Using Sociology to Support Domestic Violence Victims

 

I discuss the activism and by women who work in women’s health advocacy. In particular, I discuss the work done in domestic violence shelters. I focus on the how the work done in urban, underprivileged settings differs from the academic theories of domestic violence survivors.

Practice is messy

The case work and advocacy of women’s healthcare is less visible than the academic research on domestic and family violence.

Women’s work is largely undervalued, both inside and outside academia. Women professionals are rarely promoted into senior leadership roles, even when they have identical qualifications and they carry out the same amount of work as men.

Similar patterns emerge for women researchers and activists who work in health advocacy.

There is a plethora of feminist research on the social causes and discourses that explain gendered outcomes in health, especially in the psychology of domestic violence. This work does not always translate into the everyday work of health advocates and workers.

Judith Auerbach and Anne Figert argue that this is because there is a disconnect between the type of activities that sociologists find acceptable. It is prestigious to publish research in academic journals. Much of this research has been used by applied researchers to shape public policies, and yet academic sociologists have been reticent to be directly involved in health policy work. As Auerbach and Figert put it, policy work is “difficult” and “messy.”

They argue that some academic sociologists may be reluctant to get involved directly in policy service delivery because it is seen as less rigorous.

The scientific approach to women’s health advocacy is socially located worlds away from the actual work involved in doing health advocacy. 

Activist knowledge

American researcher Jacquelyn Campbell argues that there exists “a real distrust” between women who work at refuge shelters and the academics that write about their clients. Feminist researchers have done important work to make the private struggles of domestic violence more public. However, some academic explanations that have helped policy makers understand the emotional and psychological damage of this violence are alienating to community workers.

The idea of the “battered women’s syndrome” portrays violence survivors as passive victims who embody “learned helplessness” and who are increasingly diagnosed with “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Campbell argues that the scholarship that gave rise to this mainstream understanding of domestic violence is informed by predominantly white, middle-class women who are more likely to visit psychologists. This framework ignores the “strong, resourceful” predominantly urban, women of colour whom activists and nurses were seeing in shelters and health care settings.

These activists and workers often feel angry that their hands-on knowledge and experience is ignored in academia. They are rarely invited to speak at academic conferences on the subject in which they have decades of experience. Moreover, they work in under-funded facilities that do not fit into a neat ideal of scientific purity.

The reality is that these workers are under-staffed, under-paid and under-resourced. Moreover, their communication of their public mission changes in reaction to policy funding models change. This makes it difficult to engage with academics who are better able to sustain coherent narratives about what counts as “good” public science.

Campbell writes of women’s shelters in disadvantaged urban areas:

 “These are the settings where you have to constantly write grants and constantly feel like you are “selling your soul” to funding agencies. They are places where you constantly have to reinvent and repackage your services to meet some new funding proposal guidelines. Agencies where payrolls are often not met because funding agencies work on a reimbursement basis, and their bureaucracy is slow and your staff is only one reimbursement check away from another payless payday. The staff are often underpaid, often single-parent women, only one pay cheque away from total destitution themselves.”

Campbell argues that the best way to move forward is for practitioners to work with academics on interdisciplinary projects that blend together their expertise and experiences.

The same approach would be useful across other applied sociological fields.