in
1992 by some visiting German feminists; the project collapsed, however,
when the Germans failed to secure funding, and local interest had since
waned. When I asked group members to elaborate about this, they told
me that sexual and domestic violence was something they had not really
thought much about. It was a terrible thing, but they did not feel any real
connection to it. They also insisted that women would not come together
around this issue, because it was too private. They could not see how such
a project could work in Tver’.
The idea of crisis center, however, had remained in the group, in diffuse
forms. Katia was the custodian of one of these crisis center plans. An un-
employed woman in her fifties, she attended Zhenskii Svet regularly. I met
frequently with her during my stay in Tver’ in 1997. Katia explained that
she was not concerned with dealing with the female victims of sexual vio-
lence. She intended her crisis center, or “anti-crisis center” (anti-Â�krizisnyi
tsentr) as she preferred to call it, to be a service to assist women who en-
counter economic discrimination (ekonomicheskaia diskriminatsiia), or
(gendered) discrimination in the workplace. This was a new term to refer
to a new phenomenon, since the Soviet regime had an ideological commit-
ment to both full employment and gender equality. She understood that in
the United States and western Europe, a crisis center was a service for the
victims of sexual and domestic violence but argued that in Russia such a
conception did not make sense. She insisted that although sexual violence
was indisputably a terrible thing, it was a much less widespread problem
than economic violence and discrimination, which touched almost every
woman’s life.
As I pieced her story together, I came to regard it as a classic survivor’s
narrative. She had encountered “discrimination” in her own life and now
wanted to set up a service to assist women in similar situations. Two years
ago before I met her, Katia was pressured to quit her job as a sociological
analyst at the Federal Employment Service when initially generous state
funding was cut back. Forced to make layoffs, her boss began to exert pres-
sure (davlenie) on some members of the staff to leave. To leave, as it were,
of their own volition (so the company might avoid paying unemployment
benefits). Although both men and women staffed the office, he targeted
the women in the group. Katia experienced this treatment as a profound
“crisis,” as did her female colleagues, who went through the same process.
She told me that it was the first time she and her coworkers had had to
face the idea of unemployment. She was shocked at the callous disregard
of her rights. She was shocked at how her boss, a former military officer,
she emphasized, had “pressed” her to leave. Agitated by the memory, she
told me that the pressure was so intense that one woman had been “on the
verge of a heart attack.” Katia’s account evoked the profoundly destabiliz-
ing social dislocation she and her colleagues had experienced at this time.
Unemployment was distressing to her not merely because of the financial
burden it placed on her but because it was an attack on her dignity, on her
very identity, her sense of self. It also cast a blow to her worldview. She was
shaken by the fact that a person of education and high social standing (an
officer) had behaved in this way.
In many ways, Katia’s story is paradigmatic of women’s early non-
governmental organizing in Russia. Regardless of how they described
themselves, of the educational levels of their members, their location or
ideological hue, in the early 1990s women’s groups were engaged in a com-
mon purpose. They were survival mechanisms, set up for and by women
who were hard hit by social and economic reform. Involvement in this
activity goes beyond a concern with the gendered effects of the market and
is frequently driven by a generalized perception of material, moral, and
psychological crisis. In their different ways, these organizations have taken
on the challenge of creating new forms of social solidarity and togetherness
following the collapse of the Soviet collective.
Although Katia’s conception of crisis center emphasizes structural fac-
tors—economic violence attributable to the market and shock therapy
and their gendered effects—hers is neither a straightforwardly “feminist”
nor anticapitalist construction. Indeed, she did not address her sense of
discrimination toward men as a group or toward the institutions whose
policies contributed to it (the International Monetary Fund, or the Rus-
sian government). Instead, she addressed herself to the absent, retreating
Soviet state. She had been able to find a state agency that had overturned
the decision. Although she had not been awarded material compensation,
she had received symbolic recognition of the injustice of her dismissal.
She intended her crisis center to be a project that would provide similar
assistance to local women.
Katia’s case perhaps looks idiosyncratic. In many ways, she represents a
prior understanding of crisis center, one that preceded the arrival of foun-
dation support. However, I found echoes of her understandings elsewhere.

Between 1995 and 1997, before the action research project in Tver’, I
visited crisis centers in St. Petersburg and several provincial cities. These
visits provided alternative insights and left me with quite different im-
pressions of the antiviolence campaigns than those I received in Moscow.
Although they formally adopted the crisis center model (the “international
standard”), many of these centers had much broader programs in response
to local needs. As the director of one provincial crisis center told me, “We
go to these Moscow-based seminars, workshops, and conferences, but our
agendas are still driven by local concerns.” Because these centers are rais-
ing the issue of violence against women for the first time, only a relatively
small proportion of clients call to discuss it. All the counselors I spoke
with confirmed that when they first set up, a wide range of people called
their hotlines. Men called as well as women, and, strikingly, a lot of pen-
sioners—in sum, those who felt marginalized and vulnerable. I was told
that people called to speak about diverse issues—unemployment, unpaid
wages, loneliness, alcoholism, and loss of children to the military service,
as well as domestic or sexual violence. As one St. Petersburg–based activ-
ist put it, “There is great confusion now, the old system is broken down,
but it’s not clear what is emerging. People are confused, and there is a
great demand for information. They don’t know what to ask for, whom to
speak to, how to name their problems.” Centers have responded to these
concerns in different ways; some speak to all callers, others only to female
victims of violence. One center in Sergiev-Posad abandoned its women-
only focus for a few years in response to local incomprehension.
Counselors in all the centers I visited informed me that women who
do call to speak about gendered violence frequently relate it to a range of
other materially based issues, such as unemployment, impoverishment, and
cramped living space. In response to such calls, counselors focus on the
woman in a broader social context, particularly on the family. Activists in
provincial cities, where they may provide the only women-oriented services,
conclude that it makes no sense to specialize too narrowly. They say it is
impossible to separate the problem of domestic or sexual violence from other
issues women face. In general, counselors assign a high priority to clients’
material problems. In one St. Petersburg center, survivor support groups
place great emphasis on practical steps women can take, to the extent that
members of some of these groups have gone into business together.
These constructions could work to inform the work of the trans-
national feminist movement, and these critiques could be the basis for
dialogue. The effectiveness of the global women’s movement surely rests
on its ability to heed local concerns. As Ellen Dorsey (1997, 355) puts
it, we need to “carefully tread the line between building common strate-
gies and reflecting the actual concerns and dynamism of the movement
on the ground” lest the movement be discredited. There are, however,
some serious systemic impediments. First, the logic of grants and funding
encourages groups to adopt the themes and terminologies prioritized by
donors, making issues that fall outside this rubric unnarratable. Second,
NGO staff and donor representatives are frequently not disposed to listen
to these commentaries.20 For both these reasons, crisis centers experience
great pressure to conform to the “international model.”
Furthermore, I found that the rubric of the crisis center and the tech-
nologies that accompanied it brought about significant changes in the ways
both staff and their clients formulated the problems facing women, mak-
ing the articulation of critiques and counter strategies still less likely. In
Russia, technologies and methods that are designed to empower women—
such as nondirective active listening—ironically work against empower-
ment insofar as they dissuade clients and counselors from articulating
their material concerns. Techniques of nondirective active listening require
callers to come to their own solutions. Crisis centers provide information
and consultations (on legal issues and social services) but encourage clients
to take part in the defense of their rights and make their own decisions.
While most centers offer free legal advice, their main message is frequently
what not to expect from the state. The director of one center told me,
“Their first question is always, ‘What will the state do for me [as a battered
woman] if I get divorced?’ I explain that they have little realistic chance of
getting help.” In survivor support groups, she works to make women aware
of these material and political issues, to recognize that the state is not going
to help them, and that the only way forward is to help themselves.
Tver’ and Zhenskii Svet: Adopting the Western Model
This dynamic became clear to me during my interactions with Zhenskii

Svet. The action research process that I undertook with members of Zhen-
skii Svet brought the two models of crisis center I have outlined into com-
petition.21 Katia’s “anti-crisis center” for unemployed women was pitched
against a “crisis center” for female victims of domestic and sexual violence
that accepted the framing of violence against women backed by the trans-
national campaigns. The latter won out. It won not because it best ex-
pressed members’ idea of the most important problem facing local women
in Tver’ but because it was considered most likely to succeed. In crucial

ways, as facilitator of the seminar and as a Western outsider with resources
to bring to the project, I was the arbiter.22 The latter model had two ad-
vantages. It had broad legitimacy among two key constituencies—Western
donor agencies and actors of the local administration—and it was organi-
zationally viable. Both characteristics were consequences of international
donor involvement and the success of transnational feminist campaigns.
Through the action research project, I was able to lend my energies to
the group as it negotiated the contradictory nongovernmental field. In this
context, my status as a Western outsider and my familiarity with donor
priorities became a valuable resource that group members were able to
deploy. In the course of my fieldwork, I had amassed a great deal of infor-
mation about women’s crisis centers and realized that the network offered
great possibilities for provincial women’s groups. I shared this information
with members of Zhenskii Svet.
Some of the women began to see the founding of a crisis center as a
way to strengthen and institutionalize some of the more socially oriented
programs offered by Zhenskii Svet. They saw it as a potential base from
which already existing projects could be run and as a place where young
women could gain work experience. A key player in this project was Ta-
mara, a doctor and one of the newest and most enthusiastic participants
of the group. An assertive, practical woman in her mid-thirties, she had
recently moved to Tver’ from Siberia with her family when her engineer
husband lost his job. She worked part-time at one of the local hospitals,
renting office space with another doctor, drawing a meager salary, and of-
fering free seminars in women’s health through Zhenskii Svet.
When I met her, she was looking for a niche, a place to which she could
bring her considerable energies and that would allow her independence.
“I’m not afraid of hard work,” she told me. “The main thing is that I am
committed to what I do.” She dreamed of being able to bring about a unity
between what she called her hobby (issues of women’s health, the women’s
movement) and her career. The idea of setting up a crisis center appealed to
Tamara because it most closely approximated the “concrete social project”
she wanted to be involved in. Her own economic vulnerability meant that
she was attuned to the plight of women in the city, and she wanted to do
something practical to meet their needs. Furthermore, she was persuaded
by the issue of gendered violence. As a doctor, she had noticed that many
of her female patients had bruises under their clothes. “It was obvious that
some of them had violent spouses, but there was no way to talk to them
about it,” she said.
In summer 1998, with the endorsement of other members of Zhenskii

Svet, Tamara and I embarked on a preparatory project to set up a crisis
center for women in Tver’. Our aims were to learn more about existing
services and to locate sources of financial and material support. We met
with members of the local administration and staff of the local social se-
curity services and traveled to Moscow and several provincial cities to visit
and learn from other crisis centers. The strategy was successful. The Tver’
project coincided with a specific moment of expansion in the network of
crisis centers. It was seeking to reregister itself as a national association
and was eager to find more collaborators throughout the Russian Federa-
tion. To this end, its sponsors provided start-up funds for new centers and
were glad to make the acquaintance of a provincial woman activist, well
versed in the tenets of the international women’s movement. At the same
time, in Tver’ local conditions were ripe. Since the mid-1990s, “women’s
issues” have had political currency in Russia. Throughout the regions of
the Russian Federation, officials are now mandated to undertake steps to
provide services for women. In this way, crisis center has entered the lexicon
of government officials and social services personnel and is on the books.
We won the support of two key political figures in the city—the mayor
(who was preparing for reelection) and the president’s representative to the
oblast’ (a female journalist with an insecure political base who had begun
to dabble in the “women’s movement” to generate support for herself in
the city). They were only too happy to make the acquaintance of a com-
munity group willing to undertake such an endeavor.
The center set up in fall 1998. Tamara pulled together a group of inter-
ested women who were prepared to start work on a voluntary, unpaid basis
and led seminars based on the training she had received in Moscow. At
the outset of the project, she acknowledged that she saw setting up a crisis
center as a pragmatic move. If it took off, it would make a good umbrella
project under which already existing projects could continue to run and
new ones could be devised. She saw it as a pilot project through which she
could discover what local women perceive their real problems to be.
As I followed the crisis center’s development between 1998 and 2003
when it closed down, I was able to trace the shifting perceptions of its staff
and volunteers. In the first months of its existence, gendered violence was
very much on the periphery of the project. The first clients who came to
the center were either already personally acquainted in some way with staff
members or were chance passersby. These women did not talk about do-
mestic violence but discussed instead a variety of other, mostly materially
based problems. When I asked them about their plans for the near future,
Tamara and other staff and volunteers talked about setting up a variety of
other projects within the center to meet local women’s needs—a “work
therapy” club (designed to help local women go into business together and
consider economic strategies), a social club, and seminars in cosmetology
and women’s health. Tamara confided that in some ways she regretted fo-
cusing so directly on sexual and domestic violence. She told me, “Women
who really experience this will rarely come forward to talk about it—I
uncover it in conversations, it lies buried, it is very often a source of grief,
but in focusing on it, we scare women away.”
She gave a very different account when we met in Boston in February
2000 while she was attending a training course for Russian professionals
working on domestic violence. She exhibited increasing self-confidence,
both in her own position and in the validity of the crisis center narrative.
She told me that much had changed since a telephone had been installed
in August 1999. It enabled the center to finally open a hotline for women
(telefon doveriia), and as soon as the service was advertised the center had
been inundated with calls. There was a great appetite in the city for tele-
phone hotlines, and (particularly) for free psychological counseling. She
explained that the hotline was open from nine to six every day except
weekends and that they received between fifty and seventy calls a month,
of which between six and fifteen pertained to domestic violence.
I asked her to tell me about the issues clients raised. She told me that
many came to discuss problems in their relationships (vzaimootnoshenie)
with the people they live with—alcoholism or conflicts over living space
after divorce. I asked her how many of these people had experienced do-
mestic violence. She paused to consider and told me that in each case
there was an element of domestic violence. However, this term was loosely
defined. One woman came to speak of problems with her mother, another
about difficult relations with her sister. The rest came to discuss issues with
their spouses. Tamara told me that she was surprised that women were
willing to come forward and to talk about their problems, however they
define them, and that she was surprised too that people do speak about
forms of domestic violence. “The need is real,” she said.
She had devised an interesting strategy to overcome the problem of
women’s reluctance to speak of “domestic violence.” Center staff have two
distinct modes of representing their work. They advertise the hotline as a
generalized service, as a hotline for women (telefon doveriia dlia zhensh-
chin), “so we don’t scare women away.” Beginning in fall 1999, the center
ran a couple of support groups, which staff advertised as a “support group
for women” (gruppa podderzhki dlia zhenshchin), not specifying spousal
abuse. When speaking with clients, they avoid terminology that might
alienate women; they do not use the terms violence (nasilie) or violent
behavior (nasil’stvennoe povedenie) but speak instead of controlling be-
havior (kontroliruiushchee povedenie). Likewise, they do not refer to the
violator (nasil’nik) but the offender (obidchik). They discuss the myths
(mify) and prejudices (predubezhdeniia) surrounding rape and domestic
violence. Meanwhile, they use the language of the campaigns and speak of
domestic violence, or violence against women, in their outreach and edu-
cational work, for example, when speaking to the media, when lobbying
the mayor, and when giving lectures to students of the university, of the
police academy, or to lawyers.
Tamara attributes the success of the project to the framing of violence
against women. As she put it, “It was important for us to define a specific
area of activity in order to achieve this. If we had chosen to deal with vio-
lence more broadly, or with economic issues, or with alcoholism as some
people suggested, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.” She told me that
the main achievement of the past six months is that the center now has
a name, an image (imadzh) in the city. She was able to overcome local
skepticism precisely because of the international support that the project
has won. The symbolic aspect of this support was as important as the mate-
rial; she had used it as a bargaining chip in negotiations with local power
brokers, and it had won her the grudging support of those who were very
skeptical about the issue.
As is clear from the account she gave me that day, what appears to have
changed most markedly is Tamara’s own sense of conviction. Women came
with similar problems as previously. But she was more convinced of the ef-
ficacy of her project and more tightly socialized into the campaigns. I tried
to push her to reflect on these changes. What did these shifts in orientation
mean to her? I gained no sense that she was torn by the changes. Rather,
she was clearly proud about her work and its success. “We’ve come a long
way,” she told me. “There used to be no language for this kind of thing.
Now the authorities have been forced to recognize the problem.”
Our final conversations about the center revealed a greater degree of
ambivalence. When I returned to Tver’ in summer 2001, I found Tamara
preoccupied with new questions. Although eloquent about the importance
of her work, she was alive to its contradictions and eager to discuss the
ambivalence of collaboration with donor agencies. We discussed these is-
sues with Natasha, a crisis center colleague from a neighboring city. In the
course of our conversation it became clear that the two women were dis-
satisfied and baffled by foundation policies and felt unheard by foundation

