“We Can Be Oppressed but That Does Not Mean We Cannot Fight Oppression”: Narratives of Resilience and Advocacy From Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Helping others has been identified as an important component in recovery and resilience for women following intimate partner violence (IPV). However, little is known about the experiences of women who are IPV survivors and who also engage in formal and informal violence against women (VAW) advocacy work, such as supporting IPV survivors in a social work role or volunteering on VAW advocacy committees. Using in-depth semistructured interviews with nine “survivor–advocates” who were part of a larger study on IPV and resilience, this study extends the existing literature to examine the multidirectional relationship between IPV, advocacy work, and resilience using narrative analysis. Three distinct narratives were identified in survivor–advocates’ accounts of their experiences of abuse and advocacy work. The working through the abuse narrative focused on using the knowledge and experience from advocacy work that began prior to IPV to critically reflect on the abuse and its meaning for women. The second narrative, helping others, focused on using personal experiences of abuse to help other IPV survivors. The third narrative, personal strength, focused on a personal identity as a lifelong advocate and inner strength and determination as central to resilience. The findings of this study demonstrate the multitude of ways that engaging in advocacy work interacts with abuse experiences and women’s recovery and resilience processes. The findings of this study can inform approaches for promoting resilience and recovery for IPV survivors and highlight the importance of cultivating a critical understanding of abuse to support resilience and recovery following IPV.

Keywords

intimate partner violence domestic violence resilience advocacy activism helping others narrative

Introduction

Intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a complex and persistent global health issue. Although a myriad of negative physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual consequences of IPV are well documented (e.g., Campbell, 2002; Clements & Sawhney, 2000; Coker, Sanderson, Fadden, & Pirisi, 2000; Dutton et al., 2006; Gleason, 1993; Leserman & Drossman, 2007), research on IPV has begun to move away from a damaged-centered lens to focus instead on the ways in which women cope with and move forward from their experiences of abuse. As such, there is now a substantial body of qualitative and quantitative literature on the recovery experiences and outcomes for IPV survivors (e.g., Ahmad-Stout, Nath, Khoury, & Huang, 2018; Flasch, Murray, & Crowe, 2017; Saint Arnault & O’Halloran, 2016). Missing from this literature and our understanding of women’s recovery from IPV, however, are the narratives of IPV survivors who participate in violence against women (VAW) advocacy or activism, even though their experiences are likely to be of particular interest and value to understanding coping and resilience. We define “survivor–advocates” as individuals with lived experience as both IPV survivors and VAW advocates/activists. Notably, the relationship between advocacy and activism and recovery and resilience in the face of trauma has started to be examined in other populations, including transgender people of color who have experienced trauma (Singh & McKleroy, 2011) and asylum seekers (Lavie-Ajayi & Slonim-Nevo, 2017). However, there may be important differences in the experiences of survivors who have survived IPV specifically. Thus, the purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between IPV, VAW advocacy, and resilience through an analysis of survivor–advocates narratives of their advocacy work to better understand how women who have both experienced IPV and engaged in VAW advocacy make meaning of their experiences.

The recovery and positive adaptation literature (within which we include research on coping, resilience, and posttraumatic growth [PTG]) has identified psychological and social factors, often referred to as protective or resilience factors, that support positive adaptation after IPV. These include social support (Anderson, Renner, & Danis, 2012; Carlson, McNutt, Choi, & Rose, 2002; Meadows, Kaslow, Thompson, & Jurkovic, 2005), self-esteem (Bradley, Schwartz, & Kaslow, 2005; Carlson et al., 2002), spirituality and religion (Anderson et al., 2012; Bradley et al., 2005; Meadows et al., 2005), empowerment (Wright, Perez, & Johnson, 2010), positive health (Carlson et al., 2002), hope, self-efficacy, and effectiveness in obtaining resources (Meadows et al., 2005), among others. Within this body of research, the role of helping others has been identified as a strategy for women’s recovery and positive adaptation following IPV.

