Collective trauma? Isolating and commoning gender-based violence

Abstract

This paper considers the tensions between individual and collective experiences, responses and framings in gender-based violence (GBV). I explore three concepts that aid understanding of GBV – isolating, collective trauma and commoning – and question their utility in understanding trauma and the process of survival. The arguments are evidenced with survivors’ testimony from a participatory action research project on experiences of trauma from GBV. First, the isolating of survivors, taking multiple forms, is not just ‘how it is’, but a condition created and exploited by perpetrators and buttressed by social perceptions and practices to reduce access to sources of support. Second, I consider whether GBV might be thought of as collective trauma, a concept from Black and postcolonial literatures to describe structural traumas that are communal in nature. I explore the collective aspects of experiencing, surviving and rebuilding from GBV, and resonances and discontinuities with this notion of collective trauma. Third, commoning emphasises mutual aid in resistance to violence, and better reflects diverse experiences of GBV. It offers an alternative promise of collective care in an era of shrinking and neoliberalising service provision, illuminating existing practices by which GBV survivors and feminist organisations work to make and remake survival.