representatives. Although they felt that they were doing useful work, they
were frustrated that so much time was taken up by bureaucratic activities.
What is more, they felt constrained. Grants permit and exclude specific
activities, down to the themes of trainings. Natasha explained that agency
evaluators had recently visited her center, and it was absolutely clear to
her that they were not interested in the content of the center’s activities.
“They just need pretty numbers, they don’t need to hear my thoughts (raz-
myshlenie) about our work,” she said. Further, they were concerned that
donors were moving away from supporting the theme of nasilie (violence).
The new theme, she continued, was torgovlia liud’mi (trafficking). Tamara
nodded, saying, “We have to be like chameleons to please the foundations.
Even if you don’t want to take it [trafficking] on, you have to!”
Finally, they had begun to feel a sense of futility about the work they
had been encouraged into. They had successfully raised an issue that both
felt was real and important, but at the same time, they were aware that it
was nested within a host of other concerns. As with the other crisis centers
I came across, they found that their clients came to discuss a wide variety
of issues. Although they were frequently able to locate (or “uncover”) an
element of domestic violence in clients’ accounts (whether it be verbal or
psychological abuse, economic pressure, or actual physical violence carried
out by spouses or male relatives), clients most pressingly made reference to
material problems that affected both them and their families. Tamara and
Natasha’s work with women uncovered issues that they felt powerless to ad-
dress—problems connected with unemployment, unpaid wages, the crisis
of living space. “All we can offer is psychological support. It doesn’t resolve
the main issues,” Tamara lamented. “We can’t solve the material problems.”
Natasha agreed, saying, “The global attention to solving women’s problems
must be the business of the government! Housing, the police, the law—it’s
too much on our shoulders!”
Indeed, these remarks were to prove prophetic. The crisis center closed
in 2003 because of some of the problems these women named. The project
lost a crucial local ally when the city mayor suddenly died. His death left
the center institutionally vulnerable; staff were unable to defend the cen-
ter from demands for rent payment from the city legislature. Meanwhile,
international funding proved to be a fragile source of support. Center staff
were able to secure only modest and sporadic funding from foundations
at the best of times, and starting in 2001, these agencies began to redirect
their resources to the new hot topic of sex trafficking.
Conclusions
I have tried to convey the local meanings that get screened out by the inter-
national renditions of the violence against women campaigns. So what
lessons for the transnational women’s movement can we draw from this
specific case?
While it is important to celebrate the success of the crisis center net-
work in terms of the economic and political opportunities it provides local
women, we also need to critically interrogate the success of the campaigns
and to be aware of their discursive effects. Within contemporary condi-
tions of globalization, transnational gender politics operates as a mode of
power that constitutes some women and some issues as deserving, exclud-
ing others (Mindry 2001). Indeed, understanding these effects helps us
interpret the skepticism of some of the women involved in the campaigns,
such as Nadya, whose comments I began with.
Skepticism about these campaigns testifies to the fact that many people
experience these campaigns and similar ones as primitivizing. In the 1990s,
“violence against women” became an international development issue, a
marker to gauge the “civilization” of states. According to this yardstick,
despite the collapse of the political, military, and conceptual boundaries
of the Cold War, Russia remains as far away from the West as ever be-
fore. In fact, ironically, rather than drawing closer, in the 1990s it slipped
backward (from Soviet gender equality to a place of “uncivilized” gender
relations). I believe that it was precisely this discursive effect that many of
my interlocutors objected to. Furthermore, the framing used by the inter-
national campaigns has the ideological effect of obscuring the fact that
violence against women is structurally endemic within liberal-democratic
capitalist regimes. It is not so much that liberal democratic “civil” society
is not violent but that the system allows for the existence (and occasionally
encourages the provision) of services to mop it up. Making gender and
violence a marker of development obscures a fact that both crisis counse-
lors and their clients know very well—that all forms of violence, including
gendered violence, have been exacerbated by structural adjustment, the
very liberalizing project that was supposed to bring civility to Russia. No
wonder those engaged in the ideological work of these campaigns feel am-
bivalent about them.
The discursive prominence of terms such as crisis center and violence
and their prioritization exemplifies some troubling aspects of Western de-
mocratization aid. The prominence of the issue of violence against women
can be read as part of a broader trend, marking a discursive privatization
of the social dislocation accompanying transition and a depoliticization

of the economic. Stopping up the gaps of the radical free market, services
such as crisis centers act as mediators, educating Russian people into the
new order. The individualizing, economizing discourses that these centers
put out (“self-help,” “self-reliance”) educate people out of politics, out of
expecting anything from the crumbling and retreating state. The winning
out of the “international model” marks an abandonment of attempts to
tackle structural problems, as my examples from Tver’ reveal. Interestingly,
both Tamara’s and Katia’s crisis center projects foreground issues of indi-
vidual change and development, rather than structural issues, and there is
little critical discussion of the path of democratization and development.
One of the last things Tamara said to me was that women need to be edu-
cated out of the “myth” that domestic violence has material roots. Here,
she was making the feminist argument that domestic violence could not
be justified as a response to economic hardship. Still, in her ready adoption
of this framing, I see her as still taking on the old socialist state and its dis-
credited, materialist ideologies, perhaps not fully aware of the implications
of the new ideology that is taking its place. Meanwhile, over time the ele-
ment of structural critique dropped out of Katia’s “anti-crisis” center plan.
Whereas formerly she had at least implicitly addressed the state and the
illegality of economic discrimination and dismissals, she began to speak
only in terms of psychological support. Her new project description was
“to afford psychoÂ�logical support to women who are suffering the conse-
quences of loss of work.”23
This, however, is not the full story. My Tver’ case study shows how
the model of crisis center was appropriated and embraced and deployed
by Russian women activists during the 1990s to various different ends.
The women of Zhenskii Svet, like many other activists, made a pragmatic,
strategic decision to set up a crisis center. They were to some extent co-
erced into the framing, yet they were able to reappropriate it in key ways.
The crisis center met group needs and objectives that preceded the arrival
of Western funding. It became an important discursive site where social
dislocation and confusion were explored and made sense of, where needs
could be defined and named and survival strategies formulated. Like other
NGOs, it was a dynamic site in which people negotiate the past and the
present. No less significantly, it offered an effective niche, a foothold for
those who worked there, contributing to the creation of new forms of
solidarity and togetherness. What is more, crisis centers brought nongov-
ernmental women’s activists into dialogue with state agencies, contributing
to important realignments between spheres.
I regard my colleagues’ appropriation of the model as an ambivalent

thing—it is part co-optation, part self-justification, and part testimony
to a new formulation of gendered violence. Work conducted in the cen-
ter both embraced and exceeded the gendered violence narrative. In their
commentaries I see the germ of a critique and the potential formulation
of a collective, or at least less individualistic response to gendered violence
that could be useful to us all.
Ack nowledgment s
This chapter is based on nineteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in

Moscow, Tver’, and Pskov between 1995 and 2001; I dedicate it with gratitude to
Valentina Uspenskaia and Oktiabrina Cheremovskaia. I am grateful to the Cornell
Graduate School, the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Cornell Uni-
versity Peace Studies Program for financial support. I would like to thank Elizabeth
Armstrong, Nanette Funk, Davydd Greenwood, Nancy Ries, and particularly Mi-
chele Rivkin-Fish for their thoughtful and critical engagement with earlier drafts and
for their encouragement of these ideas. I would also like to thank the editors of Signs
and the reviewers for their detailed comments.
Notes
1. Following anthropological conventions, I use pseudonyms to protect the identity

of the women activists I worked with in my research.
2. The official Soviet Women’s Committee delegations had connections with some
Western feminist activists during the Soviet period. Further, Western feminist
texts circulated clandestinely through samizdat during the 1970s and 1980s, and
there were limited connections between individual dissidents and Western femi-
nist activists.
3. For critical discussions of this topic, see, e.g., Berdahl 1999; Borneman 1992;
Verdery 1996; Wedel 1998.
4. Recent feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered effects of de-
mocratization and transition, pointing to the ways it has marked the demotion
of women as a group in Russia and other postsocialist countries (e.g., Bridger,
Kay, and Pinnick 1996; Gal and Kligman 2000; Verdery 1996; Watson 1997).
5. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW), which was adopted in 1979 and entered into force in 1981,
makes no mention of violence, rape, abuse, or battery. By mid-1995, however,
violence against women had become a “common advocacy position” of the wom-
en’s movement and the human rights movement (Keck and Sikkink 1998).
6. The Ford Foundation played a significant role in determining patterns of fund-
ing and led the way in funding campaigns against violence against women.
While in 1988 major U.S. foundations awarded eleven grants totaling $241,000,
in 1993 they made sixty-eight grants totaling $3,247,800 (Keck and Sikkink
1998, 182).
7. See Keck and Sikkink 1998. Sperling, Ferree, and Risman 2001 provides a nu-
anced account of Russian women’s activism in the context of the development of
the transnational women’s movement, bringing new social movement theory to
bear on the changes of the past decade. Their study documents the first phase of
Western donor support to Russian women’s groups in the early to mid-1990s.
8. Drawing on data from China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Ong 1996 gives ex-
amples of alternative strategies. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1996 presents a
similar critique of the Beijing Conference and its colonialist characteristics.
9. Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar (1998, 22) introduce the concept of “APSAs” to
describe the new service-oriented NGOs that are encouraged into being by interÂ�
national foundations and donor agencies. They regard them as band-aids, pallia-
tives, hopelessly compromised by the role they play in stopping up the gaps of
the free market.
10. For discussions of how “NGO-ization” has influenced women’s movements, see,
e.g., Alvarez 1998; Lang 1997. For a consideration of these issues in the for-
merly socialist states of central Europe and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union, see Abramson 1999; Richter 1999; Snitow, 1999; Sperling 2000.
11. I am grateful to Michele Rivkin-Fish for suggesting the formulation of repriÂ�vatiÂ�
zation in relation to the international campaigns against domestic violence.
12. Another explanation for this skepticism toward women’s groups is that women’s
organizing was enforced and managed from above by the Soviet state, in a net-
work of official women’s departments and councils. Further, feminism was dis-
credited by Bolshevik and Soviet leaders, who labeled it a Western reformist phe-
nomenon (Noonan and Rule 1996, 77).
13. For discussions of state socialist gender arrangements and the corresponding ab-
sence of a sense of gender discrimination, see Gal and Kligman 2000; Verdery
1996; Watson 1997.
14. I met many crisis center activists who were keen to establish shelters. They ac-
knowledged, however, that local conditions made it impossible for them to do
so. First, it was difficult to obtain premises from local authorities. Second, it was
unclear where to relocate women once they had been admitted. While in west-
ern Europe and the United States the shelter is a temporary refuge, a stopgap for
women and their families before they find their feet, in Russia people have quite
literally nowhere to move on to.
15. According to data published in 1995, 14,400 cases of rape were recorded in the
Russian Federation in 1993. In the same year, 14,500 women were reported to
have been murdered by their husbands or male partners (Attwood 1997, 99).
16. Foundation representatives I spoke with frequently cited the crisis center net-
work as one of the most successful women’s NGO projects.
17. The Canadian Embassy funded the publication of the book. According to one of
its Russian authors, five thousand copies were distributed to nascent crisis centers
and women’s NGOs (Zabelina 1996).
18. Its feminist and democratic orientation made the group unusual. It can, how-
ever, be considered exemplary of the early clubs and groups founded in aca-
demic circles by women familiar with feminist texts and the Western women’s
movement.
19. I first learned about the group in 1995 from the Network of East-West Women
electronic listserv. New women’s groups, which had just been hooked up on the
Internet, announced and introduced themselves and listed their interests. Groups
tended to make broad declarations rather than itemize existing services. This
practice was very much of the times, before the standardization associated with
NGOs had become widespread.
20. I found that many North American or western European feminists viewed
discussions of economic factors as a rationalization for male-perpetrated vio-
lence. The standard response was the assertion that rich men also beat their
wives. Though of course this statement is true and important, in this context it
is Â�extraordinarily dismissive of local concerns and shows little awareness of the
Â�extent of economic dislocation in Russia and its devastating effects on the lives
of women and their families.
21. In brief, participatory action research (PAR) is a social change methodology in-
volving the participation of a community group in problem posing and solving
(Maguire 1987). For helpful discussions of PAR see, e.g., Fals Borda and Rah-
man 1991; Greenwood and Levin 1998; Maguire 1996.
22. I reflect on my role and the implications of my involvement in this project else-
where. See Hemment 2000, 2007.
23. During my last trip to the city in 2001, I learned that Katia had been appointed
director of the newly founded, government-funded Center for Women and
Families.
Works Cited
Abramson, David. 1999. A Critical Look at NGOs and Civil Society as Means to an
End in Uzbekistan. Human Organization 58 (3): 240–50.
Alvarez, Sonia E. 1998. Latin American Feminisms “Go Global”: Trends of the
1990s and Challenges for the New Millennium. In Cultures of Politics, Politics of
Cultures, ed. S. E. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, and A. Escobar, 293–324. Boulder, CO:
Westview.
Alvarez, Sonia E., Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar. 1998. Introd. to Cultures
of Politics, Politics of Cultures, ed. Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar. Boulder, CO:
Westview.
Attwood, Lynne. 1997. “She Was Asking for It”: Rape and Domestic Violence
against Women. In Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia, ed. M.
Buckley, 99–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the World Ended: Reunification and Identity in the
German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Borneman, John. 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kinship, State, Nation. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bridger, Susan, Rebecca Kay, and Kathryn Pinnick. 1996. No More Heroines? Russia,
Women, and the Market. New York: Routledge.
Dorsey, Ellen. 1997. The Global Women’s Movement: Articulating a New Vision of
Global Governance. In The Politics of Global Governance: International Organiza-
tions in an Interdependent World, ed. P. F. Diehl, 335–58. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
Escobar, Arturo. 2000. Culture Sits in Places: Anthropological Reflections on Glob-
alization and Subaltern Strategies of Localization. Paper presented at Five Col-
leges Faculty Symposium on Globalization, Postdevelopment, and Environmen-
talism, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, August 19.
Fals Borda, Orlando, and Muhammad Anisur Rahman, eds. 1991. Action and
Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. New York:
Apex Press.
Feldman, Shelley. 1997. NGOs and Civil Society: (Un)stated Contradictions.
ANNALS, AAPSS 554 (Nov.): 46–65.
Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Cri-
tique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Greenwood, Davydd J., and Morten Levin. 1998. Introduction to Action Research:
Social Research for Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hemment, Julie. 2000. Gender, NGOs, and the Third Sector in Russia: An Ethnog-
raphy of Russian Civil Responsibilities. PhD diss., Cornell University.
———. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press.
Kamat, Sangeeta. 2002. Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy
Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lang, Sabine. 1997. The NGOization of Feminism. In Transitions, Environments,
Translations: Feminisms in International Politics, ed. J. W. Scott, C. Kaplan, and
D. Keates, 101–20. New York: Routledge.
Maguire, Patricia. 1987. Doing Participatory Research: A Feminist Approach. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Center for International Education.
———. 1996. Considering More Feminist Participatory Research: What Has Con-
gruency Got to Do with It? Qualitative Inquiry 2 (1): 106–18.
Mindry, Deborah. 2001. Nongovernmental Organizations, “Grassroots,” and the
Politics of Virtue. Signs 26 (4): 1187–1212.
Noonan, Norma C., and Wilma Rule, eds. 1996. Russian Women in Politics and
Society. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ong, Aihwa. 1996. Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity? Questions of Com-
munitarianism and Citizenship in Asia. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4
(1): 107–35.
Paley, Julia. 2001. Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Â�
Dictatorship Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Richter, James. 1999. Citizens or Professionals? Evaluating Western Assistance to
Russian Women’s Organizations. Report prepared for the Carnegie Corporation.
Snitow, Ann. 1999. Cautionary Tales. Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meetings of the
American Society of International Law, 35–42.
Sperling, Valerie. 2000. Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering
Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sperling, Valerie, Myra Marx Ferree, and Barbara Risman. 2001. Constructing
Global Feminism: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Russian Women’s Ac-
tivism. Signs 26 (4): 1155–86.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1996. “Woman” as Theatre: United Nations Confer-
ence on Women, Beijing 1995. Radical Philosophy 75 (Jan.–Feb.): 2–4.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 1997. Transitions as Translations. In Transitions, Environ-
ments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics. J. W. Scott, C. Kaplan,
and D. Keates, eds. New York: Routledge.
Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Watson, Peggy. 1997. Civil Society and the Politics of Difference in Eastern Europe.
In Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics, ed.
J. W. Scott, C. Kaplan, and D. Keates, 21–29. New York: Routledge.
Wedel, Janine. 1998. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to East-
ern Europe, 1989–1998. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Zabelina, Tat’iana. 1996. Sexual Violence towards Women. In Gender, Generation,
and Identity in Contemporary Russia, ed. H. Pilkington, 169–86. New York:
Routledge.
11
Memorializing Murder, Speaking
Back to the State
Belinda Leach
Memorials to women murdered by men have materialized on the Canadian

landscape over the past several years, brought into being by groups that
usually include relatives, friends, and antiviolence activists.1 Some of these
memorials blend gently into the landscape. Others startle when one stumbles
upon them unexpectedly (Cultural Memory Group 2006). A few of these
were dedicated before fourteen women were murdered at l’École Polytech-
nique in Montreal on December 6, 1989, because they were women, in
the killer’s own words. Many invoke that act even as they commemorate a
friend, sister, mother, daughter, coworker, or simply a member of the same
community, whose death at the hands of a man has shaken those around
them. These memorials have often become rallying points where the local
feminist community holds noisy Take Back the Night gatherings and reflec-
tive December 6 vigils (Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2002).
In this chapter I consider the relationship between the Canadian state
and violence against women, and the intervention into that relationship of
memorials to murdered women constructed through the efforts of frontline
antiviolence workers.2 As in many other countries, in Canada memorials
are most commonly erected to celebrate the heroic acts of men who died
serving the country. Murdered women—the underside of state-Â�sanctioned
violence—are usually mourned quietly and markers noting their deaths
disappear in vast cemeteries or do not exist at all. Unlike the former kinds
of memorials that appear to function largely as “scriptural tombs,” in-
tended to keep the dead dead (de Certeau 1988), memorials to femicide
have an activist and forward-looking intent, seeking to keep memory alive
and change the future (Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2003).3 I argue that
through creating memorials and memorializing practices, frontline work-
ers provide an alternative to culturally sanctioned ways of remembering
191
murdered women. In the process, they communicate the nature and extent
of gender-based violence against women to a larger public, and back to
the state itself. Yet, they do this in a highly contested context in which
frontline workers must step cautiously around hegemonic constructions of
family grief and state responsibility.
The chapter conceptualizes the everyday violence that women fre-
quently experience as a manifestation of the embeddedness of gendered
violence in state and social institutions. It traces the relationship between
the Canadian feminist antiviolence movement and the state through events
and state responses over the past three decades, paying particular attention
to the paradox that, for the feminist antiviolence community, the state is
both part of the problem and part of the longed-for solution. Drawing
on local ethnographic fieldwork with a Canadian women’s shelter organi-
zation, I examine how frontline antiviolence workers relentlessly contest
how “the rendering of physical hurt” (Riches 1991, 295) is represented. In
so doing, these workers—paid staff and unpaid volunteers working for a
local feminist shelter organization—confront hegemonic constructions of
violence against women that undermine a shared acceptance of its moral
repugnance, while simultaneously diminishing access to the resources of
the state to assist them in their work. The chapter shows how, through the
construction of a local memorial to a woman murdered by her male part-
ner, as well as other ongoing memorializing practices, frontline workers
and their organizations offer an alternative construction of violence against
women to the hegemonic version the state presents through its policies
and legislation. I conclude by considering the risks involved in these ac-
tions as funding programs increasingly insist on gender-neutral “victim”
services and programming and penalize organizations for what is deemed
“political” advocacy.
Anthropologies of Violence
While anthropology has made a significant contribution to the study of