Following Anderson et al.’s (2012) recognition that understanding the process for how women adapt following IPV has received far less attention than identifying protective factors for and outcomes of positive adaptation, the purpose of this study was to provide an in-depth, qualitative examination of the role of engaging in VAW advocacy and activism, a form of helping others, in women’s processes of overcoming IPV. As we have discussed elsewhere (Crann & Barata, 2016), there is ongoing debate in the literature about how to best conceptualize positive adaptation constructs (e.g., recovery, resilience, PTG) and the extent to which they are distinct. For the purposes of the current study, which was conducted as part of a larger project on violence and resilience, we use the term resilience to refer to the process of coping, adaptation, and personal growth that may occur as a result of IPV. Resilience is conceptualized as an ongoing and dynamic process that is not mutually exclusive of trauma and its negative consequences (Crann & Barata, 2016).

Helping Others and Advocacy Among IPV Survivors

Consistent with the broader literature on resilience and violent trauma (e.g., Banyard & Williams, 2007; Bowland, Biswas, Kyriakakis, & Edmond, 2011; Bryant-Davis, 2005; Grossman, Sorsoli, & Kia-Keating, 2006), the desire and ability to help others have been found to be an important part of women’s recovery and resilience following IPV (Senter & Caldwell, 2002). For example, among Taiwanese women (Hou, Ko, & Shu, 2013) and Indian women (Shanthakumari, Chandra, Ekaterina, & Stewart, 2014), helping others, which included sharing personal experiences of abuse as a way to support other survivors, helped women recover from their IPV experiences by giving them a sense of self-worth and purpose. Taylor (2004), in her study of survivorship in African American IPV survivors, identified the role of more formal community activism and advocacy work in recovery and resilience processes. For the women in Taylor’s study, both “personal/private” and “hands-on/community” activism were important components of survivorship.

Although “helping others” has been identified as one of several factors in women’s recovery and resilience following IPV, very little is actually known about this process. It is often assumed in the literature, both theoretically and methodologically, that the relationship between trauma and helping others is unidirectional and linear such that women experience abuse, and helping others is a way that they cope with and give meaning to their abuse experiences. Even less is known about this process in the context of formal VAW advocacy and of the experiences of IPV survivors who engage in more formal advocacy and support roles. Research on IPV advocates with personal histories of sexual abuse or assault (and of trauma more broadly) has tended to focus on the relationship between trauma history and distress (e.g., Schauben & Frazier, 1995), rather than on the potential for advocacy work to contribute to the recovery and growth of survivors. For example, Slattery and Goodman (2009) quantitatively examined factors that contributed to secondary trauma in domestic violence advocates, including past childhood and/or adulthood abuse. Findings suggested that survivor status was related to more deleterious impacts of advocacy work, such as burnout. More recently, Wood (2017) qualitatively examined the experiences of trauma survivors (adult victim, childhood witness, sexual assault survivors) involved in formal service provision and the impact of survivor status on service provision, and found both negative and positive effects. Survivorship was found to influence women’s motivations for becoming advocates, as well as their approach and experiences of service provision in positive (e.g., bringing empathy and understanding to the therapeutic relationship) and negative ways (e.g., difficultly with boundaries and triggering).

Developing an understanding of the relationship between IPV victimization and IPV advocacy and activism is important because it has been suggested that up to half of the practitioners working in support roles for survivors of IPV are survivors themselves (Bemiller & Williams, 2011; Wood, 2017). As a result of their unique experiences, IPV survivor–advocates may provide important insights into the resilience processes for women experiencing IPV above and beyond the impacts of survivorship on service provision (e.g., burnout). Although previous research has attended to a desire or ability to help others in recovery and resilience, the relationship has been conceptualized somewhat linearly as studies have tended to focus on how helping others after their abuse has the potential to be helpful (or not) to survivors in their own recovery processes. Given the number of IPV survivors working in VAW advocacy and activism, it is likely that some women were already engaged in formal and informal advocacy prior to their experiences of abuse. A linear, unidirectional understanding of the relationship between IPV, advocacy, and resilience also obscures the reality that women may experience IPV at multiple times in their lives from the same or multiple partners. Using a sample of women who self-identified as survivors of IPV and who had experience participating in formal and informal VAW advocacy roles, this study examines the advocacy and resilience narratives of survivor–advocates to provide a more nuanced understanding of the multidirectional relationship between IPV victimization, VAW advocacy, and resilience. Specifically, this study examines how survivor–advocates understand and give meaning to their advocacy in relation to their own recovery and resilience.

