Dr Anna Piekarska
European Network on Conflict, Gender and Violence
April 13-14, 2012, Rauischholzhausen Castle, Hesse, Germany
Sponsors: Gender Studies Unit, University of Gießen & State of Hesse
Organising committe: Monika Schröttle, Renate Klein, Carol Hagemann-White, Barbara Kavemann
Program of Work
The work programbelow has several purposes:
- To (re)introduce the network and its meetings with their emphasis on constructive exchange
- To review in the plenary topics of interest for discussionand potential research collaboration
- To provide room for more in-depth discussion of at least some of these issues
Based on the email feedback we received interests identified so far roughly fall under three headings:
1)Assessing good practice across Europe
2)Monitoring, applying & integrating research across Europe
3)Addressing the complexities of contexts in which perpetration, victimization and intervention occur
All participants are invited to share their perspective and experience. Some people are planning to give short overviews of current or recently completed research. The names listed below under “Initial input” are there to acknowledge this, not to put people on the spot. “Initial input” means 5 to 10 minutes of remarks about your current research or policy issues, not a long presentation. There will be more room to share your perspective in the ensuing discussion.
Friday April 13
10:30Check in, mingling and coffee
11:00Official welcome
Monika Schröttle, Gender Studies Unit, University of Gießen
11:10Resuming the network: Brief look back and ahead
Renate Klein, London Metropolitan University/University of Maine
11:20Assessing practice, integrating research, addressing complexity of contexts
(one hour brainstorming session to identify key issues for discussion Friday afternoon and
Saturday; initial input: Renate, Monika, Carol, Barbara? Based on feedback we received)
12:30Lunch
13:30Assessing good practice across Europe
(Initial input: Carol, Barbara, Daniela/Hanna, Angelika)
15:30Coffee Break
16:00Monitoring, applying & integrating research across Europe
(Initial input: Monika, Nancy, Thomas)
18:00End of structured work program
18:30Dinner & informal discussion
Saturday, April 14
9:30Ethnicity, Refugee status, Dis/ability, Armed conflict, Relationships with perpetrator
(Initial input: Yvonne, Bo, & Sofia; Sandra; Vlasta; Monika)
11:00Coffee Break
11:30Trauma and health / Ambivalences around domestic violence: Child (sexual) abuse,
partner/abuser relationships
(Initial input: Pat, Margrit, Sandra, Anna, Bodil, Manuela, Milena)
13:00Lunch
14:00Educational institutions, virtual worlds, community-based approaches
(Initial input: Renate, Bianca, Sabine)
15:30Coffee break
16:00Summary and conclusion: Collaborative research, joint proposals, next meeting
18:00Adjourned
18:30Dinner
Participants / Research Interests
Patricia Bell, University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany
Domestic violence including child sexual abuse and the relationship between these forms of abuse; current interest - how child sexual abuse is dealt with in women’s refuges; also interested in hearing more about resilience research and research methods with women with learning disabilities.
Margrit Brückner, University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt, Germany
Advantages and disadvantages of professionalisation of domestic violence and still the old question of how to deal with the ambivalences of women towards their violent partners and new ways to look at and deal with violent partnerships in a way which supports the victim
Sofie Danneskiold-Samsøe, Roskilde University, Denmark
Sofie is an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Globalisation, RoskildeUniversity. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from University of Copenhagen on the dissertation The Moral Economy of Suffering: Social Exchange among Iraqi Refugees in the Danish Welfare State (2006). Her research focuses on social suffering and gendered violence among Middle Eastern families in the context of the welfare state. She is presently working on the research project on gender violence in Iraqi refugee families.
Nancy Gage-Linder, Hesse State Ministry of Social Affairs
Translating research into policy into action; gender-based violence, VAW/children, elderly abuse and neglect, primary prevention and early intervention schemes in child & youth welfare
Sandra Glammeier, University of Bielefeld, Germany
VAW with disabilities; reality constructions and subject positions of women dealing with abuse, their service needs, constructions within intervention systems; SV against children & youth
Daniela Gloor, Social Insight (research consultancy), Schinznach-Dorf, Switzerland
VAW interventions; evaluation
Bianca Grafe, University of Osnabrück, Germany
Media/Internet and links to gender violence
Carol Hagemann-White, University of Osnabrück
Conceptual and practical frameworks for prevention and for empowerment, both of women and of children, each in their own right; developing more in-depth research on the processes of becoming a perpetrator or becoming a victim, with the aim of identifying points of potential resistance and change. Working together to unravel the "knots" in which policy and practice keep getting entangled.