political and state violence and its experience and resistance in everyday
life, much of this attention has focused on repressive states (Asad 1992;
Nagengast 1994). There is little concern for these issues in the context
of states governed by what are taken to be nonviolent regimes. In con-
trast to obviously violent environments, the study of violence within a
state like Canada requires a conceptualization that encourages analytical
attention to some of the hidden sites of violence. These sites include what
Memorializing Murder, Speaking Back to the Stateâ•…â•… 193
Scheper-Hughes (1992) identifies as specific configurations of policy,

rhetoric, institutions, and politics. These configurations provide a useful
framework for examining how violence against women is embedded in
Canadian society through social institutions and cultural conceptions. As
Linda Green (1999, 7) shows in her own work, such social institutions
and conceptions are then “reproduced locally and revealed in everyday
life.” Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997) extend Scheper-Hughes’s idea to
consider how everyday violences are frequently exacerbated—if uninten-
tionally—by the responses of institutions and social policy.
Mainstream studies of violence against women and policy attempts to
address it are impeded by common conceptualizations that rely on simple
binaries. Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997, 227) observe that within schol-
arship: “current taxonomies of violence: public vs. domestic, ordinary as
against extreme political violence—are inadequate to understand either
the uses of violence in the social world or the multiplicity of its effects
in experiences of suffering, collective and individual.” Such reductions
moreover minimize the significance of the issue and obscure the fact that
violence against women is systemic. Two widespread ideas in particular
invade popular perceptions of the issue, fueled by often ill-considered me-
dia contributions. The first is that the batterings or killings of women by
their partners are “private” issues, and the second is that the killings of
women by strangers are the work of deranged and socially disconnected
individuals.
Harvey and Gow (1994) have claimed that in Anglo-American con-
texts violence is culturally identified as transgressive. As I demonstrate in
what follows, only in recent years has violence against women been con-
sidered transgressive in Canadian society, and that judgment continues to
be tenuous and contested. In this context frontline antiviolence workers
struggle to keep violence against women in the public eye, to make it
visible and show that it is pervasive, through their everyday and memorial-
izing practices.
Violence against Women and Gendered State Violence
When feminists work together to establish memorials to murdered

women, they intervene in and attempt to disrupt a hegemonic discourse
that separates everyday male violence from the sanctioned violence of the
state. States’ claims that only they may exercise force legitimately consti-
tute social categories of who may use violence and against whom. Within
states, certain kinds of conflicts are minimized as “law and order” prob-
lems, which may nonetheless warrant violent intervention. Amita Baviskar
(2001) has argued that one of the tasks of social movements is to make
visible the violence that underlies the social contract and can be mobi-
lized at the will of the state. Feminist analysts have argued that gendered
(and racialized) violence is intimately connected to other more clearly
sanctioned forms of violence (Kelly 2000). This analysis makes explicit
the links among intimate partner violence, colonialism, nationalism, and
militarism and implicates the state in sustaining patriarchal domestic rela-
tions through its exercise of violence in different venues.
Sherene Razack (1998), for example, has highlighted the intersections
between practices of colonialism and patriarchy in her discussion of (white)
men’s coming of age in faraway places, where a common part of the colo-
nial experience for men was their engagement in sexual activities with “lo-
cal” women, blind to the power imbalance multiplied by colonialism and
patriarchy, even in liaisons construed as consensual. Andrea Smith (2005,
23) pursues a similar line of argument, linking colonial, race, and gender
oppression by arguing that “patriarchal gender violence is the process by
which colonizers inscribe hierarchy and domination on the bodies of the
colonized.”4 Smith insists on expanding the conceptualization of sexual
violence to show how environmental racism, residential school policies,
forced sterilization and medical experimentation, and spiritual appropria-
tion all operate as violence in support of the state’s genocidal agenda for
native peoples in the Americas.
Smith extends the well-established feminist argument that the binary
distinguishing violence carried out in private spaces from violence car-
ried out in public spaces fails to capture links among forms of violence,
and especially the ways that private “domestic” acts and public “random”
ones are connected to violence occurring in police stations and military
establishments and that occurring in more conventionally identified con-
flict zones. Cynthia Enloe has long argued for recognizing the connections
among militarization, neo-imperialism, war, and coerced sexual relations
(paid for or not), focusing much of her attention on U.S. imperialism
in Southeast Asia and its aftermath (Enloe 1988, 1990, 1993). Liz Kelly
(2000, 47) argues that it is impossible to make a clear distinction between
peace and war for women (and for many men, too), since the violence
of armed conflict always articulates with gender relations, and militarism
constructs a brutalized form of masculinity played out in private and pub-
lic spheres. The veracity of this argument became all too clear as reports
emerged from U.S. military bases of several murders of women by their
husbands, soldiers recently returned from active duty in Afghanistan and

Iraq (Smith 2005).
Enloe’s and Kelly’s arguments are further confirmed when we consider
the ways rape is used as a weapon of the state, against its own as well
as “other” citizens. Historical research has shown that in all parts of the
world conflicts have included the rape of enemy women (Jacobs, Jacob-
son, and Marchbank 2000), but even in a less obviously charged context,
custodial rape is common. Violence against women is usually dissociated
from other institutionalized forms of violence, but as the state deploys its
power, gendered and racialized/racist violence is common. The issue is not
only that this violence is perpetrated by state representatives but that it is
also ignored and implicitly condoned by the state. The treatment of the
disappearance of aboriginal women in Vancouver and along the so-called
Highway of Tears in British Columbia, a situation recently raised by the
United Nations in talks with Canada as a serious concern, attests to this
point. In these cases entrenched gendered and racialized categorizations
render aboriginal women undeserving of the state’s full protection and
furthermore, as Smith (2005,Â€10) points out, as inherently violable by
state or civilian men. Referring to the United States, Angela Davis (2000)
asks, “Can a state that is thoroughly infused with racism, male dominance,
class-bias, and homophobia and that constructs itself in and through vio-
lence act to minimize violence in the lives of women?” With these words,
Davis captures the paradox of the feminist movement’s (and individual
women’s) relationship to a state that abuses its power in misogynist acts
(and abuses of minority populations), yet is simultaneously the only actor
with sufficiently broad power to make sustainable, legally binding, and
enforceable change.
Violence against Women and the Canadian State
Feminist memorializers address their statements not simply to members

of the public who encounter a memorial but also to the state, making
claims on the resources of the state to address the issue. States, however, are
not monolithic, and clearly different states fashion and tolerate different
gender regimes. Within these regimes, gender relations are supported and
reinforced by specific policies, and with greater or lesser capacity to wield
control over citizens. The Canadian state is produced day by day through
a variety of mechanisms that attempt to unify disparate groups over a large
and diverse geographic area. The hegemonic Canadian national narrative
celebrates the (ethnic, religious, linguistic) difference that underlies po-

litical and symbolic coherence through the “myth of the Canadian mo-
saic,” institutionalized in an official policy of multiculturalism (Moynagh
2002, 104). Eva Mackey (2002, 9) argues that a persistent and key theme
in the Canadian national myth is that “Canada is marginal to and victim-
ized by various forms of colonialism.” Constructed as a feminized victim
suffering at the hands of external others (first Britain, now the United
States), Canadian identity is fictionalized as homogeneous and unified,
able to transcend the internal difference that constitutes it but always in
need of protection. This fiction has the effect of denying the state’s capacity
to “victimize internal others on the basis of race, culture, gender, or class”
(Mackey 2002, 12). The process of constructing this national narrative,
as Moynagh (2002, 97) argues, stitches “historical sutures that close out
stories of racial terror and sexual injustice”—such as the history of slavery
in Canada and the ongoing treatment of First Nations people, and the
ways both of these are particularly gendered—even as it simultaneously
celebrates difference.
Although the hegemonic Canadian national narrative celebrates unity
and coherence emerging from diversity, Mackey (2002, 16–19) argues that
in practice the national project involves more “flexible strategies” that man-
age cultural diversity internally and can account for inclusions and erasures
on a situational basis. Thus, strategies gradually shift and can exploit the
dangers and opportunities contained in ambiguous situations. Mackey
draws on Asad’s (1993, 17) notion that dominant power has “worked best
through differentiating and classifying practices” that in Canada are insti-
tutionalized in what is constructed as a liberal and tolerant state.
The Canadian state has historically “managed” the position of women
within it through a form of social patriarchy that later became characteris-
tic of welfare states. Policies were designed primarily to stabilize the family
such that women could (barely) sustain both paid and unpaid work roles
(Leach and Yates 2008; Ursel 1992). Women internalized the persistent
contradiction and coped individually in their own homes with particular
partners. Within this patriarchal familial model, violence by men against
women partners was considered a private matter, of little interest to the
courts, or indeed anyone else.
The management of women’s issues shifted in the early 1970s after
the Royal Commission on the Status of Women was forced on a reluctant
government by pressure from thirty-two national women’s groups (La-
Marsh 1968).5 Following the commission’s recommendations, the federal
Women’s Program was established as a branch of the Secretary of State,
which appointed feminists from outside government to run the program

and provided operational grants to women’s organizations (Schreader
1990, 197), including shelters and rape crisis centers. Public funding then
supported activism and services around issues involving violence against
women. This work, which was a central piece of the work of the femi-
nist movement in the 1970s in Canada, included the establishment and
maintenance of shelters (often, as in the city of Guelph, in small, barely
financed premises) and rape crisis centers. Through the 1970s and 1980s
much of the antiviolence work consisted of local initiatives. But there were
successes at the national and provincial scales, such as the introduction
of mandatory-charge legislation, that resulted from the work of equality-
seeking women’s groups.6 Sustained feminist demands for increased state
attention to the issue—to change the justice system and improve funding
for shelters and other programs, as well as to recognize that violence is tied
to women’s subordinate position—accompanied unprecedented atten-
tion to and analysis of several well-publicized incidents of violence against
women, culminating in the killings at l’École Polytechnique in Montreal
on December 6, 1989.7
Catalyzed by these events, the government established the Canadian
Panel on Violence Against Women, whose 1993 report, Changing the Land-
scape, formed the basis for reforms of the Canadian system and for some in
Europe as well (Hague, Kelly, and Mullender 2001). Through the 1990s,
a host of other federal initiatives were put in place along with provincial
action plans and numerous smaller studies of the issue.8 The federal Family
Violence Initiative was established in 1988, the year before the Montreal
killings, with the investment of $176 million over eight years for work on
“domestic violence, familial child abuse and elder abuse” (Hague, Kelly,
and Mullender 2001, 32). The title “Family Violence” for this initiative,
which has been identified as a mainstream approach to antiviolence work,
raised a further issue for feminist activists, who have repeatedly sought to
ensure that violence against women is explicitly named and not obscured
behind the terms domestic or family. This again speaks to the paradox for
feminists and to the ways in which the feminist movement engages with
the state and its institutions.
Canada, unlike many other countries, has had a relatively long history
of direct funding from the federal government (and from provincial funds
as well) to feminist social agencies, with much more limited support for
these issues deriving from private sources. As detailed earlier, a consider-
able portion of state support was redirected to antiviolence initiatives in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. While state support for feminist initiatives
might appear to have been a success, Gillian Walker (1992) has argued that
these initiatives drew the feminist antiviolence movement into the restric-
tive discourses of the state in problematic ways. Speaking of the women’s
movement in the 1970s, Walker highlights the shifts in language that took
place within the feminist antiviolence movement and in its negotiations
with the state. She argues that “our thinking came to be organized so that
the state, through its social problem apparatus, could be induced, shamed
or pressured to respond” (336). While feminists objected to the undif-
ferentiated term family violence because they argued it worked against
women’s interests, bureaucrats argued that this term permitted them
to “â•›‘slip women in,’ in circumstances where wife battering itself would
have been ‘too contentious an issue’â•›” (322). Changes in the legal code,
for example, from “rape” to “sexual assault,” allowed charges to be laid
more easily but removed a powerful tool for naming this specific form of
violence against women. These moves, as Walker shows, situated violence
against women within a particular set of institutional relations, allowing
activists and policy makers “to define the problem in ways that linked
specific aspects to particular institutions and agencies within the govern-
ment” (324). Walker analyzes the implications of using the term violence,
arguing that in a context where the state claims the right to the legitimate
use of “force,” the term violence carries ideological weight (328), doing
ideological work to reinforce the state’s legitimacy. Walker fears, however,
that through such terminological moves, women’s protest is absorbed into
the state’s institutional structures, with the loss of its political potential.
Over the past forty years in Canada, violence against women has been
recast as a serious social issue requiring the dedication of state resources,
and the state has come to accept some responsibility for bringing about
change. Much of this change has taken place as a result of the sustained
efforts of the feminist community, which come vividly into focus when
especially violent incidents targeting women take place. I now turn to one
example of such efforts, where a woman’s murder became the catalyst for a
particular form of activism.
Memorializing Murder
Two years after the violence that targeted women in Montreal, Marianne
Goulden was killed by her partner at her home in Guelph, in front of her
young daughter. Marianne had left a former abusive partner, becoming
one of the first residents of the residential shelter facility established by
Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis (WIC). After a time, she became a

volunteer and then a staff person with the organization. Her death hit the
organization very hard. Marianne’s long relationship with WIC had been
cemented by the naming of the shelter after her—Marianne’s Place. At the
time of Marianne’s death, WIC was preparing to occupy a new shelter,
having fought a losing battle to rebuild on the site of the original shelter,
deemed unsuitable for new development because of its close proximity to
a river. When the new location had been secured, the organization asked
Guelph City Council to designate the former shelter site as a park dedi-
cated to Marianne.
All the adjacent land on both sides of the river and across the road
was already part of a riverside park system. Yet it still took considerable
work on the part of board members and staff of WIC to persuade City
Council to dedicate the park to Marianne. WIC staff felt fortunate to be
able to draw on the support of a board member who was a well-known
and respected community leader, and they were convinced that without
his influence, Marianne’s Park (as it came to be known) would never have
been created. In some ways, City Council had few options, since it had
already established that the land could not be developed. Yet WIC staff
heard that getting the approval required that favors be called in. As a vet-
eran staff person said, “Those were also the days when we had to apply to
City Council to have them announce Take Back the Night and allow the
march,” and “every time you went .â•¯.â•¯. it would always be with your fingers
crossed hoping that they were going to do it that year.”
At the same time, WIC staff were struggling to get the necessary per-
mits to expand the new building acquired for the shelter. As Justine, the
executive director at the time recalls, “We started to build anyway.” The
contractor “dug the footings and poured them and he just said ‘stop me’
to the city.” She continued: “Getting that little hunk of land named Mari-
anne’s Park was not a straightforward thing; it was almost as hard as getting
the friggin’ building permit for the new shelter.” Fighting City Hall’s Plan-
ning Department on two fronts, making presentations to committees, and
addressing what was perceived to be a very conservative council regarding
a feminist issue was in some ways simply business-as-usual for a feminist
service organization.
Justine also recalls that “at a certain point we did pull out the sympathy
card around Marianne.” “At the time,” she added, “City Council was not
exactly really open to a lot of violence against women stuff.” She remem-
bers that within City Council and the community more broadly there
was shock that there had been a murder in Guelph and contempt for the
man who had murdered Marianne. So pitching a dedication to Marianne,

rather than to “the violence against women thing,” seemed the pragmatic
route to take: “If you could just get it approved, then we could have Take
Back the Night there, and you could have the December 6 vigil there, and
other events.”
Joan, who followed Justine as executive director of WIC, saw a dif-
ferent motivation in the approval, even if it remained unspoken: “At the
time of this, violence was really becoming very apparent to the whole city;
.â•¯.â•¯. there was lots of other work done across the province and the country
around violence against women and I think it gave them a way not to feel
so guilty about doing stuff.”
While the pitch to City Council focused on an individual community
member and her contributions to the city, within the feminist community
the space “felt like sacred ground,” partly because the original shelter had
been there, and even more “because she was there for so long, and so much
had happened and so much history.” Another staff person said, “I think
that the park is about violence against women and the power of women’s
work, what women working together can achieve.” The dedication of the
park, on December 6, 1993, memorialized Marianne and the organiza-
tion’s own history in that place.
Vigils to remember the events of December 6, 1989, were held that
year, and on every December 6 since, at hundreds of sites across Canada.
In Guelph, they were held first in the Unitarian church, then at the Uni-
versity, and then downtown. With the dedication of Marianne’s Park, the
local feminist community acquired a site for the event that connected lo-
cal incidents of violence—and most explicitly, Marianne’s murder—with
the murders of the women in Montreal.9 Yet the commemorative plaque
to Marianne that sits in the park references Montreal, and through that,
broader issues of violence against women, only obliquely through the date
of dedication. The plaque’s wording was worked out jointly by one of
Marianne’s daughters and a WIC staff person. That person said she had
seen her role as a facilitator, adding, “and the fact that it wasn’t political
is completely reflective of the process that was happening there in that
I wanted to help the family move where they could with it and present
their mother the way they wanted to.” For this person, who had known
Marianne and her family very well, “she was a lot more than a victim .â•¯.â•¯.
[and] her surviving was more important than his act of violence and her
collusion in his violence.”
In the WIC newsletter announcing that the park had been established,
the link was more explicitly made: “With this dedication it is our hope that
the community will never forget the many women who have and will lose
their lives to violence until it is no longer acceptable.”
In the decade following the park’s dedication, Take Back the Night
rallies and December 6 vigils were always held there.10 In contrast to the
process WIC staff engaged in to ensure the dedication, where violence
against women as a systemic problem was downplayed and Marianne’s
contribution as a community member was made the focus, these events are
far more explicitly political. At both, the names of dead women are read.
At Take Back the Night rallies and marches, women noisily reclaim streets
where they feel unsafe to walk alone at night, sometimes visiting specific
sites where women have been subjected to violence. At December 6 vigils
the names of the fourteen women murdered in Montreal are read, as well
as the names of all the women killed in Ontario during the past year, often
with details of how they died and the names of the children who died with
them. At both events, women’s testimonials of their own experiences of
violence are made a focus. A WIC staff person explained:
What we really worked towards was involving survivors who were the age
of the Montreal women and who can talk about their lives and what’s
unfolded, the fact of being survivors. So they can talk very directly about
the horror. [But also] this is what was lost: look at this dynamite woman,
and this is what is lost. How to do this work in making violence against
women as close to the right size as possible in people’s minds is really,
really challenging, in how you do that in a pretty garden.
To address critics who have argued that December 6 vigils focus on