Method

The analysis presented in this article is part of a larger collaborative project to understand how different vulnerable populations conceptualize resilience and to identify key protective factors and mechanisms for resilience (see Ahmad et al., 2013; Gagnon & Stewart, 2014; Isaak et al., 2015; Oliffe et al., 2014; Rodin & Stewart, 2012; Shanthakumari et al., 2014). Ten participants were recruited for each study in this project. For the purposes of the current analysis aimed at understanding the relationship between VAW advocacy and resilience, participants were nine adult English-speaking women who self-identified as survivor–advocates. One additional participant was interviewed, but is not included here because she did not provide a detailed narrative of her advocacy experience. See Table 1 for an overview of participant characteristics. Within the context of the broader project, the subpopulation of survivor–advocates were intentionally recruited because it was expected that women who experience IPV and participate in VAW advocacy exhibit, to some degree, resilience through their ability to advocate. Advocacy was defined broadly as having participated in any paid or unpaid efforts toward the goal of ending VAW, improving the lives of IPV survivors, or consciousness raising (e.g., volunteering at a women’s shelter or participating in community activism events such as rallies or walks). Although participants were recruited specifically for advocacy work that occurred following the start of their abuse, it became clear in the interviews that women often had engaged in multiple kinds of advocacy, some of which had taken place prior to their abuse. As described in detail in the analysis below, the experience of participating in advocacy work prior to IPV had important implications for both women’s resilience processes and their advocacy work. IPV was defined broadly as physical, psychological, emotional, sexual, or financial abuse by a romantic partner.

Table 1.

Participant Demographics.

Participant	Age	Racial Identity/Ethnicity	Sexual Identity	Advocacy Work		Highest Education	Children (N)
Participant	Age	Racial Identity/Ethnicity	Sexual Identity	Position	Organization	Highest Education	Children (N)
Danielle	18-25	White/European	Lesbian	FT employee	VAW agency	College/university degree	No
Mae	18-25	White/European	Queer	FT employee	VAW agency	College/university degree	No
Rebecca	26-35	White/European	Bisexual	Practicum student	VAW agency	Graduate degree	No
Allesandra	56-65	Central American	Heterosexual	FT employee	VAW agency	Graduate degree	Yes (3)
Karen	46-55	White/European	Heterosexual	FT employee	VAW agency	Graduate degree	Yes (4)
Christina	36-45	Northern African	Heterosexual	Volunteer	Woman abuse council	College/university degree	Yes (2)
Maria	36-45	Latin American	Heterosexual	PT employee	Women’s legal agency	Graduate degree	No
Candace	46-55	White/European	Bisexual	Attends events	No affiliation	College/university degree	No
Cindy	—	Caribbean	Heterosexual	Volunteer	Woman abuse council	Some college/university	Yes (-)

Note. VAW = violence against women; FT = full time; PT = part time.

Recruitment and Data Collection

Ethics approval was obtained from the authors’ institutional research ethics board. Sampling was purposive and participants were recruited through agencies that had a VAW mandate or focus, including women’s organizations, immigration services, and shelters. Recruitment posters advertising a study on resilience and IPV were circulated to staff and volunteers. Interested women contacted the first author, at which time, they were screened for eligibility (18 or older, ability to communicate in English, identified as a survivor of IPV, and had participated in VAW advocacy) and scheduled for an interview.

Written informed consent was obtained prior to the interview. Each participant participated in a single, semistructured audio-recorded interview lasting approximately 1 hr. Interviews were conducted by the first author in person in private meeting rooms at the participant’s affiliated agency, at the authors’ institution, or at a local public library. An interview guide and field notes to capture interviewer reflections immediately after each interview were used to increase methodological rigor. Given the focus of the larger study on resilience, interview questions asked women to define resilience in their own words, about the things they found helpful throughout the process of overcoming their abuse, to discuss their advocacy work, and how, if at all, it had an impact on overcoming the abuse. Participants completed a demographics questionnaire and were provided with a list of local community resources. Participants received a CAD$30 honorarium and were reimbursed CAD$10 per child for child care and CAD$5 for parking/public transportation costs.

