From Victim to Entrepreneur: Rebuilding shattered lives

Abstract

Globally, millions of women experience violence or live with its consequences (Watts and Zimmerman, 2002). In addition to the physical implications, violence leaves psychological scars. Assumptions that the self is worthy and the world is a safe place become shattered when women experience domestic and sexual violence (Janoff, 1983), causing shame, extremely low levels of self-esteem, and a loss of trust in others (Cascardi and O’Leary, 1992). Entrepreneurship can be a way to rebuild one’s life professionally (and financially) but also on a more personal level. As such, EET may be a useful way to enable women who have experienced violence develop an entrepreneurial mind-set -thus overcoming the obstacle of a checkered career path - and build a new future for themselves (Haynie and Shepherd, 2011; Patzelt et al, 2014). It may boost their ‘entrepreneurial self-efficacy’ (Kickul et al, 2004) and enable them to ‘emancipate’ themselves from the individuals and structures that bind them (Rindova et al, 2009), opening up a new professional and personal life. Little research has addressed the ‘how’ of entrepreneurship education (Byrne, Toutain and Fayolle, 2014), throwing light on the particular methods used to achieve learning outcomes. At the same time, research exploring tailored entrepreneurship programs, such as women’s entrepreneurship training is severely lacking (Byrne and Fayolle, 2009; Bullough et al, 2015). Designing entrepreneurship education initiatives which aim to boost entrepreneurial self-efficacy is a complex and challenging task (Wilson et al, 2007), and we propose this task becomes even more challenging in the case of women who have been ‘victimized’ in some way (either through sexual, domestic or psychological violence). We believe that it is interesting to examine whether and how entrepreneurship education and training (EET) programs can succeed in nurturing favorable entrepreneurial attitudes among violence survivors.