white, middle-class women, commemorative activities, including those
in Guelph, have become deliberately more inclusive in terms of race and
class.11 In recent years, these events have included presentations about
women living with conflict in places such as Afghanistan, Darfur, and the
former Yugoslavia. These are often presented by women who came as refu-
gees from those places to Canada.
Yet even as the scope of the events has expanded to include a broader
conceptualization of violence against women, early December always
brings national debates over how long the day should continue to be com-
memorated and local ones over how women murdered by men in the com-
munity should be remembered. Every year newspaper columns suggest
that it is time to allow the December 6 murdered women to “rest in peace,”
and sometimes the young feminists hired to put the events together ex-
press discomfort about discussing the details of recent deaths of women.
This response causes much dismay among more seasoned antiviolence

workers engaged in a relentless struggle to make visible the everydayness of
violence against women through telling their individual stories whenever
there is the opportunity for making the news or catching the ear of a policy
maker.12
When new memorials to murdered women are established, aside from
the constant struggles waged with local authorities to get permissions, dis-
putes frequently emerge over whether to state explicitly that this woman
was murdered (Cultural Memory Group 2006). As a veteran WIC staff
person explained:
Do they want to celebrate the life, or is it more denial around this woman
[who] died, she was murdered. We’re doing this kind of thing [frontline
antiviolence work] but it’s too hard to go there all the time.â•¯.â•¯.â•¯. When we
named the shelter for Marianne it was for celebration of who she was and
the miracles she had performed in her life; .â•¯.â•¯. that’s where I’m wanting
to go as well, and not into violence against women in quite that way.
Another staff person, who feels strongly that the circumstances of the
murders be more explicit, said, “[Often]we have to sneak it in.” And, she
added, referring to the plaque in Marianne’s Park, “we didn’t do a very
good job sneaking it in.”
Speaking Back to the State
The everydayness of violence against women renders it largely unconsid-

ered as a public issue, often until an especially shocking event brings it out
from the private spaces and into the media and the courts. Frontline anti-
violence workers spend their days working with survivors and their nights
trying to suppress the stories they have heard so that they can sleep. They
put a lot of energy into finding ways to keep the issue alive in the public
eye, struggling against hegemonic constructions that persist in viewing
violence against women as a relatively minor crime, to insist that all vio-
lences against women be considered morally repugnant. The two strategies
they use reinforce and complement each other. Naming violence against
women as often and as publicly as possible, and doing so through the
stories of those who have suffered it—told either by women themselves,
or by those who survive—has become a standard practice. In this strategy,
speaking plainly about the actual physical violence and attaching that
violence to actual named women and children renders the physical hurt
unambiguously intolerable, countering state and popular strategies that
are more likely to refer to “unspeakable acts,” by actually speaking them.
In this way, violence against women is repeatedly inserted into media and
policy discourses, and debates that threaten to disappear are kept alive.
Violence against women is then represented as widespread and horrific,
individually experienced and collectively incumbent.
Establishing memorials to women murdered by men is a complemen-
tary strategy to that everyday work, providing physical reminders of wom-
en’s experiences of violence. After their initial construction, memorial sites
require little to sustain their intervention into hegemonic constructions
of violence against women, but their silent power can be mobilized and
activated when a site becomes the setting for rallies and vigils. Individu-
ally, each site communicates a slightly different aspect of the issue. Some
commemorate minority women explicitly. Others began with ominously
empty space for future inscriptions, which only too quickly fill up (Cul-
tural Memory Group 2006, 154).
Both frontline worker strategies, then, offer an alternative construction
of gendered violence to the weak but hegemonic version that the state
condones. This alternative redefines the meanings of those who have died
and presents possibilities for an alternative subjectivity for survivors. Using
this double-edged political strategy, frontline workers point to individual
instances of women’s murder (this woman died, on this day, in this place)
and insistently draw attention to the systemic nature of gender-based
violence.
Conclusion
The systemic nature of violence against women is increasingly represented

at events through references to state-sanctioned violence—the wars in Af-
ghanistan and Iraq and civil conflicts elsewhere—through which women
are brutalized. These references allude to the role of the Canadian state
in sustaining militarized environments and neocolonial relations that
shape women’s lived experiences. Yet despite its increasingly active role
in military combat operations, and in contrast to the prevalent idea of
Canada as a world peacemaker, the Canadian state continues to view itself
as characterized by fairness and progressive ideas (Mackey 2002). In cer-
tain ways that view can be substantiated. In 1993, Canada established the
legal right for women to claim refugee status on the basis of gender per-
secution, which frequently involves gendered violence. Canada is the first

country to take this action, which is a significant legal achievement. Yet,
as Razack (1995, 46) shows, such refugee claims are most likely to be suc-
cessful when women are leaving a country that is constructed in Canada as
“dysfunctional and exceptionally patriarchal,” while overlooking the often
violent forms that patriarchy takes within Canadian borders.
This position is consistent with the state’s domestic policy shift in the
past few years, making major cuts to funding for women’s equality initia-
tives on the stated basis that in Canada women have achieved equality and
thus government funding should be redirected to gender neutral programs,
such as “victim” services, which channel funds away from feminist shelters
and sexual assault programs.13 Since the mid-1980s, public financial sup-
port for a range of equality initiatives at the federal level in Canada has de-
clined and narrowed through changes in funding policies and mechanisms
and, more recently, through direct cuts to the Women’s Program. At the
provincial level, funding agreements for shelters and sexual assault centers
took on new stipulations in the 1990s. In Ontario, a punitive conservative
government made clear that to qualify for funding, feminist organizations
were not to engage in what was considered “political” advocacy. If they did
so, they risked losing their funding to provide critical services to abused
women. With these recent developments, the feminist movement’s depen-
dence on the state for funding support has proven to be ambiguous. With
a velvet fist, state policies increasingly circumscribe the work of activists.
The relationship between state institutions and violence against women
is critical. Andrea Smith and Sherene Razack insist that we understand the
ways in which sexual violence is a key mechanism for sustaining patri-
archy, white supremacy, and capitalism. These operate “in and through
each other” (Razack 1998, 339) to secure white, middle-class elites. Smith
(2005, 166) argues that in this context state funding for antiviolence ac-
tivism and services does nothing more than manage and control dissent
by “incorporating it into the state apparatus.” Why would we expect that
real material resources would be committed to dismantle the systems of
domination that secure hegemonic masculinity and elites? Why would
the revolution be funded by the very forces it seeks to overthrow (Incite!
Women of Color Against Violence 2006)? Despite Schreader’s (1990) ap-
pealing argument that state funding for feminist work signaled success for
the women’s movement in Canada, the erosion of such funding over the
past twenty years and the containment of women’s protests undermine
that claim.
The umbrella organization that represents women’s shelters in Ontario
voiced its concerns about the cold climate in which shelters increasingly
operate:
Some shelters worry about being too publicly outspoken on issues, fear-
ing it might jeopardize the partnerships they’ve worked hard to build
with powerful community systems. Some have concerns about loss of
fundÂ�raising potential, and even public funding, if they appear to be “too
political” or seem critical of public policy, especially if there are few Â�allies
in their area. Added to these pressures are the lack of time/resources to
do their work. We hear about the frantic efforts of shelters to provide
direct services, participate in coordination and collaborative community
projects, as well as to organize fundraising and awareness events. (OAITH
2007, 6)
Despite these pressures, frontline workers continue their sustained efforts

to fight against violence against women using all the tools—cultural, eco-
nomic, and political—available to them. They work with survivors of vio-
lence individually, they educate collectively, and they intervene in public
debates to disrupt the hegemonic constructions that impede the social
justice agenda. Speaking back to the state is still critically necessary yet
ever more difficult.
Ack nowledgment s
This chapter derives from a collaborative research project with Guelph-Wellington

Women in Crisis, funded by a strategic research grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. Many of the ideas expressed here emerged
from intellectual exchange with my academic colleagues in this project, Christine
Bold and Ric Knowles, for which I thank them. The other members of the Mari-
anne’s Park research team, Sly Castaldi, Jodie McConnell, and Lisa Schincariol, have
also generously contributed invaluable time, energy, and ideas to the broader project,
without which none of this work could have taken place.
Notes
1. The Cultural Memory Group has identified sixty-two such memorials in Canada.
2. In Canada seventy-five women were known to have been murdered by a current
or former partner in 2004 (Statistics Canada 2006). More than 28,000 incidents
of women assaulted by their spouses were reported to police in 2000, probably
about a third of the actual cases of assault against a female partner. In 1999–
2000, 57,000 women and 39,000 children were admitted to Canada’s 448 shel-
ters for abused women, and every day over a thousand women and children are
turned away from shelters, mainly because they are full. In 2000, 23,352 women
were victims of reported sexual assaults, estimated to be about 6 percent of actual
incidents (Ontario Women’s Directorate 1995). While these numbers cross age,
race, and class distinctions, the combination of racist and sexist attitudes toward
First Nations women (Amnesty International 2004) and racialized women makes
these groups of women are more vulnerable than others.
3. A vast literature on memorials, monuments, and memorializing has emerged
over the past several years, and their role in facilitating societal remembrance and
forgetting. See, e.g., Connerton 1989; Young 1992. For the analysis of gender
and memorializing, see Hirsch and Smith 2002; Schirmer 1994, and with
specific reference to memorializing violence against women, see Rosenberg 2003.
4. McGilligray and Comaskey (1999) also make this link between violent colonial
histories and the treatment of First Nations peoples in Canada, examining the re-
lationships among intimate violence, aboriginal women, and the justice system,
although their focus is on reform of the justice system.
5. Judy LaMarsh, then minister of national health and welfare, who first presented
the idea of a Royal Commission to Prime Minister Lester Pearson in 1963, re-
called these details, referring to a comparable initiative of the Kennedy adminis-
tration in the United States.
6. Mandatory-charge legislation requires that charges be made in domestic violence
situations even when police at the scene are not able to establish an arrestable
offense. Feminist critics have countered that this policy often results in failure to
arrest, leaving women vulnerable to further attack.
7. An example of a highly analyzed and well-publicized incident of violence against
a woman was the rape of “Jane Doe” in her Toronto apartment in 1986 by the
“balcony rapist.” She assisted the police in their investigations that led to the
arrest and conviction of the accused. She then initiated a civil suit against the
Toronto police for negligence and violation of her rights under the Charter of
Rights. The central issue in her suit was that the police chose not to alert women
about the danger of a rapist in their neighborhood. Rather, they used women
as bait in their bid to catch the rapist in the act of rape and more likely ensure
his conviction. Madame Justice Jean MacFarland’s ruling clearly criticized the
pervasive attitudes of the Toronto police toward women and rape: “The conduct
of this investigation and the failure to warn, in particular, was motivated and
informed by the adherence to rape myths as well as sexist stereotypical reasoning
about rape, about women and about women who are raped. The plaintiff there-
fore has been discriminated against by reason of her gender and as a result the
plaintiff’s rights to equal protection and equal benefit of the law were compro-
mised.” (MacFarland decision 1998 excerpted at www.owjn.org/archive/jane.htm.)
8. Other federal initiatives in the 1990s included the establishment of five feder-
ally funded research centers on violence against women across the country; law
reforms that included increased protection for complainants in rape cases, “pro-
charge” policies that encourage the police to lay charges in wife assault cases,
and expanded police training; giving the police power to remove firearms from
domestic premises; and expanded protections through civil laws, such as emer-
gency intervention orders to permit an immediate restraining order, giving sole
occupancy of a house to an abused woman, or removing the perpetrator from a
residence (Hague, Kelly, and Mullender 2001).
9. The federal government named December 6 the National Day of Remembrance
and Action on Violence Against Women. Many have subsequently argued that
this resolution has allowed the government to appear to have acted on the issue,
while little has changed.
10. In 2000 another park, just across the river from Marianne’s Park, was dedicated
to the memory of the fourteen women who died in Montreal on December 6,
1989. Accompanied by considerable debate, the December 6 vigil was moved
there. See Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2002 for a discussion of this move and its
implications.
11. In at least one case, the University of Toronto Women’s Centre decided not to
continue to hold the vigil. “The event tends to focus everyone’s attention on
fourteen young white women,” the center’s Gillian Morton said. “It affects such
a small constituency—we need to take into account women who are left off the
list as victims of violence.”
12. The stakes involved in naming violence in a local (Canadian) context are dis-
cussed in George 2000.
13. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper, elected to a minority in 2006,
eliminated “equality” from the mandate of Status of Women Canada, slashed its
operational budget, resulting in the loss of 61 out of 131 positions, the closure
of 12 out of 16 regional offices, and the elimination of the Independent Policy
Research Fund, the Court Challenges Program, and many other programs. The
Harper government has also reneged on important commitments to build a na-
tional child care program, resulting in cuts of $1.2 billion annually to provinces
and territories for child care services.
Works Cited
Amnesty International. 2004. Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimina-