Data Analysis

The goal of our analysis was to build on previous research that has identified helping others as an important component in resilience by providing a rich, contextualized accounting of the relationship between women’s abuse, being a VAW advocate, and resilience. We were particularly interested in the ways that survivor–advocates made connections between abuse, advocacy, and resilience in the stories they chose to tell during the interview and the meaning that these different experiences and their intersections had for women. As such, the interviews were analyzed using a narrative approach (Riesmann, 2008). Narrative theory is concerned with the ways people create stories about their everyday lives and sees narrative as shaped in social interaction. According to Riesmann (2002), personal narratives are “meaning-making units of discourse” (p. 705). Narratives are a way for us to present and construct our identities and experiences (Sools & Murray, 2015), and narrative analysis is concerned with how these stories are told (Riesmann, 2002). Although the broader resilience research project of which the current study is a part of did not explicitly use a narrative approach for data collection, the women in our study provided sufficient narrative text for analysis in the way they recounted their experiences.

Narrative inquiry encompasses diverse analytical approaches (Riesmann & Quinney, 2005). Rather than focusing the analysis on women’s straightforward responses to questions to identify themes across the data set, we focused instead on the places in women’s stories where they spoke about meaningful or important events or experiences, both internal and external to themselves, that were related to advocacy work (Lietz, Lacasse, & Cacciatore, 2011). The analysis, thus, focused on aspects of the interviews that were most relevant to the relationship between abuse, advocacy, and resilience, but were still considered within the context of the full interview.

To facilitate the analysis, the interviews were transcribed verbatim by the first author. Each transcript was read and reread by the first author to identify narrative segments (typically longer sections of text wherein the participant tells a story) from each interview related to advocacy for analysis. We began an iterative, collaborative analytic process by reviewing and coding these segments independently followed by a discussion of our interpretations, to identify the dominant narrative(s) that characterized how each woman told her story of advocacy and resilience. The purpose of our deductive coding process was to identify instances in the transcripts that followed a similar pattern of meaning making between their advocacy work and its relationship to resilience. We attended to Riesmann and Quinney’s (2005) standards for narrative inquiry, which focus particular attention on the sequence and consequence of the narrative and the context in which the narratives were produced. Our analysis paid attention to both the structure of the narratives within the context of the interview (e.g., temporal, episodic) and the content of the narratives (e.g., what women spoke about). We engaged in comparative analysis between the participants’ narratives that attended to differences and similarities among the women’s identities and experiences and how they told their stories (Riesmann & Quinney, 2005).

Analysis

Women’s accounts of their experiences of abuse; the process of coping with the abuse, including navigating services and systems for survivors of abuse; and their IPV advocacy work were organized through one of three dominant narratives. The first narrative, working through the abuse, was used by survivor–advocates who began their advocacy work prior to their first experience of IPV. Their accounts focused on using the knowledge and experience from their advocacy roles to critically reflect on and process the abuse and its meaning for women. The second narrative was helping others. This was the most frequent narrative and it focused on using personal experiences of abuse to help other IPV survivors, particularly in terms of helping them understand, navigate, and make changes to the social and legal systems that survivors often face. The third narrative was personal strength. This narrative was taken up by only one participant and focused on her personal identity as a lifelong advocate and her inner strength and determination as central to her resilience.

Working Through the Abuse

Three women’s accounts were structured primarily through a working through the abuse narrative. All three of these women were social workers employed at agencies that provided support services and shelter to survivors of IPV. All three women had also been involved in VAW advocacy prior to the start of their intimate partner abuse. However, their abuse experiences were quite different. Danielle (18-25 years old, White/European, lesbian) and Mae (18-25 years old, White/European, queer) were both abused by female partners, and Rebecca (26-35 years old, White/European, bisexual) was abused by a male partner.

The interview began with a broad, open-ended question that asked women to reflect on the people or things that were helpful to them in dealing with their experience of abuse. All three women began by talking about receiving support from at least some family members, before their stories quickly transitioned to talking about their work in the VAW field and the intersections between this work and their own process of coping with their abuse. The connections between their advocacy work and their own experiences of coping arose spontaneously, rather than in response to an interview question.

