Abstract
This project explores the post-separation needs of Chinese women in Hong Kong who have left their abusive partners and how they might be addressed The project aims to provide insights for improving the local domestic violence service, whose main focus is on crisis intervention. Cooperative Grounded Inquiry (CGI) was developed as a novel participatory action research methodology (PAR) for fostering collaboration between social work practitioner-researchers and women service users. Its purpose is to generate useful knowledge and provide support for abused women and their children. The project involved 7 Hong Kong Chinese women as participant-researchers. The inquiry group met at least once a week for 6 months to explore the post-separation needs of the women and their children, and to implement and evaluate the practices/services developed through this project together in a participatory manner. Women participants identified the problems of doing either ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ that respectively underpin the ‘safeguarding’ and the ‘empowerment’ models; and they developed practices for ‘doing being oneself’ beyond the victim-survivor dichotomy. This paper presents the changing self-narratives of women participants over the research project, from victimhood to survivorhood and from survivorhood to survivor-becoming. These narratives demonstrate the importance of safeguarding women’s space for undertaking symbolic action and of empowering them through using volcabulary that can help them describe themselves/their experiences differently from mainstream discourses. Women’s narratives highlight the existing ‘planetary difference’ between the safeguarding model, which treats women as helpless and vulnerable and in need of external support, and the empowerment model which treats them as powerful, resilient and with resources and solutions to problems. The study transcends the victim-survivor dichotomy and service models by proposing an alternative relational model that emphasises power sharing in making sense of abusive experiences and finding one’s own voice in a supportive community.
Highlights
The Tin Shui Wai tragedy in 2004 saw a mother, Kam Shuk Ying, and her two twin daughters stabbed to death by her abusive husband
The gender asymmetry in intimate partner violence is further confirmed if we look at the cases reported to the government systems, majorly the police, social services and hospitals
Narratives and pictures co-produced with women participants problematize the ‘either victim or survivor’ dichotomy evident in the design of Hong Kong’s intimate partner violence service, as well as elsewhere in the world
Summary
The Tin Shui Wai tragedy in 2004 saw a mother, Kam Shuk Ying, and her two twin daughters stabbed to death by her abusive husband. Narratives and pictures co-produced with women participants problematize the ‘either victim or survivor’ dichotomy evident in the design of Hong Kong’s intimate partner violence service, as well as elsewhere in the world (see Dunn 2004; Thapar-Björkert et al 2016) Drawing on these data, this paper engages with the debate about the appropriateness of ‘victimhood’ or ‘survivorhood’ in representing abused women’s lived experiences. Experiences of abused women in the early years of the movement supported the construction of pure victimhood, where women had low personal agency to resist the violence against them needed external supportfor remediating the problem This particular form of ‘blameless’ and ‘innocent’ victim identity served as a ‘politicized collective identity’ for mobilizing public resources and brokering public sympathy for raising the profile of this emerging social problem of ‘wife battering’ (Dunn 2004; NissimSabbat 2009; Thapar-Björkert et al 2016; Tierney 1982). For women who have left the perpetrators and become labelled as ‘survivors’ in Hong Kong, how do they negotiate their identities for expressing their needs and sufferings, and to re-discover and reappropriate their strengths? How do negotiated identities help women who have experienced intimate partner violence face their post-separation challenges? This paper presents the narratives, textual and pictorial data co-created with women who have left their abusive partners and unpacks women’s identity work as negotiated in the context of participatory action research (PAR) project
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