tion and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada. Amnesty International.
Asad, Talal. 1992. Conscripts of Western Civilization. In Civilization in Crisis: An-
thropological Perspectives, ed. C. W. Gailey, 333–51. Gainesville: University of
Florida Press.
———. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Baviskar, Amita. 2001. Written on the Body, Written on the Land: Violence and En-
vironmental Struggles in Central India. In Violent Environments, ed. N. L. Peluso
and M. Watts, 354–79. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bold, Christine, Ric Knowles, and Belinda Leach. 2002. Feminist Memorializing
and Cultural Counter-Memory: The Case of Marianne’s Park. Signs 28 (1):
125–48.
———. 2003. How Might a Women’s Monument Be Different? Essays on Canadian
Writing 80:17–35.
Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Cultural Memory Group. 2006. Remembering Women Murdered by Men: Memorials
across Canada. Toronto: Sumach Press.
Davis, Angela. 2000. The Color of Violence against Women. Colorlines, Fall, no. 10.
De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1988. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives.
San Francisco: Pandora Press / Harper Collins.
———. 1990. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1993. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
George, Glynis. 2000. This Rock Where We Stand: An Ethnography of Women’s Activism
in Newfoundland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Green, Linda. 1999. Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Hague, Gill, Liz Kelly, and Audrey Mullender. 2001. Challenging Violence against
Women: The Canadian Experience. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.
Harvey, Penelope, and Peter Gow, eds. 1994. Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation
and Experience. New York: Routledge.
Hirsch, Marianne, and Valerie Smith. 2002. Feminism and Cultural Memory: An
Introduction. Signs 28 (1):1–19.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. 2006. The Color of Violence: The Incite!
Anthology. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Jacobs, Susie, Ruth Jacobson, and Jennifer Marchbank, eds. 2000. States of Conflict:
Gender, Violence, and Resistance. London: Zed Books.
Kelly, Liz. 2000. Wars against Women: Sexual Violence, Sexual Politics, and the
MiliÂ�tarized State. In States of Conflict: Gender, Violence, and Resistance, ed.
S. Jacobs, R. Jacobson, and J. Marchbank, 45–65. London: Zed Books.
Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock, eds. 1997. Social Suffering.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
LaMarsh, Judy. 1968. Memories of a Bird in a Gilded Cage. Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart.
Leach, Belinda, and Charlotte Yates. 2008. Gendering Social Cohesion. In Solidarity
First: Workers and Social Cohesion in Canada, 21–37. Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press.
Mackey, Eva. 2002. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in
Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McGilligray, Anne, and Brenda Comaskey. 1999. Black Eyes All the Time: Intimate
Violence, Aboriginal Women, and the Justice System. Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press.
Moynagh, Maureen. 2002. “This History’s Only Good for Anger”: Gender and Cul-
tural Memory in Beatrice Chancy. Signs 28 (1): 97–124.
Nagengast, Carole. 1994. Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State. Annual Review
of Anthropology 23:109–36.
Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH). 2007. Year in Re-
view. Toronto: OAITH.
Ontario Women’s Directorate. 1995. Dispelling the Myths. Toronto: Ontario Wom-
en’s Directorate.
Razack, Sherene. 1995. Domestic Violence as Gender Persecution: Policing the Bor-
ders of Nation, Race, and Gender. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 8
(1): 46–88.
———. 1998. Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of the Bourgeois Subject.
Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 10 (2): 338–79.
Riches, David. 1991. Aggression, War, Violence: Space/Time and Paradigm. Man 26
(2): 281–97.
Rosenberg, Sharon. 2003. Neither Forgotten nor Fully Remembered: Tracing an
Ambivalent Public Memory on the 10th Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.
Feminist Theory 4 (1): 5–27.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life
in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press
Schirmer, Jennifer. 1994. The Claiming of Space and the Body Politic within
National-Security States: The Plaza De Mayo Madres and the Greenham Com-
mon Women. In Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, ed. J. Boyarin,
185–220. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schreader, Alicia. 1990. The State-Funded Women’s Movement: A Case of Two Po-
litical Agendas. In Community Organization and the Canadian State, ed. R. Ng,
G. Wlaker and J. Muller, 184–99. Toronto: Garamond.
Smith, Andrea. 2005. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cam-
bridge, MA: South End Press.
Statistics Canada. 2006. Violence against Women in Canada .â•¯.â•¯. by the Numbers. Ot-
tawa: Statistics Canada.
Ursel, Jane. 1992. Private Lives, Public Policy: One Hundred Years of State Intervention
in the Family. Toronto: Women’s Press.
Young, James E. 1992. The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany
Today. Critical Inquiry 18 (2): 267–96.
Walker, Gillian. 1992. Family Violence and the Women’s Movement: The Conceptual
Politics of Struggle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
12
Laliti, Compassionate Savior:
The Hidden Archaeology
of Founding a Shelter
Jamila Bargach
In the Berber dialect spoken in the southern part of Morocco, the word
laliti combines two concepts: rescue, in the sense of rain saving the earth—
and by extension people—from the devastating consequences of drought;
and compassion.1 Laliti is also given as a first name to girls. I distinctly re-
member how I simply fell in love with the intonation, the singing rhythm
of low-low-high of the syllables, and I became enamored even more when I
came to understand its rich meaning. I even decided to name my daughter
Lalita, but destiny chose otherwise. Then I proposed the name Laliti to a
committee of the Moroccan nongovernmental organization (NGO) that
received funds from a Swiss donor to open a domestic violence shelter in
Morocco. The NGO in question was short of staff and I had offered my
services to build the shelter free of charge. I was astonished that they so
easily trusted me after I had volunteered for a mere two months in their
adult education section. I thought their acceptance was a sign of trust that
I could not possibly let down.
Violence against women has been a taboo topic in Morocco for de-
cades. The first official antiviolence campaign initiated and launched by
NGOs took place as recently as 1989. The NGO efforts led finally to an
official plan and document issued by the state in 2003 called The Strategy
for Fighting against Violence against Women. This document constituted a
victory in the feminist struggle because in the document the state rec-
ognizes gender-based violence as a violation of rights and not merely a
“private” issue, as had been so commonly believed. This document offers
many progressive ideas in the struggle to free the country of gender-based
violence, and it lays out a strategy that proposes to translate these ideas
211
into action. Of these, I would like to single out the document’s emphasis
on the necessity for the creation of shelters as an important link in a chain
of services all intended to fight against violence. “The strategy,” however,
remained a dead letter. The historic amendments to the Moroccan family
laws in 2004 attracted all the attention and the efforts of feminist NGOs
to the extent that the fight for a law against violence lost preeminence, or
at least did so at that time.2 Historically, some NGO activists claimed that
since the old family law, Moudawana, was itself an agent of symbolic as
well as structural violence against women, their struggle against violence
had in effect never stopped. When in 2006 a new antiviolence law project
was launched and proposed to the secretary general of the government in
2007 by the Ministry of Social Development, most established feminist
associations exerted a lot of pressure and the text was withdrawn. The in-
tention of these NGOs was to open up and widen the scope of the debate
primarily between themselves and the government so that more progres-
sive clauses and resolutions would finally be presented to the parliament.
As I write this chapter, the situation concerning this new law is still at a
standstill, though the collective of NGOs has been and continues to hold
meetings to discuss and draft the memorandum they aim to present to the
government.
There are today in Morocco seven shelters all run by local NGOs, op-
erating with international funds. In addition, there are two shelters run
by Christian missionaries. Four of the seven shelters specialize in helping
unwed mothers, whose existence is a thorny social problem itself, while
the other three grew organically from legal orientation centers operated by
NGOs that offer their services free of charge to women seeking legal advice
about such matters as divorce, custody, alimony, and violence. In fact,
feminist organizations have been the first in Morocco to offer complete
shelter services to female victims of gender-based violence because the Mo-
roccan government fails to do so. The need became apparent when the staff
of many orientation centers started housing more and more women who
were running away from abuse in their own homes and in the offices of
the NGOs, but offering one’s house could be only a temporary solution.
Despite a decade of progressive political changes, there still is no state-run
shelter in Morocco and the debate between feminist associations and state
representatives over the form of the law to fight violence against women
has stalled. What the Moroccan government’s response will be to the ne-
cessity of creating and responsibly managing these institutions is yet to be
known.
The Hidden Archaeology of Founding a Shelterâ•…â•… 213
Working in the Idealist’s Bubble
I return now to Laliti, where I was given the task to turn the idea into a
reality, to turn an empty building into a safe space for women and their
children. As I read and reread the project, I was taken by the nobility of
the mission, by the intricacies of the proposed internal organization, and
by the way the arguments claim that this shelter constitutes the necessary
brick in building the road to liberating women of all classes and all walks
of life from violence and domination. It speaks a language that I strongly
believe in and have fought for as an individual and contributed to in col-
lective venues. I was unaware at the time, however, that the grant had been
awarded to a person who had left and severed her ties with the NGO. I
learned a few years later that she left because of intense and ugly internal
fighting for the leadership of the organization. Since the project was still
funded but there was no one to carry it through, the secretary general (SG)
of the NGO—the one who won the internal war—asked me to carry this
mission. She was aware of my position as an anthropologist with expertise
on issues of marginality and questions of rights. Years later I realized that
despite the SG’s utter ignorance of what a shelter is really about, it was out
of the question for her to let the funding go and miss an occasion to be in
the spotlight, a beacon of the feminist movement in Morocco.
Thus began my hybrid identity as anthropologist cum frontline worker.
I began working, but then where does one start? There were no blueprints
to follow, no maps to orient me. So I visited the only shelter already run-
ning up in Rabat (at the time) and that was, as Laliti would later be, run
by an NGO. I also visited the shelters run by Christian missions and then
went to the library for a reading spree on the issues of gender-based vio-
lence, children and violence, and working with victims of violence and
abuse, as well as on the history and experiences of shelters throughout
the world and similar structures through different historical epochs. Soon,
however, the NGO called me and put an end to my academic enthusiasm.
“This is not a book you are writing; just rent a house and find someone to
help you run it,” I was told. I thought the call was rude and quite unprofes-
sional but then reasoned that it had to do with the pragmatic approach of
an NGO accustomed to political tactics and subterfuge, to the “end justi-
fies the means,” and that perhaps I was too caught up in academia, far from
a matter-of-fact dealing with things. Time would prove just how wrong I
was.
After I was called to order, I realized that funding agencies work with
statistics, deadlines, and reports. I had to hasten the process by unwill-
ingly emerging from the library. I tried to put ads in the papers to start
hiring the staff, including an administrative assistant, a social worker, and
a psychologist who would act as a consultant and possibly a mentor. The
NGO discouraged me and refused to pay the advertising fee, since their
habit was to check first in their known entourage. I let myself once again
be persuaded, but I was lucky, because I hired three people, two of whom
proved and continue to be absolutely committed professionals, one with
experience and two willing to learn, willing to embark on the adventure.
We set up work, and the task was more than daunting. Again, where does
one start? So we sat and studied the project. We revised my notes from the
library and from my visits, and we decided that we could not have a shelter
without the physical building itself. We visited about ten houses and finally
chose one that was seventeen miles from the city, covering a two-acre prop-
erty with a garden, its own source of water, and a truly beautiful landscape.
Once the building was securely rented, our enthusiasm soared, leaving us
feeling as though we were runners in a marathon and that we were win-
ning the race. We began planning for the setup of the house. Downstairs
there was one large dormitory with a bathroom, a room reserved for day
care, a very large living-room area with a small enclosed space for learning
activities for the women, a large kitchen, and food storage. Upstairs we
planned another dormitory, a smaller room with two beds for wounded
women needing special treatment, the infirmary, one room for the sleeping
staff, and two offices for us. We exploited every little corner in the house
and hoped to use the garden to produce our own vegetables and even
flowers.
What do we do when we rent a house? We furnish it. Thus, we sat
down and selected furniture and thought about sheets for beds, towels,
a stove, toilet deodorants, pots and pans, games for children, desks and
chairs, and dozens of other details. We went to the traditional markets and
to huge modern stores. We chose, we bargained, and we put things in con-
signment. Then the differences started taking shape between the kernel of
what was to become the hired professional staff of Laliti and the feminist
NGO that was, with the exception of a dozen poorly salaried staff, largely
run and staffed by activists. Why do we need to have “so much stuff in this
shelter?” I was repeatedly asked. “Couldn’t they just do with what’s avail-
able?” Surely, but then nothing was there. After so much arguing back and
forth—a sort of sterile exchange between an ideology deeply grounded in
an adversarial stance and a practice attempting to reach an established goal
for which it was hired—we did reach consensus. We were finally able to
secure money for half of the furnishings we wanted, but we had to fulfill
the remaining needs through donations from individuals or established

firms and businesses. It was certainly difficult, since we had no history to
present to these potential donors. In the end, however, this effort proved
worthwhile because it allowed us to build some important relations with
the business world.
After two months, we felt that the house had the basic necessities to be
operational, and we focused then on planning what to do with the women
once they came to the shelter. We were given funds to set up a shelter for
twenty beds, fifteen for women residing between two and six months and
five beds for emergency cases of one or two nights. The women would
usually come with their children and we decided to accept children up to
age five, because six years old is the official age to join the public education
system. We had neither the means nor the potential at this early stage of
the planning to accommodate school-aged children.
With the same enthusiasm, the three of us continued meeting way past
paid hours and on weekends to resolve the numerous unanswered ques-
tions. The argument we shared and all believed in was that while Laliti
was to give shelter to women running away from domestic violence and
abuse, it also had the mission of transforming these women from abused
and suffering individuals to empowered women able to stand on their feet,
face up to their torturers, and walk on the path of self-sufficiency with
dignity. We constructed this space as a transformative one: How are we
going to get the women into the shelter? What are our criteria for selec-
tion? How are we going to advertise these criteria and to whom? How are
we to deal with the authorities regarding clause 496 in the penal code that
turns us into an unlawful institution?3 How are the women going to be
occupied once in the shelter? Should the mothers stay with the children
in the day-care facility we created or not? How should the collaboration
with the psychologist and the lawyer be carried out in freeing the women
from the circle of violence? Our questions were endless but, as we learned
later, despite our best intentions, our best efforts at finding answers, and
our overflowing enthusiasm, only hands-on experience would allow us to
work out adequate solutions or compromises appropriate to each case.
While we were legally part of the NGO, we were given the semblance
of “semi-autonomy” in internal management matters. At the same time,
we still had to continually negotiate all sorts of issues with the NGO,
though the emphasis was by and large on the material aspects, since they
were the only ones allowed to sign the checks. This situation created ten-
sion, and we were subjected to a lot of pressure. Our constant pestering,
as they called it, depleted us of needed energy and created a very negative,
even hostile atmosphere. We became women living with violence, the only
difference being that we did not share the same physical building with our
torturer. Nonetheless, we believed zealously in our mission, which was fed
constantly by a pure form of idealism. Out of our personal experiences
we set up a “haven,” a house that was at the same time public and private,
which sought to transform the suffering and the pain of the women into
productive fodder for a better tomorrow. I guess our sentiments were not
much different from those that animated socialists or liberation move-
ments as they organized and ascended to power. Of course, we were naïve.
Sometimes we realized that we were, and other times we were so deeply
enmeshed in the mission that we continued our efforts unabated. I think
our major error was to set up this shelter without really considering the
women themselves, their histories, and their embodied experiences.
After four months of intensive preparation—and because of the
mounting pressure from the NGO, which threatened to not pay the sala-
ries of the staff (as I continued to be an unpaid volunteer)—we finally and
officially, though reluctantly, opened. It was a strange feeling. We were
elated as we opened to receive our first case of domestic violence. We all
experienced an awkward feeling, but the power of denial worked wonders.
When we spoke about it that very morning, we decided we simply had to
accept it as part of what animated us, but in hindsight I realize that for all
of us “violence” was still an abstract category. Though we had read and met
some women in the Legal Orientation Center run by the NGO, violence
was a passing story, an assemblage of events, of actions and reaction, but
not really an embodied experience we shared of life’s complexities and its
everyday ups and downs.
The Legal Orientation Center called, and we had our first case. We
were still waiting to get a car so I went to town to pick up the woman in
question with her two children, a five-year-old boy and an eight-year-old
girl. With the experience we have accumulated, we know now that this
first case was an extremely difficult one, in a category we identify today as
five stars. First of all, this woman’s husband was a policeman, who could
act with impunity. She had lived for over ten years with domestic abuse,
and she was deeply caught in the violence cycle. She also was incapable of
cooperating or engaging in a conversation, extremely self-absorbed, and
totally negligent of her children; some of these behavioral patterns were a
direct consequence of her violent life. The second case came the next day,
also a woman with two children who had run away with only the clothes
on her back after her husband and mother-in-law tried to kill her. We had
to take her to the hospital, treat her wounds, and give her special accom-
modations because the first woman was very hostile about sharing the large
dormitory where we had put her. This second woman, like the first, was to-
tally ensnared in the violence cycle. But she was gentle and cooperative, if
somewhat introverted; her children resembled her, though the only reality
they had ever known was violence. After the third case came in—a young
woman with two boys running away from terrible abuse by her partner—
we started experiencing serious discipline issues. The children of the first
woman, who were extremely rowdy and undisciplined, started beating the
other children. Their mother refused to cooperate in the household main-
tenance as she had agreed to do when she first came in. She argued that her
social status, her class position, and her position as the wife of a policeman
set her apart from the other two women, who were used to manual labor
and who came from lower social classes.
The First Deluding Element Seeps into the Idealist Bubble
I found myself thinking: How could victims of violence be so difficult and

uncooperative in a space that was set up specifically for them? How could
these women who bore the marks of years of physical beatings and psycho-
logical torture and who had run away looking for shelter, for protection, be
so unbending, so aggressive, and so hostile toward those who were there to
do the professional job of rehabilitating them? Yes, I know these are naïve
questions that are usually covered in a Psychology 101 class, but it was a
hard blow for the team to come face-to-face with the reality that planning
on paper for hypothetical women was much easier and more rewarding
than facing these women, complex human beings like all of us, and having
to argue that within the shelter there are rules that have to be followed. We
never thought there could be resistance.
The final straw came from our first beneficiary. The woman thought
she had waited too long to take her turn in the only shower we had in the
shelter and physically attacked the second resident, the shy, gentle woman
who probably never imagined she would experience such fury in a place
that had offered her sanctuary. Four of us came running down the stairs to
stop the attack and immediately ordered the perpetrator to pack up and
leave. We were certainly inexperienced but that was our bottom line. She
had used violence in a place set up precisely to fight it. She left and went
directly to the NGO headquarters to complain about us.
The SG of the NGO called me and admonished us for sending a poor
victim of violence out of the only place where she could be protected from
it. She called us incompetent and a shame to all institutions. Only after I
explained what had happened did she adjust her tone. I used the occasion
to insist that we needed a psychologist to frame our work and truly lead
the team, because none of us had a clinician’s experience, which, we were
learning, was essential to building a rehabilitation center. While looking
for a psychologist willing to work with us under the tight restrictions set up
by the NGO, we continued receiving beneficiaries. In our selection among
the potential beneficiaries that the Legal Orientation Center proposed to
us, we were extremely careful not to choose women with uncontrollable
tempers (though we knew we could not possibly know for sure) because
we felt we lacked the means to deal with them. For example, when ten
women seeking shelter applied, we would accept only four.
Then the “famous” case of Fatiha came. The controversy this case
involved was, for me, the final piece of the puzzle that allowed me to
clearly understand the relationship that was evolving between Laliti and
the NGO, on one hand, and the kind of ethical approach that needs to
ground the work within a shelter, on the other. As Fatiha was later to tell
us before leaving the center, their landlord evicted her and her husband
because they were over a year late with their rent, and thus they planned
that while he went away to somehow gather money, she would pretend to
have been beaten and come to the center, where she and her three children
would have all the essentials for survival. She was lucky we chose her to
come to the center, but once settled, she started arguing with the admin-
istration about the guidelines that all the beneficiaries needed to respect.
We assumed her behavior was the consequence of violence, and therefore
we were firm but understanding. Although she refused adamantly to press
charges against a husband she constantly described as being monstrous,
we could not influence or force her to do so because we were not sup-
posed to tell the women what to do. Our policy with the women is not
to interfere with their decisions but simply to orient them. At that time,
three months after receiving our first beneficiary, a wonderful psychologist
joined us for two days a week—one day for the beneficiaries and one day
with the administration helping us set up the center. When Fatiha refused
to see her, we started having doubts. Usually, the women need to talk, and
they jump at the chance to see the psychologist. So we called her. As Fatiha
came upstairs to our office, she must have felt something was awry because
when we confronted her with her unconventional behavior for a battered
woman, she simply and easily, with no second thoughts about being a liar
and a cheat, revealed her scam.
The Bubble of Idealism Starts Showing Seams
The SG and her assistant descended that same afternoon on Laliti. The SG
accused us of choosing only easy cases, saying that she was aware of all that
we did and did not do and that she knew especially of our cowardice. Her
accusation sent me into a fury—how dare she judge us in such a manner?
What about the perjury of Fatiha? What about honesty and all the other
positive moral values? What about our dedication because of our belief in
a cause, in a mission? “Well, there is no perjury from Fatiha; she simply
suffers from economic violence and her place is in Laliti.” Silence. A mo-
ment of stupefaction. The psychologist, my assistant, the social worker,
and I stared unbelievingly, stupefied even, at the SG as she began pouring
out a logorrhea, delivered in a high pitch and a single breath, about what
economic violence is and how it operates and that it is the global-capitalist
economy that turned all these women into alienated victims, robbing them
of their agency, even of the possibility of facing up to and articulating their
real needs. Her words were spoken as the good ideologue she was, surely
with conviction, but I had penetrated the smoke screen and could see how
she needed to keep the upper hand in all matters and decisions.
There was no point in arguing with the SG. I felt depleted after shout-
ing earlier with her, and we all just stood there in this hot, closed office,
listening to, what I constructed later to be, a delirious approach to vio-
lence. Once things calmed a bit, the psychologist ventured to wedge in
one essential idea: that we had priorities concerning physical violence and
that we needed to respect the values in which we rooted our work. Yet, we
could definitely not win with the SG. She pulled out the card of the fund-
ing agency and the statistics that justified their donation. We countered by
speaking about quality, and she answered that quantity does not discount
quality. We stayed like this for a while, trading words, but not conversing.
There was really nothing to say. The next day, Fatiha was sent away. The
SG understood that Laliti’s administration had a mind of its own, and
she retaliated by retaining or delaying funds for running the shelter. My
disillusion with the NGO was immense. I had misgivings about some of
the beneficiaries, but I continued to believe in a world free of domestic
violence. “What next then?” my internal monologue ran. “Can disillusion
be productive? Is it possible to disembody ‘violence,’ to turn it into an ab-
straction, a free-floating sign not connected to bodies or contexts?” Today
I realize that this was the break after which the return was hard, if not im-
possible. My bubble of idealism was full of pinholes. My enthusiasm was
slowly being undermined by doubt about the real value of the work being
done and by my anxiety and fear about having become so involved that I
could not extricate myself from a very messy situation. Then I realized that
the NGO’s stance is the easy one; it is easy in the sense that it identifies an
“antagonist block” (whether it is a person, a state, a firm or business, a set
of customs, or a society as a whole) and then goes after it. As a matter of
fact, the NGO agenda and its activities are, to a large extent, defined by
this external entity. In the case of a shelter, however, who is the “antago-
nist”? It is the “system” that lives in each one of us as “agents,” as carriers
and reproducers of these elements and this culture. This is so much more
difficult to counter. Who sets up the agenda and how can we go about
changing things then?
While reading the notes I have kept from this period, I relive the feel-
ing of uneasiness I experienced that week. I was full of questions. I could
not simply discard the activism of the NGO, since it was their passion
that compelled me to volunteer with them in the first place. I also could
not hold all the beneficiaries responsible for the dishonesty of a few. And
finally, what did I really think I was doing when I embarked on this adven-
ture? That was the same fated week when, as the director of the Laliti shel-
ter, I was confronted yet again with some serious disciplinary issues. We
had accepted to the house a beneficiary with her three little girls because
she just needed time to find a way to accommodate her new condition.
She did have a loving husband, but he had killed someone in a fight. She
wanted to stay in the city to go and visit him but did not want to go live
with her family or her in-laws. The psychologist evaluated her case and
warned us to be careful with her because of “emotional instability,” but
we figured that this instability was due to her extremely precarious living
conditions. The tensions, however, kept mounting. She was extremely ter-
ritorial, arguing for hours about her share in the household chores. She
refused to eat what we all ate, started bringing in food for her girls (strictly
forbidden in the shelter because it creates terrible jealousies between al-
ready fragile children), and overall acted in an unethical manner. We gave
her a first warning. A second and then a third followed by the end of the
week. It was my job to announce this third warning after which she simply
had to vacate the shelter. After six months of operating this shelter, after
having been coached by the psychologist, and after having had so many
moments of belief and disillusion, I had to be the “official” and tell this
woman to leave. I had to put on a mask and decree like an almighty ruler,
“You need to leave because the security of the shelter is more important
than the security of one individual.” My feet transported me in front of