The three women’s accounts of their abuse and resilience included acknowledging the specific ways in which their social work practice with survivors of IPV was integral to processing their own abuse, for example, by having “different ways to think about violence” and “a way to kind of critique” assumptions about violence, including more tangible resources:

I remember pulling out, like, the cycle of violence, which I was lucky to have because that was, like, something we’ve been trained to use, and it’s like around all the time when you are doing this work, and, and just looking at it and being like, “wow I’m experiencing that and that and that” [uses fingers to point], and it really helped me to kind of recognize that like this is not okay, and that this isn’t about, like, dysfunction within my relationship, like this is violence that is happening, and then how am I going to deal with that, so. (Mae)

Like Mae, Danielle and Rebecca framed their advocacy work as facilitating a “processing” of their own abuse experiences. Importantly, their advocacy work was also important not just for emotionally and psychologically processing and understanding their experiences but also for recognizing their experiences as abuse in the first place:

I would say that [advocacy work] was also key in realizing the situation I was in, because I was a student on placement, um, not placement, a summer position with this same agency [social work placement] and my boss had my [current] position and we were going in and talking to a group of youth about healthy relationships and to sit down after and debrief with each other and go “how the hell can I sit here and have this conversation when I know damn well what I’m going home to is an abusive situation,” right? And I guess it was that hyper, that idea that when you go into this type of work, you, you open a door and walk on another side of awareness that you can never turn back from was helpful, was helpful in validating in my experience, and the possibility you know for that resiliency and the idea that there was going to be something better on the other side. (Danielle)

For Danielle, this knowledge developed as she trained to be a VAW social worker and initiated a process of self-reflection and acknowledgment of her own abuse.

The initial reasons that women had for getting involved in VAW advocacy work in the first place also played into how survivor–advocates processed and made sense of their abuse:

I think, uh, my politics played a really strong part because I felt like I was this walking contradiction, because you know I’m this outspoken queer-identified feminist and here I am in a hetero relationship with a douche bag, you know, who’s like a total asshole, so, um, I don’t know, in many ways I felt really fake, or like it was some kind of farce, and I wasn’t living up to my actual real life politics and that bothered me and it was also a concern because, you know, I wanted to kind of put my theory and my politics into practice and it wasn’t, um, living out in that way, and, so ya, so I guess my politics played kind of a big role too. (Rebecca)

Advocacy work in the form of supporting IPV survivors through frontline advocacy clearly influences women’s understandings of their own abuse experiences and, in many ways, provided a particular kind of knowledge about abuse that was helpful in recognizing, naming, and then processing their abuse experiences. However, having this advocacy experience, and as a result an “academic” understanding of abuse and recovery, also created some challenges for these women:

Rebecca:

So it was like, volunteering during my undergrad and doing stuff, and then at grad school I was also doing stuff, got into a violent relationship, or an abusive relationship, and then after that there was about a year where I didn’t do anything [advocacy work]. Uh, and then I was in another one [abusive relationship], and after that, and it’s funny actually because after that one, I had a range of choices in terms of my [social work] placement and I chose to do mine at [VAW organization] because I was like, this is kind of the work that I’m interested in and want to do, but also I need to seriously look at my own shit, and learn, and do research, and like as much as I possibly can to kind of, like, process my own experiences with this kind of stuff, so I would say the latest one really provided the impetus to do my placement at [VAW organization].

Interviewer:

How has that helped you, or how do you feel that it’s affected or contributed to your own personal experience?

Rebecca:

Oh it’s been huge, it’s actually been really hard because in many ways its triggering things that I kind of just like to bury and avoid, and, um, but it’s allowed me to see certain things, kind of as other people would view them. So my experiences with violence in these relationships and other violence in my life, I always minimize, or there is a lot of people that goes on, and rationally I know what I’m doing and I know I shouldn’t be blaming myself, but I do it anyway, and really being involved at [VAW organization] and working with the clients and having the conversations that I’m having and doing the research that I’m doing has really, um, allowed me to, to kind of, begin shifting that blame and to start processing, really, kind of what’s happened in my own life.

