Narratives of resistance and resilience: Exploring stories of violence against women

Abstract

abstractViolence against women is extremely prevalent in South Africa, with one of the highest levels of reported rape world-wide. This article highlights the voices of young women who experienced fear and violation in South Africa, more specifically their acts of resistance in the face of adversity and their process of resilience. The article is based on research which explored how women’s lives and identities are transformed by living in violent spaces, such as South Africa. The research adopted a biographical-interpretive methodology and drew on psychosocial and narrative theory, as well as literature surrounding the social-ecological systems approach of resilience and research on resistance. Free-association narrative interviews were conducted with 27 female university students in Cape Town and narrative theory was used to analyse the interview texts. The article draws on the interviews of three of these women. Findings reveal how these women are not just ‘victims of patriarchy’ but are agentic beings capable of acts of resistance and demonstrating resilience in the face of violence and adversity. Situating the women’s narrative responses to the violence within their social ecologies reveals firstly, the importance of women’s agentic selves, and secondly, the critical limits on an over-reliance on women’s individual strengths and resilience. It is argued that it is neither just nor sustainable to expect women to carry the individual responsibility for sexual violence alone. Instead, the burden rests on society to remedy the high level of incidence of sexual violence with which women live.