her. I violated the protocol for situations like this.
My bubble of idealism exploded like a bomb, sending shreds, shingles,
and odd pieces all across the two-acre property, reverberating throughout
the shelter, bringing all to a sudden halt. My voice, not me, was shouting,
“You leave here!” My heart was looking at the girls, especially the youngest
one, who played with my own daughter, who often came with me to Laliti.
I hated this voice, the voice of authority, the voice of the community, the
voice of the righteous norms. The staff and beneficiaries all stopped their
activities, formed a circle, and just stared at this woman screaming, “Clear
the place!”
My memory fails me after that, but my assistant later explained to me
that the staff hurried me upstairs and helped me lie down. They proceeded
with the exit protocol with the woman. I realized that I had just made a
terrible and unprofessional mistake. I lost my temper, and I was not sup-
posed to do that. I acted in a violent manner rather than being firm but
calm. I have replayed this scene hundreds of times in my head since it hap-
pened, and I recognize my responsibility. At the same time, the situation
reached the limit of what I could bear.
Maintaining Hope, Realistically
Since this incident, I have worked hard to set up staff retreats with volun-
teer professionals to discuss how to live with witnesses and stories of vio-
lence, how to develop a “professional” attitude without losing one’s human
compassion, and how to keep separate the realm of work and the privacy
of one’s life. While the work at the front lines is about inviting oneself into
the private lives of others, it is also about making clear distinctions about
what belongs where. After three years of juggling my teaching load and my
work as director of the Laliti shelter, I slowly withdrew from the shelter.
This has been one of the most intense lessons in my life and one that
has taught me about the pitfalls of the idealism that animated me through-
out this adventure. I realize that despite all the academic texts that I taught
in my seminar about utopia I simply and willingly fell into its trap, expe-
riencing how individuals become simple atoms giving life to an idea, like a
communal utopia, a phalanstery.
The Laliti shelter has housed over three hundred women with their
children. While many of them did return to their husbands, they were
transformed individuals. The ones that have chosen divorce or separation

have indeed gone through a process of empowerment and broken the
circle of violence successfully. For the main Moroccan religious holidays,
many of the women come back to gather, talk, socialize, drink tea, and
eat cookies. Then, I realize that there is something to the word Laliti. And
there is something about a saving compassion.
Notes
1. Laliti is a variation of the real name of the shelter. I have changed it to protect
the identity of those taking part in this adventure.
2. These amendments raised the age of marriage for young women, allowed them
to contract a marriage without the father or the legal guardian, prohibited unilat-
eral divorce, and allowed women to ask for a divorce. In all these changes, there
are, of course, areas of gray. See Bargach 2005a and 2005b.
3. Despite the amendments of the Penal Code in 2003, clause 496 was kept. For
associations this clause embodies the discriminatory nature of the code and for
them opening a shelter amounts to an act of civil disobedience. Authorities are
notified that the shelter is open and, as there is an increasing awareness of vio-
lence, “business” runs smoothly though the shelters are in effect unlawful.
Works Cited
Bargach, Jamila. 2005a. An Ambiguous Discourse of Rights: The 2004 Family Law
Reform in Morocco. Hawwa: Journal of Women in the Middle East and the Islamic
World 3 (2): 245–66.
———. 2005b. “Wall Hit Me”: Urbanites on the Margin. Muslim World Journal of
Human Rights 2 (1): article 8.
Contributors
M. Cristina Alcalde is an assistant professor in the Gender and Women’s

Studies Department at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on
domestic violence, gender, and race in Peru and among Latinas and Latinos
in the United States. Her book, The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty,
and Resistance in Peru, was published in 2010 by Vanderbilt University Press.
Sharman L. Babior holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of

California, Los Angeles, where she has taught courses in anthropology and
women’s studies since 1994. Her primary research examines women and gen-
der, family and social organization, domestic and sexual violence, the contem-
porary status of women in Japan and cross-culturally, and human rights issues.
Jamila Bargach holds a PhD in anthropology from Rice University. She is the
director of academic programs for Dar Si-Hmad in Sidi Ifni, Morocco. She
has taught at the École Nationale d’Architecture in Rabat, and in 2010–2011
she held the Campbell Fellowship for Women Scholar-Practitioners from De-
veloping Nations. Her first book, Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and
Secret Adoption in Morocco, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2002.
She is currently completing a book on unwed mothers in Morocco.
Stephanie J. Brommer is on the faculty at City University of Seattle, where

she teaches sociocultural anthropology and communications and also man-
ages the online communications undergraduate degree program. Her current
research focuses on domestic violence representations in music videos. A for-
mer newspaper reporter, she received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology
from the University of California at Santa Barbara, her MS in journalism from
Northwestern University, and her BA in French language and in semiotics at
Brown University.
223
Cyleste C. Collins is a research assistant professor in the Mandel School of

Applied Social Sciences and faculty associate at the Center on Urban Pov-
erty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University. She
earned her MSW and PhD in social work from the University of Alabama
in 2005. Her research is focused on understanding psychosocial processes in
a cultural context. She has research and practice experience in such areas as
domestic violence, homelessness, substance abuse, child abuse and neglect,
and perceptions of discrimination.
Hillary J. Haldane is an assistant professor of anthropology at Quinnipiac

University in Hamden, Connecticut. Her research focuses on comparative
indigeneity, gender-based violence, and the instrumental use of “culture” in
institutional settings and government policies. Her ethnographic research on
the front line of gender-based violence has appeared in Practicing Anthropology
and Global Public Health.
Julie Hemment is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology

at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published on topics of
gender, postsocialism, and NGOs and civil society. Her current research in-
vestigates the restructuring of social welfare provision in Russia by examining
provincial projects to promote youth voluntarism.
Uwe Jacobs has been working with Survivors International for the past fifteen
years. He is a clinical neuropsychologist and a psychotherapist. He is an expert
on the psychological and neuropsychological assessment of asylum seekers and
has written and published guidelines on this topic. He is the recipient of the
2009 Community Health Leaders Award from the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation.
Lynn Kwiatkowski is a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Anthro-

pology at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on medical anthro-
pology, gender violence, political violence, hunger, and critical development
studies. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam, the Philip-
pines, and the United States and is the author of Struggling with Development:
The Politics of Hunger and Gender in the Philippines (Westview, 1998).
Belinda Leach is a professor of anthropology at the University of Guelph. Her

research investigates gender, livelihoods, and feminist organizations in Canada
and has been published in Critique of Anthropology, Identities, Focaal: Journal
of Global and Historical Anthropology, and Signs. She is coeditor with Win-
Contributorsâ•…â•…225
nie Lem of Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as

Praxis (State University of New York Press, 2002), and co-author with Tony
Winson of Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives: Labour and Community in the
New Rural Economy (University of Toronto Press, 2002). She is currently a
co-editor of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
Roxane Richter is a doctoral candidate at the University of Witwatersrand in

Johannesburg, South Africa, and president of the U.S.-based nonprofit World
Missions Possible, an organization dedicated to providing free medical care
and aid in dozens of impoverished and disaster-stricken nations. She has ex-
tensive experience as an emergency medical technician in national and inter-
national disaster aid and emergency medical services. Her research focuses on
women’s health care and justice challenges in refugee disasters.
Kim Shively is an assistant professor of anthropology at Kutztown University

of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in gender and religion in the Middle
East. She received her MTS from Harvard Divinity School and her PhD from
Brandeis University. Her research has focused on women and religion in Tur-
key, including a two-year research project on domestic violence and women’s
shelters in Izmir, Turkey. She is currently preparing a book titled Sharp Edge
of the Sword: Religious Lives in Secular Turkey for the Society for the Anthro-
pology of Religion book series published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Jennifer R. Wies is an assistant professor of anthropology at Eastern Kentucky

University. She completed a PhD in anthropology at the University of Ken-
tucky with an emphasis on applied and medical anthropology. Her research
focuses on those who labor with vulnerable populations, such as victims of
gender-based violence, people with HIV/AIDS, children, and college women.
She has published her work in journals such as Global Public Health and Hu-
man Organization, as well as in the edited collection Empowering Women in
Higher Education and Student Affairs: Theory, Research, Narratives, and Practice
from Feminist Perspectives (Stylus, 2011).
Index
aboriginal communities, 195, 206n4. in Japan, 28

See also First Nations communities; in San Francisco Bay Area, 64, 129–38
indigenous communities scholars as advocates, 9–10,
Abraham, Margaret, 6 11, 39, 166
academia, 27, 113, 133, 167 state retaliation against, 192, 204
academic research, 27, 221 Afghanistan, 68n4, 81, 201
and activism, 39, 213–14 Africa, 19, 93, 137. See also
in Morocco, 213–14 individual countries
in Russia, 171, 174, 182 agency, 12, 156, 219, 220. See also choice
in Turkey, 77 Alcalde, M. Christina, 12, 91–106
See also individual universities alcohol, 83, 111–13, 125, 173, 177, 181,
acid attacks, 2 182
activism, 13, 74, 170 role in violence, 5
and academia, 39 Aliağa (Turkey), 72
in Canada, 191–209 Alvarez, Donia A., 187n9
domestic violence activists, 51–70 American Bar Association, 165
feminist activists, 169, 186n2, 197 Amnesty International, 78, 80, 165
human rights activists, 86, 169 anthropologists, 3–7, 10, 14, 30, 31,
in Morocco, 214 139, 156
relation to state, 77, 204 as frontline workers, 45, 213
in Russia, 165–90 anthropology, 140, 141, 148, 186n1
scholars as activists, 9 cognitive anthropology, 110–11, 124
South Asian activists, 51–70 fieldwork, 1, 29, 30, 31, 32, 45, 124
transnational feminist activism, 168 legal anthropology, 5
in Turkey, 71–90 medical anthropology, 5
women’s rights activists, 72, 166 political anthropology, 5
Adelman, Madelaine, 8–9, 67, 80, 142 on violence, 4–7, 11, 31, 192–93
adultery, 142 See also ethnography
advocacy, 1, 4, 22, 26, 168–69, 186 appropriation (cultural), 11, 85–86
asylum advocates, 129, 131, 138 by activists, 71, 74, 76, 86, 87, 148,
domestic violence advocates, 108, 121, 160
125 as imperialism, 194
frontline worker advocacy, 12, 13 Asad, Talal, 196
227
Asia, 19, 44, 51, 93, 143 Bolshevik regime (USSR), 187n12
ethnicity categories on the U.S. census, Bolton, Ralph, 31
68nn5–6 Bordo, Susan, 145
South Asia, 51–65, 68nn3–4, 69n8, Bosnia, 169
194 Brazil, 6, 7, 91, 93, 94–95, 104, 104n3
See also individual countries British Columbia, 195
asylum, 129–38 British Embassy, 165
autonomy, 22, 69, 77, 86, 145, 172, 215 Brommer, Stephanie J., 11, 12, 51–70
Brown, Judith, 5
Babior, Sharman, 10, 11, 12, 29–49 Brown, Wendy, 64
Bangladesh, 53–56, 58, 68n4, 68n6 burnout, 45–46, 135
Bargach, Jamila, 10, 13–14, 211–22
Başkent University, 79 California, 11, 51–69, 129
Batchelder, William H., 110 Campbell, Jacquelyn, 5
battered women’s movement, 39, 168, 169 Canada, 10, 13, 197–207
batterers, 7, 11, 42, 71, 155, 158, 159 Canadian Embassy, 188n17
in Brazil, 104n3 Canadian Panel on Violence
interviews about, 95, 142, 150 Against Women, 197
in Japan, 42 capitalism, 170–71, 187n9, 204, 219
in Peru, 91–106 in Russia, 167, 173, 176, 185
police response to, 11, 42, 71, 97, in Vietnam, 142–43
104, 104n3 See also liberalism; neoliberalism
shelters for battered women, 42, carework, 23, 26, 34, 67, 82, 144, 151
77–78, 88n3, 101, 103 frontline workers as caregivers, 52–53,
in Turkey, 11, 71–72, 77–78, 80, 55, 59–61
85–86, 88n3 models of care, 1, 8, 14, 66
in Vietnam, 13 See also child care; domestic workers
of women, 6, 13, 42, 104, 186n5, caste systems (South Asian), 54, 55, 64
198, 218 Center for Women and Families
See also child abuse; domestic violence; (Russia), 188n23
intimate partner violence; violence Centers for Disease Control and
against women Prevention (CDC) (U.S.), 73
battery, 99–100, 140, 147, 154, 178, 194 Cesara, Manda, 30
Baviskar, Amita, 194 Charter of Rights (Canada), 206n7
bearing witness, 10, 135 child abuse, 4, 91, 197, 217
behavioral science, 9 child care, 19–20, 23, 26, 84,
Beijing, 169, 187n8 201, 203, 207n13
Berkeley (U.S.), 54, 56 children, 8, 72, 75, 79, 104n1, 132–33,
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (India), 55 135
Bhutan, 68n4, 69n6 children’s rights, 138
biology, 22, 26, 31 child welfare workers’ focus on, 114,
bisexuality, 3 118–25
blame custody of, 134–35, 148
self-blame, 40, 111, 113, 116 in danger, 102, 130, 216
women blamed for violence, 92, 96, and divorce, 101, 150, 152
99, 100–103, 107–8, 123 fear of losing, 19, 40
body, 145, 146 as perpetrators of violence, 36
Indexâ•…â•… 229
in shelters, 34–35, 84, 96, 205, community clubs, 148–49

213–15, 218, 220–21 community harmony, 153
child support, 36 community resources, 118
child welfare workers, 1, 12, 107–26 creating community, 59–62, 64, 67,
China, 86n5, 91, 104, 169, 187n8 138
choice, 84, 145–48 and domestic violence workers, 115,
and constraint, 114–15 117, 121, 126
and human rights discourse, 145, 153, empowering community, 1, 27, 59
154 feminist communities, 191, 192,
and social constraints, 152 198–201
women’s choice, 52, 60–61, 117, 149, as fictive kin, 52, 60
151, 159, 160 international/global community, 74,
See also agency 128, 154
Christianity, 6, 33, 51, 56, 212–13 in Japan, 29
Çiğli (Turkey), 72 linguistic communities, 68n5
Çiğli Rotary Club, 73 medical surveillance in, 158
citizenship, 68n5, 83, 86, shelters within, 154, 205
96, 138, 172, 195 South Asian diasporic communities in
civil society, 76, 142, 165, 169–70, 171 the United States, 51–70
class, 21, 55 targeted by development programs,
and asylum seekers, 134–35, 137 151
in Canada, 201, 204, 205n2 in Turkey, 84
classism, 44, 92, 152, 160, 195–96 in Vietnam, 139–40, 143, 145,
and domestic violence, 37, 93 148–60
and intersectionality, 97–99 violence in, 2, 4, 55–57, 130, 155–59
in Morocco, 213, 217 women in, 27, 165, 168
in Peru, 91–94, 97–99, 104 confidentiality, 58, 59, 68n1, 161n1, 174
in South Asian diaspora, 56 consciousness raising, 174
in Turkey, 86 counseling, 132, 137
in Vietnam, 152, 160 for batterers, 149, 155, 157
See also poverty by child welfare workers, 117, 133
Clifford, James, 46 counselor training, 55, 66, 152,
Club for Family Happiness 154–55
(Vietnam), 149, 157, 159 in disaster contexts, 13, 26
Club for Male Farmers (Vietnam), 149 for frontline workers, 40, 133
Club for Volunteers for Family in health care centers, 142, 144–59
Happiness (Vietnam), 157 in India, 61
Cold War, 184 in Japan, 34, 36
Collins, Cyleste C., 12, 107–26 legal counseling, 147, 174
colonialism, 187n8, 194, 196, 203, 206n4 multilingual, 34
Comaskey, Brenda, 206n4 for refugees, 12, 135
Committee for Population, Family, in Russia, 173, 174, 177, 181, 184
and Children (Vietnam), 148 scholars as counselors, 9, 99
communalism, 55 sexual and domestic violence
communism, 6, 143. See also socialism counseling, 26, 34, 58–66, 118,
community, 11, 26, 188n21, 221 121, 133, 174
antiviolence work in, 7 at shelters, 34, 36
counseling, continued Davila, Arturo, 94

for South Asian diasporic Davis, Angela, 195
communities, 58–66 democracy, 166, 167, 170–72,
telephone/hotline counseling, 1, 36, 184–85, 188n18
177 development, 199
in Vietnam, 140, 142, 144–59 critique of, 80
Counts, Dorothy, 5 developing nations, 19, 20, 22, 25
Court Challenges Program economic development policies, 80
(Canada), 207n13 international development
crimes against humanity, 169 organizations, 140–48, 151, 154,
crisis centers, 13, 83, 165–88, 156, 160–61, 167–70, 184–85
197. See also shelters as neoliberalism, 170
Cruz, Isabel de la, 41–42 underdevelopment, 82
cultural adjustment, 36, 58, 63 diaspora, 51–69
cultural consensus theory, 110, 112, 122 Directorate General for Social Work
Cultural Memory Group and Social Services (Turkey), 77
(Canada), 205n1 Directorate General on the Status and
cultural models research, 65, 110–11 Problems of Women (Turkey), 75–78
cultural relativity, 5, 7 disability, 24, 27, 85
cultural rituals, 4 and disaster management, 22, 25–26
cultural specificity, 4, 5, 9 mental illness, 36, 82, 111, 113, 125,
culture, 7, 12, 67, 100, 131, 137, 169, 135
220 disasters, 10–11, 19–28
cross-cultural comparison, 6, 22, 36, discourse, 137, 151, 184, 193
67, 104, 165, 170 and activism, 52, 53, 61, 67
cultural differences, 34, 55 on the body, 145
cultural displacement, 55, 58 development discourse, 148, 185
cultural ideologies, 4, 13, 139, 154, discursive politics, 52–53, 56, 65, 80
156, 160 empowerment discourse, 53, 56
cultural similarities, 40, 55 human rights discourse, 72–74, 86
cultural translation, 9, 76, 140 model minority discourse, 64
culture/rights dichotomy, 14n1 and silence, 63–65
definition of, 110 state discourses on violence, 141,
and empowerment, 59 193, 198, 203
and food, 34 transnational discourses on gender,
intracultural diversity, 122 145–46
and South Asian diasporic transnational discourses on violence,
community, 52–67 8, 9, 13, 79, 139–41, 154, 174,
and violence, 11, 62, 112–13, 129, 185
142, 193, 196 See also language
culture shock, 32 discrimination, 3–4, 75, 168, 176,
cycle of violence, 51, 56, 116–17, 186n6
124, 136, 146, 216–17 economic discrimination, 92, 175,
185
Dagnino, Evelina, 170, 187n9 gender discrimination, 28, 91–94,
Darfur, 201 97–98, 103, 187n13, 206n7,
Das, Veena, 193 222n2
at police stations, 91–94, 97–98, 103 in South Asian diasporic communities,