The connection between advocacy work and resilience for these three women is facilitated through a “processing” of their abuse. What is encompassed within “processing” is broad and multifaceted. Whereas Danielle focused on validation and a sense of hope that she could successfully move through this experience, Rebecca speaks to the importance of overcoming self-blame. Rebecca’s narrative also illustrates the complex and nonlinear relationship between abuse, advocacy, and recovery for survivor–advocates.

Helping Others

For women who became involved in advocacy after their first experience of IPV, their narratives were focused on using their experiences to help others. Two women, Allesandra (56-65 years old, Central American, heterosexual) and Karen (46-55 years old, White/European, heterosexual) were employed (or previously employed) at agencies that provided support services and shelter to IPV survivors at the time of their interview. Christina (36-45 years, North African, heterosexual) volunteered on a woman abuse advocacy committee. All three of these women were immigrants to Canada, whose abuse was perpetrated by their husbands in their countries of origin. Maria (36-45 years old, Latin American, heterosexual) was an immigrant and worked as an interpreter at a women’s legal clinic. Candace (46-55 years old, White/European, bisexual) was not involved in a formal advocacy role, but rather was an engaged community member who participated in community consciousness-raising events, and was an informal support provider for friends who were experiencing abuse.

Although each of the women began by describing the resources that helped them deal with their abuse, their stories always included descriptions of their abuse, and many identified a turning point in the abuse that ultimately led to the end of the relationship. Then, guided by the interview questions, the women’s stories shifted focus from the details of their abuse and the dynamics of their abusive relationship to their advocacy work. This sequence and detail is noteworthy because explicit questions about the abuse were intentionally not included in the interview protocol. Unlike Danielle, Mae, and Rebecca’s narratives, the discussion of advocacy work and its relationship to their recovery and resilience was not brought up spontaneously, thus making the dominant free narrative about their abuse and recovery from it. Their advocacy roles then played into this narrative by explaining how helping others contributed to their own recovery. This narrative is most consistent with how the relationship between resilience and helping others is typically conceptualized in the literature. Unlike the nonlinear relationship between advocacy, abuse, and resilience articulated through the “working through the abuse” narrative, here, the relationship follows a more linear and unidirectional relationship.

Although their advocacy work was quite different from one another, all spoke of the desire to help other women experiencing IPV because of their own experiences of abuse and navigating social and legal systems. In addition, advocacy work was seen as important to their own resilience and was immensely meaningful and often enjoyable. This motivation is evident in Maria’s account:

Yes, I enjoy [the work] so much. And the women feel very happy to have this kind of programs for them, because how [what] I experienced myself: it’s very difficult to face the legal system when you don’t have any background and when you suffer abuse and when you are in this situation, and when you know that the legal system is complicated for somebody that doesn’t speak the language, because in my personal experience, when you go to the lawyer office and when you go to these agencies from the government, you need to be trained in order to understand because if you go to a lawyer, she’s not going to stop to explain you. No, she just goes along with her file, and if you catch up and if not . . . So . . . us as interpreters, we can digest information and try to pass it to the victim, and make her more easy to deal with this kind of matter. So it’s very gratifying for me to do this because I know I can give back to the system.

The abuse and resilience narratives of Christina, Allesandra, Karen, and Maria were told chronologically in such a way that their overarching story arc reflected a transition from being a victim to an advocate for other women. To illustrate, in response to a question about whether her advocacy work had any role to play in her own resilience, Allesandra said,

Definitely. And, and I would like to see, I think that’s what I would like to see in women kind of knowing that, that they can make a change, umm, I think there’s a woman from the United States and her name is, I believe it’s Andrea Smith, and you can check that and she wrote a book which is about um, she’s a First Nation woman, saying that one of the things that kind of stay with me is that women should stop being clients. They, you know, for a while we can be clients but then we should become, um, advocates . . . and agents of change. I really believe that. So because then you know that, the fact that, that will change everything. I mean we can be oppressed but, but that does not mean we cannot fight oppression. I really believe that.