Angelika Henschel, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Domestic violence, gender studies, and social work
Vlasta Jalusic, The Peace Institute/Ljubljana University, Slovenia
Collective violence, gender, and intersectionality; post-conflict arrangements, including transitional justice
Barbara Kavemann, University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany
Purpose and usefulness of approaches designed to assess service provision and service needs
Liz Kelly, LondonMetropolitanUniversity
Violence against women and children, research and policy
Renate Klein, London Metropolitan University/University of Maine
University responses to intimate partner violence; informal responses from family members and social networks; role of digital literacy in promoting better interventions for rape victims
Jørgen Lorentzen, Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo, Norway
Men and violence
Maria José Magalhães, University of Porto
Gender, gendered violence, violence against women, research and intervention
Manuela Martinez, Department of Psychobiology, University of Valencia, Spain
Health and violence
Hanna Meier, Social Insight (research consultancy), Schinznach-Dorf, Switzerland
Works on VAW interventions; evaluation
Thomas Meysen, German Institute for Youth Services and Family Law, Frankfurt, Germany
Cross-European comparison of how states have responded to violence against women on one hand and violence against children on the other; similarities and differences in these policies
Yvonne Mørck is an Associate Professor at the Department of Society and Globalisation, RoskildeUniversity. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen in 1996. Her research focuses on sociological and cultural issues, e.g. migration, multiculturalism, globalisation, citizenship, youth education, gender, sexuality and violence against women. She has published Hyphenated Danes. Narratives on Gender, Generation and Ethnicity (1998) and a number of articles.
Bodil Pedersen, Roskilde University, Denmark
Different forms of violence; gender and ethnicity; concepts of trauma and ways of dealing with it; methodologies in gender research and practice
Anna Piekarska, Faculty of Psychology, WarsawUniversity
Child abuse, school trauma
Monika Schröttle, Gender Studies Unit, University of Gießen, Germany
Prevalence research, monitoring, migration, disability studies, and social inequalities. Current research: monitoring and data collection in Germany/Europe, violence against migrant women, violence against disabled women and men; women and men as victims and perpetrators of violence (gender constructions / risk factors).
Bo Wagner Sørensen is currently a senior researcher at LOKK, the Danish National Organisation of Shelters. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen in 1993. His dissertation Power or Powerlessness? Gender, Emotions and Violence i Greenland was published in 1994. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Greenland and published many articles on contemporary Greenlandic issues. The last couple of years his research has concentrated on VAW in ethnic minority families in Danmark. In 2012, he is doing research on violence against Danish women, collecting their stories of violence and trying to identify similarities and differences in those stories.
Milena Stateva, Tavistok Institute, London, England
Trauma & VAW; secondary victimization of practitioners; working relationships among researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners
Sabine Stövesand, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Community based approaches to prevent gender-based violence. “I did some research on the value of community organizing in this context (Book, published in German: Mit Sicherheit Sozialarbeit! Gemeinwesenarbeit als innovativer Ansatz zur Prävention und Reduktion von Gewalt im Geschlechterverhältnis) and I am currently running a pioneer programme to establish this kind of work in Hamburg under the name of StoP - Stadtteile ohne Partnergewalt".
Vappu Sunnari, Oulu University, Finland
Gendered violence in schools, sexual harassment, awareness in educational institutions
Kathrin Vogt, University of Bielefeld, Germany, Interdisciplinary women’s and gender studies, took part in German Prevalence study on violence against disabled women and in the FRA-pilot survey as German country partner.
Katarina Weinehall, Umeå University, Sweden
Men’s violence against women and children in close relationships; Women under protection - in hiding from violent men, Count on costs ; Police officers' view of women as victims of male IPV
Paula Wilcox, Brighton University, England
Violence, gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, women and crime, critical and cultural criminology, quality of student experience in higher education
Abstracts
Abstract: Tackling Ambivalences in working with battered women
Margrit Brückner, University of Applied Sciences Frankfurt, Germany
There are two points I would like to make in my paper (or if time is short one of them):
1. In dealing with domestic violence against women two different logics become more and more apparent: Hurtful experiences are made by women as victims of intimate partner violence, but also quite often - in a different sense - by supporters because of the ambivalent feelings and behavior of part of the women concerned. Therefore it is necessary to include these ambivalences into the helping process. That means to understand the essence of the relationship logic and to link it to the professional logic. Since these two logics seem to follow quite different forms of thinking: underlying the helping professions and helping institutions is a linear logic (if this is the case then…), whereas the logic of life seems to follow more often than not a circular logic (…as well as …). That causes various forms of disappointment: disappointment of the battered women not being helped the way they feel necessary; disappointment of the helping teams and individuals of not being as successful as they intended to and worked for hard.
2. Yet another form of ambivalence in working with battered women has become visible especially in women-shelters: Women who suffered from violence of their partners sometimes become violent against their children. To look at these cases from a feminist perspective seems to me very important in order to understand and stop these dynamics of violence and to help the violent mothers as well as the suffering children. This debate should focus on the perception of violence of the women concerned in order to be able to find the right approach to the phenomenon. It is not the intention to diminish the suffering of these women from their partners, but to understand the links between gender and generational violence. To relate to this side of experience with violence in the lives of battered women openly is very difficult for the helping professions in women’s shelters and women’s counselling institutions, because it means a double task and it might refrain some women from coming. But the effect of this difficulty is the danger that it opens up a split between women’s and children’s agencies which does no good, neither to women nor to their children. Therefore there is a need to overcome the competition between these agencies. May be this is a more or less German problem may be not.
Domestic violence interventions from thevictims’ perspective
Daniela Gloor and Hanna Meier,Social Insight, Switzerland
Our input will be on a project funded by the Swiss National Research Programme NRP 60 ("Gender Equality"). We hope to present and discuss preliminary results.