racial discrimination, 92 11, 51–70
workplace discrimination, 185 structural dynamics of, 4, 115–17
diversity, 6, 53–54, 168, 169, 171, 177, in Turkey, 11–12, 71–90
196 in the United States, 11, 51–70,
and approaches to violence, 131, 138, 107–28, 169
139, 160 in Vietnam, 12–13, 139–63
intracultural diversity, 110, 122 See also battery; child abuse; domestic
divorce, 60 abuse; domestic violence training;
counseling about, 36, 38, 65, 118, elder abuse
147–50, 178 domestic violence training, 45, 117, 183
divorce laws, 147–48, 222 for child welfare workers, 125
impact on women, 79, 148, 150, 152, for crisis center workers, 174, 181
178 for health workers, 142–44, 147, 153,
in Japan, 36, 38 158
in Morocco, 121, 222 for police, 80, 206n8
in Russia, 178, 181 for welfare offices, 108–9
in South Asian diasporic communities, Domestic Violence: Women’s Way
56, 58, 61, 65 Out (Shrader and Sagot), 6
as stigma, 56, 58, 61, 100, 150, 152 domestic workers, 34, 41, 56, 84
in Turkey, 79 Dorsey, Ellen, 178
in Vietnam, 147–52 dowry, 2, 56, 64, 168
domestic abuse, 86, 215 drug addiction and dependency, 22,
causes of, 56 26, 83, 87, 111, 112, 113, 123
definition of, 68n2 DuBois, Cora, 32
political economy of, 67 dysadaptation syndrome, 32
in South Asian diasporic communities,
51–69 Eastern bloc, 167, 187n10
transnational approach to, 53 École Polytechnique, 191, 197
See also battery; child abuse; domestic ecology, 31
violence; elder abuse economic dependency, 95–96
domestic violence, 6 economic exploitation, 2–4, 56,
and anthropology, 5 129. See also poverty
and asylum seekers, 129–38 education, 55, 68n5, 113, 123, 133,
in Canada, 197 182, 194
and child welfare workers, 12 and asylum, 134
definition of, 2, 68n2, 71–74, 79, about capitalism, 184
88n2, 142 for children, 58, 84
in disaster contexts, 22, 26 and class, 132
in Japan, 29–49 about domestic violence, 125, 205
and law, 74–76, 98–99, 143, 154–55, domestic violence workers as
206n6 educators, 115–18, 121–24
and model minority narrative, 63 for health workers, 143–44
in Morocco, 211–12 and model minority narrative, 52, 63
in Peru, 12, 91–106 in Morocco, 211, 215
and police, 80, 94–96 in Russia, 171, 174, 176, 184
in Russia, 13, 165–90 in Turkey, 76–79
education, continued family support, 68n9, 84, 96, 103,

for women, 25, 76, 69n8, 77, 85, 104 115, 152
See also individual universities family unity, 159
elder abuse, 197 fictive kin, 30, 51, 60, 74
empathy, 14, 45, 115, 135 and law, 7, 84, 93, 97, 147, 212
empowerment, 62, 69n8, 117, 146 and social services model, 79–80
for community, 1, 27–28, 55–56 in South Asian diasporic
disempowerment, 101, 134, 156–57 communities, 51–68
for women, 52–56, 59, 61, 64, 102, and state, 8, 188n20, 196
178, 222 See also kinship; marriage
England, 79, 165, 167, 196. family violence, 2, 4, 80–82, 103,
See also British Embassy 142–43, 173, 197–98
Enloe, Cynthia, 194–95 and anthropology, 5
Escobar, Arturo, 187n9 child welfare workers on, 118–21
essentialism, 92 community reaction to, 62–63,
ethnicity, 37, 44, 82, 87, 134–35, 137, 149–56, 158
196 and law, 147
on U.S. census, 68nn5–6 and police, 91–93, 99–100
ethnography, 1, 5, 6, 46, 92, 113, and shelters, 35–36, 38, 85, 87, 88n3
124–25 Family Violence in Cross-Cultural
definition of, 9–11 Perspective (Levinson), 4
and fieldwork, 12–13, 41, 192 Family Violence Initiative
as localized methodology, 7–8, 139– (1988) (Canada), 197
41, 167 Farmer, Paul, 3
and methodology, 11, 14, 141–42 Farmers Union (Vietnam), 149
and reflexivity, 30–38, 56 Federal Emergency Management
and violence, 9–11 Association (FEMA) (U.S.), 25
See also participant action research Federal Employment Service
Europe, 12, 91, 136–37, 167, 187n10, (Russia), 175
188n20, 197 female genital cutting, 2, 4, 129,
European battered women’s movement, 134, 136, 168, 191
168, 170 femicide, 191
shelter models from, 71–76, 79, 81, feminism, 13, 31–32, 174, 175, 186n4,
86, 87, 175, 187n14 213, 214
See also individual countries in Canada, 191–205
European Union, 74, 75 in Japan, 44
Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, in Morocco, 211, 212
Court Rites, and Cultures of in Peru, 92, 95, 97
Reconciliation (Lazarus-Black), 6–7 relation to the state, 195, 197–204,
expert witness testimony, 129, 134 212
in Russia, 166–90
family, 42, 170, 172, 177, 179, 183, 192 in South Asian diasporic
definitions of, 141, 160 communities, 52–53, 56
families of victims, 107, 124–25, 130 transnational feminism, 166–90
family honor, 55, 63, 86 in Turkey, 86
family pressure on women, 53, 112– on violence, 168–69, 185, 194–95,
13, 147–56 197–204, 206n6
Indexâ•…â•…233
Fiji, 68n4 gender-based violence, 7–9, 67, 131,

First Nations communities, 149, 168, 184, 186
196, 205n2, 206n4. See also and anthropology, 4–7, 9–14, 31,
aboriginal communities; 141
indigenous communities and asylum, 129
First World. See global North in Canada, 192–98, 203–4
Firth, Raymond, 32, 39 causes of, 112–13
Flying Broom (Uçan Süpürge) definition of, 2–4
(Turkey), 76 and frontline workers, 1–2
Ford Foundation, 165, 186n6 in Japan, 29
Foucault, Michel, 64–65 in Morocco, 211–13
funding, 77–78, 159–60, 175, 186n6, in Peru, 95
192, 213–15 political economy of, 33, 170
and asylum, 131, 33 in Russia, 172, 177, 179–80
corporate funding, 51 shelters, 87–88, 144, 172, 177,
international funding, 166, 169–70, 179–80, 212
178, 182–83, 185 and the state, 192–98
for international health programs, transnational understandings of,
143, 145, 155 14, 74, 140, 145–46, 152–56,
state funding, 197–98, 204–5 160–61, 167
in Turkey, 79, 81, 87–88
Gammeltoft, Tine, 152 in the United States, 73, 107
gay identity, 3, 130, 137 in Vietnam, 142–43, 146, 160–61
gender, 22, 81, 104, 138, 140, 184, See also acid attacks; battery; child
206n3 abuse; domestic abuse; domestic
and asylum, 133 violence; elder abuse; female
and capitalism, 186n4 genital cutting; femicide; honor
cultural ideologies of, 152, 160 killings; incest; infanticide;
in disaster contexts, 11, 20–27 intimate partner violence;
of frontline workers, 136–37 pedophilia; rape; sexual assault;
gender discrimination, 168, 172, 175, sexual exploitation; sexual
186n13, 206n7 harassment; sexual slavery; sexual
gender equality, 5, 7, 21, 27, 74–75 violence; torture; trafficking;
gender expression, 3 violence against women
gender identity, 2, 12 Gender Politics in Brazil and
gender inequality, 8, 20, 112–13, Chile (Macaulay), 7
116, 121, 160, 161n3 genocide, 131, 194
gender neutrality, 192, 204 globalization, 166, 169, 174, 184
gender relations, 167, 171–72 global North, 13, 20, 168
gender roles, 4, 53 global South, 13, 168
gender stereotypes, 52, 92, 94 Goldstein, Donna, 6
and intersectionality, 97–98, 134–35, Gorbachev, Mikhail S., 171
194–96 Goulden, Marianne, 198–202, 207n10
and law, 93 Gow, Peter, 193
and police, 95, 99 Great Britain, 196. See also
transnational discourses on, 145, 184 British Embassy; England
See also transgender identity Green, Linda, 193
Guelph (Canada), 197–201 international human rights documents,

Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis 2–3, 73, 74–76, 168, 186n5
(WIC) (Canada), 199–202 sexual minorities’ rights, 130–31, 138
Guide for Health Personnel Working with women’s rights as, 3, 27, 56, 72, 86,
Victims of Gender Violence, 147 130–31, 153–56, 168
Human Rights and Gender
Hacettepe University, 78 Violence (Merry), 1, 7–8, 74,
Haldane, Hillary, 1–17 76, 81, 86–87, 140, 145
Hanoi, 139–63 Hurricane Ike, 21–22
Hanoi Health Service (Vietnam), 143 Hurricane Katrina, 10–11, 19–21, 23–26
Harding, Sandra, 31–32, 40
Harper, Stephen, 207n13 ideology, 14n1, 53, 153–54, 161, 171,
Harvey, Penelope, 193 214, 216
Hautzinger, Sarah, 6, 95, 104n3 family ideologies, 142, 152, 154, 156,
health care, 108, 110, 111, 143, 206n5 160
abuse’s effect on health, 7, 56, 93, gender ideologies, 4, 145, 152, 156,
139 160, 175–76, 184–85
and asylum, 129–30, 132, 135, 138 neoliberal ideologies, 8
emergency health care, 10–11, of violence, 7, 12, 13, 124, 139–40,
19–28 156, 208
international health programs, immigration
12–13, 139–63 in Japan, 36–39, 41–42, 44
in Japan, 39 South Asian immigrant communities,
in the United States, 10–11, 19–28 51–70
in Vietnam, 12–13, 139–63 in Turkey, 88, 96
for women, 19–28, 179, 181 in the United States, 129–38
Hearn, Maureen, 6 See also asylum
Hemment, Julie, 13, 74, 165–90 imperialism, 44, 194
“Here Our Culture Is Hard”: Stories of incarceration, 75, 79, 137, 138
Domestic Violence from a Mayan incest, 3
Community in Belize (McClusky), 5 Independent Policy Research
Highway of Tears (Canada), 195 Fund (Canada), 207n13
Hinduism, 54, 55, 56 Independent Russian Women’s
Hodžić, Saida, 14n1 Movement, 172
Holocaust, 131 Independent Women’s Movement
homelessness, 21, 43, 65, 82, 87, 89n5 forums (Russia), 171–72
and gender-based violence, 4, 36, 38 India, 32, 81, 89n5, 168
homophobia, 195 familial relationships, 52, 59
honor killings, 75, 82, 85, 87 Indian diasporic communities, 11, 51,
House of Emergency Love and 53–61, 64, 68n4, 69n9
Peace (HELP) (Japan), 33–46 and U.S. census, 68nn5–6
Houston, 19, 23, 24 women’s police stations in, 93
human rights, 14n1, 21, 54, 80, 93, indigenous communities, 8, 91, 97,
138, 140, 213 145. See also aboriginal communities;
and asylum, 130–32, 136, 138 First Nations communities
human rights law, 8, 74–76, 130–31 Indonesia, 187n8
human rights violations, 7, 136, 145 infanticide, 2, 56
International Conference for Population Laliti (Morocco), 13–14, 211–22

and Control (1994) (Cairo), 146 LaMarsh, Judy, 206n5
international health programs, language, 68n5, 81, 88n1, 102, 168,
12–13, 139–63 197, 200
International NGO Perspectives on and academia, 10, 110
Reproductive Health in Vietnam: An of empowerment, 52–53, 59–60
Invitation to Dialogue (INGOs), 146 linguistic difference, 34, 55, 137, 196
International Women’s multilingualism, 54, 56, 58, 171
Association of Izmir, 73 terminology for violence, 4, 61–62,
intersectionality, 97–98, 134–35, 194–96 68n2, 73, 75, 142, 181–82
intimate partner violence, 77, 83, 93, 99, terminology in activist projects, 65,
101, 121, 194 146, 174–75, 178, 184–85, 198,
domestic violence exceeding, 71–73, 213
81, 86–88 See also discourse; translation
as gender-based violence, 3 Latin America, 19, 91–93, 135, 168.
and shelters, 36 See also individual countries
See also domestic abuse; domestic Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class,
violence Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio
Iraq, 203 Shantytown (Goldstein), 6
Islam, 7, 56 law, 5–6, 96–97, 102, 121, 149, 194–
Istanbul, 78, 82 95, 206n7
Italy, 6 arrest of batterers, 61, 98–99
Izmir (Turkey), 71–90 asylum law, 129–32, 135, 138,
203–4
Jacobs, Uwe, 10, 12, 129–38 criminalizing batterers, 11, 71
Japan, 10, 11, 29–49, 68n5 difference between law and practice,
Japan Woman’s Christian Temperance 96
Union (Nihon Kirisutokyo Fujin disadvantaging women, 53, 105
Kyofukai) (JWCTU), 33–34 divorce law, 103, 146
justice, 6, 176, 196 domestic violence law, 84, 153–55,
gender justice, 74, 131 162n4, 192, 197, 206n6
justice systems, 8, 197, 206n4 and economic discrimination, 185
redistributive justice, 170 and employment, 36
social justice, 21–22, 27, 166, 168, family law, 7, 212, 222n2
171, 205 family violence law, 93, 104n1, 143
human rights law, 74–76
Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod, 52, 56 immigration law, 38
Keck, Margaret, 168 international human rights law, 4, 8,
Keiko, Toyota, 43–45 74–76, 86–87, 169
Kelly, Liz, 194–95 knowledge of, 99
Kennedy, John F., 206n5 law enforcement, 55, 80, 85, 95,
kinship, 52, 60, 64, 65, 100. 104, 130
See also family; marriage lawyers, 1, 8, 66, 135, 138, 182, 215
Kleinman, Arthur, 193 legal resources, 58, 117, 144, 147,
Kurds, 82 178
Kwiatkowski, Lynn, 12–13, 139–63 rape law, 84, 198, 206n8
See also police; state
Law for the Prevention of Spousal hospitals, 132, 141

Violence and the Protection of medical anthropology, 5
Victims (2001) (Japan), 37 medical documentation of abuse, 97,
Law on Domestic Violence Prevention 103, 129
and Control (2007) (Vietnam), 154 medical experimentation, 194
Law on the Protection of the Family, medical surveillance, 158
no. 4320 (1998) (Turkey), 75–76 and shelters, 83, 140
Lazarus-Black, Mindie, 6–7 See also health care
Leach, Belinda, 13, 191–209 Memorial Hermann-Texas
Legal Orientation Center Medical Center (U.S.), 24
(Morocco), 216, 218 mental illness. See disability
lesbianism, 3, 56, 58 Merry, Sally Engle, 81, 87, 88n2, 140,
Levinson, David, 5 145
liberalism, 56, 78, 137, 167, 172, 184, and cultural translation, 7–8, 12, 71,
196. See also capitalism; neoliberalism 74, 76, 86
Lima, 91–106 on frontline activism, 1
Lock, Margaret M., 193 methodology, 123, 124, 173
of activist projects, 173, 178
Macaulay, Fiona, 7 cognitive anthropology methodologies,
MacFarland, Jean, 206n7 111
Mackey, Eva, 196 feminist methodologies, 31–32
Maitri (U.S.), 51–70 interviews, 11, 12, 13, 20, 24, 72–73,
Malaysia, 187n8 112–14
Marcus, George E., 46 participant action research, 188n21
marginalization, 72, 80, 166, 172, 177, participant observation, 9, 11–12,
196, 213 29–33, 34, 38–41, 44–46
of battered women, 104n3 surveys, 109
in disaster planning, 26 See also ethnography; participant
of undocumented migrants, 38 action research
of women police officers, 92–95 Mexico, 104, 105n4
Marianne’s Park (Canada), military, 82, 176, 177, 184, 195
199–202, 207n10 militarism, 194, 203
marriage, 43, 59, 65, 81, 84, 141,172–73 See also war
arranged marriage, 55, 57, 58 Ministry of Social Development
forced marriage, 2, 56, 79, 136 (Morocco), 212
marriage law, 75, 83, 104n1, 222n2 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 7
pressure regarding, 53, 61, 148 modernity, 5, 145, 153
Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Mohanty, Chandra, 54
Family Law (Mir-Hosseini), 7 Montreal, 191, 197, 198,
McCann, Lisa, 40, 42, 45 200, 201, 207n10
McClusky, Laura, 5–6 Morocco, 10, 13–14, 37, 211–22
McGilligray, Anne, 206n4 Morton, Gillian, 207n11
medicine, 58, 120, 124, 179, 216 Moscow, 165–66, 171, 173, 177, 180
and asylum, 130, 133 Moudawana (Moroccan family law), 212
biomedicine, 143, 144, 160 Moynagh, Maureen, 196
emergency medicine, 10–11, 19–28 multiculturalism, 11, 196
murder, 13, 81, 99, 178n15, 191–209 participatory action research, 167,
threat of, 42, 85, 134 177, 178, 179, 188n21
See also femicide; honor killings; participant observation. See ethnography
infanticide Partners in Emergency Preparedness
Myanmar, 68n4 Conference (Seattle), 25
patriarchy, 26, 63, 170
Narika (U.S.), 51–70 Canadian patriarchies, 196, 204
nation, 20, 22, 25, 140, 151, 168 South Asian patriarchies, 53–55
and diasporas, 68n4 state patriarchies, 194, 196
nationalism, 54–55, 194–96 Turkish patriarchies, 77
nationality, 34, 131 U.S. patriarchies, 117
nation-state, 53 Western patriarchies, 53
National Day of Remembrance Pearlman, Laurie Anne, 40, 42, 45
and Action on Violence Against Pearson, Lester, 206n5
Women (Canada), 207n9 pedophilia, 3
neoliberalism, 8, 13, 142–43, 167, People’s Committee, The (Vietnam), 146
170–71, 184–85, 187n9. See also perpetrators, 3, 104, 117, 136, 155
structural adjustment policies community authority over, 154, 158
Nepal, 54, 68n4, 68n6 criminalization of, 7, 11, 71
Network of East-West Women, 188n19 frontline workers as, 12
New Delhi, 89n5 men as, 40, 120, 188n20
New Orleans, 23, 24 protection orders against, 76, 97,
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 206n8
6, 12, 169, 173, 187n16, 188n17, services for, 42, 118, 120
188n19 state as perpetrator, 2, 129, 130, 131,
and coalitional work, 139, 141, 168, 195
166–67 Personal Responsibility and Work
and disaster relief, 24–25 Opportunity Reconciliation
and human rights, 8, 145 Act (1996) (U.S.), 8
in Morocco, 211–20 Peru, 91–106
and neoliberalism, 170, 187nn9–10 Pettigrew, Joyce, 32
relation to the state, 77, 185, 212 Philippines, 41–42, 43
in Russia, 166–67 Pigg, Stacy Leigh, 145, 151
in Turkey, 75–77, 80, 86 Plesset, Sonja, 6
in Vietnam, 139–43, 146, 153–56 police, 5, 41–42, 149, 154, 183, 206n7,
217
Obama, Barack, 138 and antiviolence laws, 206n6, 206n8
Okely, Judith, 45 and disaster relief, 19
Ong, Aihwa, 169, 187n8 as frontline workers, 1, 12
Ontario, 201, 204 and NGOs, 80
Open Society Institute, 165 as perpetrators of violence, 134, 194,
order of protection. See restraining order 216
Ortner, Sherry, 9 referring women to shelters, 61, 82–83
and refugees, 87, 130
Pacific Studies, 5 reporting violence to, 144, 146, 205n2
Pakistan, 37, 53–55, 58, 65, 68n4, 68n6 training for, 55, 182
Parson, Nia, 6 women’s police stations, 6, 12, 91–106
political economy, 5, 7–9, 13, 33, 67, rape, 3, 4, 6, 87, 182, 187n15, 206n7
143, 170 and asylum, 129, 133, 134
approach to violence, 2, 6 in law, 75, 186n5, 206n8
shaping violence, 6, 11, 67, 142 rape kits, 26
See also capitalism; communism; by state actors (police, soldiers,
liberalism; neoliberalism; socialism guards), 134, 169, 195
postmodernism, 145 in war, 169, 195
post-traumatic stress, 21, 26 See also sexual assault
poverty, 21, 82, 87, 89n5, 96, 110, 173 Razack, Sherene, 194, 204
and asylum, 131, 134 Red Cross (American), 10, 19, 24
contributing to violence, 112–13 refugees. See asylum
as effect of violence, 88 religion, 26, 68n4, 138, 165, 194, 222
as structural violence, 3, 4 religious differences, 54, 55, 56, 64,
See also class; homelessness 196
power, 86, 156–60, 182, 184, 203, 216 See also Christianity; Hinduism; Islam
in families, 75, 81 resistance, 8, 10, 67, 85, 86,
imbalances of, 12, 22, 65 95, 133, 156, 192, 217
powerlessness, 29, 40–41, 100, 102, restraining order, 66, 67, 76, 116, 206n8
134, 183 Richter, Roxane, 10–11, 13, 19–28
role in abuse, 68n2, 111–13, 117, rights, 7, 173, 176, 178, 211, 213
119, 123 of children, 138
state power, 54, 152, 194, 195, 196, citizens’ rights, 55, 96, 206n7
206n8 culture/rights dichotomy, 14n1
structures of power, 7, 9, 12, 138, 145 immigration rights, 131
See also empowerment of political prisoners, 138
prostitution. See sex work of sexual minorities, 131
psychologists, 77, 79, 102, 174, 214, 215, See also human rights; women’s rights
218–20 Rivkin-Fish, Michele, 187n11
as frontline workers, 1, 73, 130 Romney, A. Kimball, 110
public health, 56 Rosaldo, Renato, 30
Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation Royal Commission on the Status of
(Mor Çatı Kadın Sığınağı Vakfı) Women (Canada), 196, 206n5
(Turkey), 76, 77, 78, 86 Russia, 13, 74, 165–90
Russian Federation, 180, 187n15
queerness, 3
Sagot, Montserrat, 6, 100
race, 6, 91, 93, 115, 201, 205n2 Sanctions and Sanctuary: Cultural
in asylum law, 131 Perspectives on the Beating of Wives
and disaster relief, 21, 25 (Counts, Brown, and Campbell), 5
and intersectionality, 97–99, 104, San Francisco, 129
194–96 San Francisco Bay Area, 51–70
racial discrimination, 3–4, 92 San Jose (U.S.), 54, 58
and state violence, 194–96 Santos, Cecilia MacDowell, 6, 94, 98
See also whiteness São Paulo, 6, 96
racism, 3–4, 92, 205n2 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 3, 193
environmental racism, 194 Schreader, Alicia, 204
state racism, 194–96 Sergiev-Posad (Russia), 177
sex, 21 in Turkey, 11–12, 71–90

sexism, 94, 95, 205n2, 206n7 in the United States, 79, 116
sex tourism, 44 in Vietnam, 154–55
sexual assault, 3, 4, 198, 204, Shively, Kim, 11–12, 71–90
205n2. See also rape Shrader, Elizabeth, 6
sexual exploitation, 2, 4, 29, Sigler, Robert T., 68n2
31, 36, 44, 194 Sikkink, Kathryn, 168
sexual harassment, 75 silence, 1, 52, 62–65, 219
sexuality, 6, 75, 82, 171 Silicon Valley, 58
and colonialism, 194 slavery, 36, 196
heterosexuality, 12, 91 Smith, Andrea, 194–95
sexual practices, 31, 43 social construction, 22, 46, 53, 145,
sexual minorities, 129, 130, 131, 138 192, 202, 204
sexual orientation, 129 of gender, 21, 141, 194
sexual slavery, 36 of identity, 62
sexual violence, 93, 142, 181, 204 of nation, 196
and disaster contexts, 22, 26 social contract, 194–95
as domestic abuse, 68n2 socialism, 169–70, 172–73, 185,
as domestic violence, 73 186n4, 187n10, 187n13,
police response to, 102 216. See also communism
in prisons, 137 social movements theory, 168, 187n7
as state violence, 194–96 Social Services and Child Protection
and structural violence, 74, 173–75, Agency (Sosyal Hizmetler ve Çocuk
177–78 Esirgeme) (SHÇEK) (Turkey),
See also rape; sexual assault; sexual 73, 75, 77–80, 82, 84–85, 87
exploitation; sexual harassment; social work
sexual slavery degree programs, 78–79
sex work, 3, 38, 41, 79, 83–84, 87 social workers, 73, 82, 118–20, 130,
forced prostitution, 36 144, 214, 219
sex tourism, 44 social work students, 110, 123
Shah, Purvi, 54, 62 sociology, 21, 175
shame, 1, 40, 43, 101–2, 198, 218 South Asia, 6, 51–70, 93. See also
and retraumatization, 130, 132 individual countries
Sheltering Women: Negotiating Southeast Asia, 44, 194. See also
Gender and Violence in individual countries
Northern Italy (Plesset), 6 Soviet Union (USSR), 171–73, 175,
shelters, 6, 53, 55, 61, 67, 168, 187n14 176, 184, 186n2, 187n10,
in Canada, 192, 197–200, 202, 187n12
204–5, 205n2 collapse of, 166
in Europe, 71, 86 Soviet Women’s Committee
in Japan, 11, 29–49 (USSR), 186n2
in Morocco, 13–14, 211–22 Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital
in Peru, 96, 101 Violence among South Asian
postdisaster shelters, 20, 23, 24 Immigrants in the United
in Russia, 182 States (Abraham), 6
shelter directors, 1, 71 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 187n8
shelter workers, 5, 38, 41, 43–45, 73 Sri Lanka, 53, 54, 58, 68n4, 68n6
state, 72, 86, 157–58, 178, 184, 212, and economic violence, 185, 219
220 and shelters, 83–84, 87, 89n5,
Canadian state, 191–209 215–16
definitions of violence, 13 and structural violence, 3, 10, 87,
and disaster relief, 24 89n5, 193
and economy, 142–43, 170 See also post-traumatic stress; trauma
nation-state, 53 Support Network for Battered
police as arm of, 93–94 Women (U.S.), 66
socialist states, 172–73, 175–76, 185, Survivors International (U.S.), 129–30
187n10, 187nn12–13
state policy, 9, 10, 88 Take Back the Night (Canada),
state response to violence, 11, 71, 191, 199, 201
140–41, 192, 211 Temporary Aid to Needy
state services, 87, 113 Families (U.S.), 8
state shelters, 76–78, 80, 87 Texas, 19–21, 23–24
state surveillance, 159 therapy. See counseling
state violence, 2, 6–8, 11, 129–31, thick description, 11
168, 191, 193–96, 203 Third World. See global South
Turkish state, 71, 76 Tikopia, 32
Vietnamese state, 140–41 To Have and to Hit: Cultural
See also law; police Perspectives on Wife Beating (Counts,
Status of Women Canada, 207n13 Brown, and Campbell), 5
St. Petersburg (Russia), 171, 177 Tokyo, 11, 29–49
Strategy for Fighting against Toronto, 206n7
Violence against Women, The torture, 3, 8, 129–31, 133,
(Morocco), 211–12 137, 138, 215–17
structural adjustment policies, 167, trafficking, 11, 33, 36, 37–38, 129, 183
184. See also neoliberalism as gender-based violence, 2, 3, 4
structural violence, 7, 10, 12, 67, 72–74, transgender identity, 3, 129
87, 184–85 translation, 3, 12, 45, 46, 109, 174
definition of, 3 of international antiviolence
in disaster contexts, 21–22 doctrines, 7, 9, 11, 71, 73–81,
gender-based violence as, 3–4 86–87, 167
and law, 212 language translation services, 26, 34,
state violence, 8, 11 83
structural factors contributing to transnationalism, 8, 138, 174, 187n1
violence, 112, 114–15, 117, 119, discourses of violence, 7, 13–14,
122–23, 160, 170 139–41, 152, 156, 166–71, 173
suffering, 2, 22, 29, 42, 97, 196, 202 feminist campaigns, 73, 166–71,
and asylum, 12, 129, 131, 133–35, 173, 177, 179
137–38 funding, 20, 155–56, 172, 182–83,
bearing witness to, 10, 40 212
and children, 100, 134 health programs, 139–63
community reinforcement of, 64, legal doctrines on violence, 11,
150, 153 73–76, 78, 86, 167–71
in disaster contexts, 24, 26 refugees, 83, 88, 130–31
shelter models, 71, 177–79, 185 Vancouver, 195

women’s activism, 13, 166, 180, 184, victims, 2–8, 13, 44, 64, 88, 205n2,
187n7 207n11
trauma, 7, 10, 32, 42, 125, 129, 134 anonymity of, 89n4
retraumatization, 107, 135 assistance for, 1, 10–11, 71, 155,
secondary trauma, 133, 136 174–75, 204, 212
vicarious traumatization, 40, 130, and asylum, 130, 132
132 counseling for, 147–48
See also post-traumatic stress and disaster contexts, 20, 23
Turkey, 11–12, 71–90 as gender-neutral term, 192, 204
Tver’ (Russia), 174–86 and memorials, 200
and police, 12, 91, 95, 102–3,
United Nations, 83, 145, 168, 195 104n3
United Nations Convention on and restraining orders, 76
the Elimination of All Forms of revictimization, 104n3, 130, 132
Discrimination Against Women and shelters, 81, 168, 178
(CEDAW) (1979), 75, 76, 86, 196n5 and state, 80
United Nations Fourth World state violence against, 172, 196
Conference on the Status of Women treatment by child welfare workers,
(1995) (Beijing), 169, 187n8 107–28
United Nations High Commissioner treatment by domestic violence
for Human Rights, 2, 3, 169 workers, 107–28
United Nations Trafficking Protocol victimization, 29, 95, 102–3
to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Vietnam, 12–13, 68n5, 139–63
Trafficking in Persons (2000), 37–38 Vietnam National Assembly,
United Nations World Conference on 143, 154, 155
Human Rights (1993) (Vienna), 169 Vietnam Women’s Union, 143–44,
United States, 4, 6, 10, 97, 104, 169, 146, 149–55, 157–59, 161n3
206n5 violence against women, 2, 64, 81, 165
asylum, 129–38 in Canada, 13, 191–209
battered women’s movement, 168, definitions of, 3–4
170 as international development issue,
definitions of violence, 71, 73 168–69, 173, 184
disaster relief, 19–28 laws against, 71, 95, 212
and neoliberalism, 8 in Morocco, 211–12
responses to violence, 107–28 in Peru, 95, 98, 100
services for South Asian diasporic in Russia, 13, 165–90
communities, 51–70 in South Asian diasporic
shelters, 40, 79, 81, 175, 187n14 communities, 56
state violence, 195 transnational frameworks, 73, 178,
United States census, 53–54, 68nn5–6 186nn5–6
University of California, Berkeley, 56 in Turkey, 71
University of Texas Medical Branch, 24 See also acid attacks; battery; child
University of Toronto Women’s abuse; domestic abuse; domestic
Centre, 207n11 violence; elder abuse; female
genital cutting; femicide; gender
violence against women, continued Wintrob, Ronald M., 32

based violence; honor killings; Women for Women’s Human
incest; infanticide; intimate Rights (Turkey), 76
partner violence; pedophilia; rape; Women’s Emergency Centers (Peru), 93
sexual assault; sexual exploitation; Women’s Light (Zhenskâ•‚ii Svet)
sexual harassment; sexual slavery; (Russia), 174–75, 178–83, 185
sexual violence; torture; trafficking Women’s Police Stations: Gender,
Violence against Women Act (VAWA) Violence, and Justice in São
(1994) (U.S.), 107, 108 Paulo, Brazil (Santos), 6
Violence against Women Health Women’s Program (Canada), 196–97
Program (Vietnam), 139–63 women’s rights, 98, 144, 151, 153–56,
Violence in the City of Women: 166, 168, 171n2
Police and Batterers in Bahia, and asylum, 130–32
Brazil (Hautzinger), 6 and citizenship, 96
and cultural translation, 74–76, 86
Walker, Gillian, 198 in disaster planning, 22, 27
war, 4, 74, 82, 88, 169, 184, and human rights, 56, 72
194–95, 203. See also military international women’s rights activists,
Watson, Peggy, 172 73
welfare (U.S.), 8, 108–9, 113, 123 World Bank, 74, 78
welfare state, 196 World Heath Organization (WHO), 22
Weller, Susan C., 110–12
White, Bill, 24 xenophobia, 3–4
whiteness, 12, 97, 194,
201, 204, 207n11 Yugoslavia, 201
Wies, Jennifer, 1–17

Jennifer R. Wies, Hillary J. Haldane - Anthropology at The Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence-Vanderbilt University Press (2011)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jennifer R. Wies, Hillary J. Haldane - Anthropology at The Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence-Vanderbilt University Press (2011)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jennifer R. Wies, Hillary J. Haldane - Anthropology at The Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence-Vanderbilt University Press (2011)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Anthropology

Jennifer R. Wies and Hillary J. Haldane, Editors

Edited by Jennifer R. Wies

Vanderbilt University Press

This book is printed on acid-free paper made

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anthropology at the front lines of gender-based violence/

â•‡1 Ethnographic Notes from the Front Lines

â•‡2 Disparity in Disasters: A Frontline View of Gender-

â•‡3 Participant and Observer: Reflections on Fieldwork

â•‡4 Crafting Community through

â•‡5 “We Couldn’t Just Throw Her in the Street”:

â•‡6 Institutional Resources (Un)Available:

â•‡8 Gender-Based Violence: Perspectives

â•‡9 Cultural Politics of a Global/Local Health Program

10 Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of

11 Memorializing Murder, Speaking Back to the State

12 Laliti, Compassionate Savior:

This volume grew from a conversation in a hotel coffee shop in Vancouver,

fellow travelers in the field of gender-based violence deserve special men-

My work is a part of empowering the whole community. When

Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence presents anthro-

We define gender-based violence as violence against an individual or popu-

Gender-based violence also includes acts of violence perpetrated toward

racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance reveal

gender perspective into relevant policies, strategies and programmes of

The Anthropology of Gender-Based Violence

Anthropologists have a long history of studying violence and conflict

define it here is the discipline’s investment in cultural relativity (Harvey

tempting to study a “closed” and “private” topic. Donna Goldstein’s (2003)

of Reconciliation, Fiona Macaulay’s (2006) Gender Politics in Brazil and

Local Workers in the Global Political Economy

ritorialized ethnography. In responding to reviewers of her 2006 book,

In seeking to understand the complex and vast world of human rights

Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence fills these lacunae

Adelman’s work illustrates that a political-economic analysis is central

Ethnographic Notes from the Front Lines

Social and behavioral science researchers use ethnography to gain an in-

victims from the perspective that state-level structural violence produces

identified by Sally Engle Merry, have influenced the creation of domestic

on an international health program in Vietnam and how the local front-

Conclusions and Beginnings

Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence explores how we

It seemed as though all of Houston was on high alert, anxiously glued

possible here in the United States of America. It seemed both impossible

Gender Does Matter

When a natural disaster strikes, its path of destruction may be indiscrimi-

as cross-cultural comparisons between the responses of developed and de-

Majority Population, Minority Access

As a woman, you feel helpless.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, mini tent-cities of EMS crews

Houston mayor Bill White, nongovernment organizations (NGOs) such

“I’m Not Disabled—I’m Female”

Several months after completing my interviews with female Katrina evacu-

Women have unique and gender-distinctive social, physical, economic,

This chapter describes the methodology of participant observation and ex-

Ethnography, Reflexivity, and Participant Observation

Reflexivity, or self-reflection in the construction of ethnography, and eth-

against which hypotheses are tested.” My research meets these criteria by