The public stance on domestic violence has changed from taboo to intervention. Today, victims of domestic violence receive support from advice centres, the police, legal authorities, the health care system and other institutions. However, it is not known how appropriate and efficient the new interventions are. This project focuses on the perspective of the affected persons.
Background
During the past ten years, domestic violence interventions have intensified in Switzerland, as they have also in other European countries. This project evaluates the situation of women who are or have been victims of violence: How do they rate the help and advice that they received? What forms of support were helpful and useful? What conditions and circumstances had more limiting or negative effects?
Aim
The aim of this research study is to reflect on the current intervention and support network on the basis of the users’ experience. This approach extends the social policy discourse to include the dimension of the affected persons. The information will be collected by means of narrative interviews, and the contacts will be established via institutions of the support and advice network. These include the police, general help centres for victims and specialised institutions such as women’s shelters or women’s advice centres. In addition the working methods of these institutions will be examined. The study will look at institutions in four cantons of Switzerland.
Significance
The results should reveal whether and how the changed practice contributes towards the well-being of victims of domestic violence. The findings should also show what interactions between the experience of violence and gender-specific conditions/circumstances may possibly continue to affect these women. Including the persons affected brings in a new perspective and provides new knowledge in a still urgent problem area within gender equality.
Revisiting “good practice”: Risk assessment, victims’ rights and data sharing across Europe
Carol Hagemann-White, University of Osnabrück, Germany
Against my personal research history of engagement in formative evaluation of innovative projects addressing violence, over the past ten years I have been involved in monitoring and analyzing the development of policies and legal frameworks across Europe. This has been, on the one hand, an attempt to define some transnational common ground for coordinated policy initiatives as well as practical cooperation, and on the other, to understand the historical, cultural and institutional differences at play in the various patterns of how the various EU and CoE states go about implementing the abstract norms of “combating violence”.
In particular, the drive to establish standards of good practice across Europe is raising a number of ethical issues around the proper balance between individual rights of victims and the duty of the state to prevent and protect. Historically, state “protection” has often involved imposing order and exerting control. Furthermore, intervention strategies and methods may have very different effects on different groups within a society, and this calls for additional attention to the situation of minorities.
In the discussions of “risk assessment” (now codified as a standard in the Istanbul Convention on Violence Against Women) and case management there are strong voices promoting a free flow of information among state agencies and/or with non-governmental providers of help, support and (psycho-)education. This is occurring in a society that is being profoundly transformed by information technology: As the possibilities of technology expand, so does the appetite of state agencies and of representatives of a “good order” in society for information, so does also the willingness of individuals to disclose their personal data. This corresponds to tendencies, certainly fairly strong in German social work, to interpret “empowerment” as a methodology for professional work with victims, not infrequently leading to an expectation that the victim ought to cooperate with the measures intended to lead her towards a better, violence-free life. (It also raises the question, aside from anti-violence work, of whether those of us who passionately defend privacy rights and informational self-determination are already de facto dinosaurs in the Facebook world.)
International organisations have been compiling examples of “good practice” for others to imitate, but these fail to uncover the conditions under which practices may be effective in one location, but counter-productive in another. A deeper understanding of the “hidden logic” of intervention approaches and methods can support the crucial European conversation on whether, when and how measures aimed to prevent and protect are able to empower women, children and those who do not fit the heteronormative mould, and to establish their entitlement to a life free from violence.
We (five of us: myself, Liz, Thomas, Maria José and Vlasta) are developing a project proposal, but beyond the uncertainties and constraints of such application processes, I am very interested in developing this discussion in the “revitalised” network.
Transformation processes – from the women’s shelter movement to professional anti-violence work
Angelika Henschel, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany
There are two issues I would like to discuss, if there is time enough.
1.)The first women’s movement generation of founders and workers of (autonomous)women’s shelters, after more than 30 years of development/changes of societal structures and working in women’s shelters, with their historical knowledgeand their professional experience have now reached retirement age. The next generation of women’s shelter workers occasionally has insufficient knowledge about the origins and development of women’s shelters and their work, as well as of the associated political, theoretical and practical implications. The self-imageof the “new women’s shelter workers” has also frequently changed as the concepts and actual work within the women’s shelters in the sense of a “professionalisation process” have changed. In order not to lose existing knowledge and many years of experience on the one hand, and on the other, to show how today’s women’s shelter work already is, as well as how it can be incorporated into a larger context of anti-violence and human rights work, could be treated asa common international work perspective.
2.)Women’s shelter residents, who have left their violent partners in order to build (with their children) self-sufficient lives, have often said: “If I hadn’t gone to the shelter, I would never have managed to do it” or “Without the women’s shelter I would have still been with him.” But what is it that helped the women recover their autonomy? The relationship to and counselling offered by the workers, the conversations and interactions with other residents, concrete offers of support, psychosocial counselling, financial security, etc.? How do the women themselves describe this process, what did they experience as being so helpful, supportive and constructive, that they could think of separating from their partners? To what extent would such findings help in changing and improving the professional work?