Illustrative of the other women’s narratives, Maria’s and Allesandra’s accounts highlight an important aspect of the relationship between abuse, advocacy, and resilience—that is, that the women were very passionate about and invested in the work that they do for survivors, particularly as an effort to improve the experiences of women seeking support for abuse. What is also striking about their accounts, and as Candace’s account below will further illustrate, is how advocacy work facilitated positive personal feelings and experiences for these women, such as feelings of happiness, agency, value, and a rewriting of one personal narrative from victim to advocate, that are emblematic of resilience and recovery as a process of coping, adaptation, and personal growth.

Embedded within the overarching narrative of helping other women, women also acknowledged the value of doing advocacy work for their own resilience, empowerment, and recovery:

I think um, felt more empowered. I felt better about myself even though I was doing it for somebody else. Take Back the Night was also for me but helping my friends was, it was nice that I was able to do something and that, they felt safe enough with me to let me help but I don’t know that, I mean maybe down the road when I have done more work, I don’t know that I could actually do volunteer work or anything. This is because I am still dealing with my own stuff. Um, but, yeah, its, I think it’s something that’s so important, it makes me feel good that it’s still happening, that I can have a part of it, and, I don’t know, all I can think of is that its empowering and its, um, validating . . . So you feel like you are doing something that’s got purpose and it has value. And it also affects you in a positive way, you know? (Candace)

For Candace, it was being involved in VAW activism that promoted a deeper understanding of her own abuse experiences and an ability to connect her advocacy with her own (and other women’s) experiences. In some ways, this is similar to the experiences of Danielle, Mae, and Rebecca, whose advocacy work offered different ways to think about abuse when it did happen and a pathway for personal growth. Illustrative of other women’s accounts, Candace highlights an important challenge for survivors of IPV who go on to do advocacy work. Although the overarching experience for women was that advocacy work was a positive experience and contributed to their experiences of resilience, doing this work creates the potential for retraumatization. This was previously acknowledged as part of the working through the abuse narrative, and suggests that the challenges of advocating while also a survivor is a somewhat common experience for survivor–advocates.

Personal Strength

Cindy’s (no age provided, Caribbean, heterosexual) accounts of her experience of abuse and resilience took on a somewhat different narrative structure and content than the other women. Cindy’s story was told through a personal strength narrative. Whereas the other women also spoke about inner strength and other personal characteristics or traits they believed were helpful in their resilience, a focus on personal strength was the primary way that Cindy spoke about her experiences. Like the women whose accounts were structured through the helping others narrative, she started her story by discussing her abuse and the difficult experience of navigating the social support and criminal justice systems, but unlike any of the other women, the prevailing way that Cindy spoke about herself and her resilience was through an identification as someone with a lot of “inner strength.” What was particularly striking about Cindy’s story was the extent to which she continually constructed herself as a capable, competent, and strong woman throughout her more than an hour-long interview, in which the interviewer said relatively little. Cindy’s husband served time in prison for assault, and as a result, Cindy was required to engage with the criminal justice system. Cindy’s account focused on her personal strength and resourcefulness that helped her to cope with her abuse and the further trauma she experienced in the criminal justice system:

At the police location [laughs] when my, well, uh, my ex pleaded guilty, so I was sort of robbed from my chance, because the [Federal government] was looking for 10 years minimum because he tried to choke me. Right, I was unconscious. I have a lot of inner strength . . . The unfortunate thing is because I went to a group called [women’s advocacy organization] . . . I listened to the other women and they unfortunately didn’t have the help and the services that I got. And I don’t know if it’s good or if it’s bad but I think I was probably judged by who I am and how I presented myself, because like I say, I’ve been in the, I’ve done the work, I know the ins and outs, I know police services, I used to volunteer years ago for the rape crisis centre, and so I know a lot of these things. So I, my help, or their persistence, or determination, if you will, was basically who I was and how I presented myself, which is good.

Not only does Cindy’s account attribute inner strength, determination, and persistence to her ability to get the support she required, but these personality characteristics are connected to her previous experience as an advocate and her familiarity with the domestic violence and legal systems:

Um, for one, all my life I’ve always helped people, so I’ve been more in the role of an advocate because I have been a counselor for many, many years and working for customer service care, that sort of stuff. So when I was, um, when I was victimized it was, um, quite difficult because then I had to now seek help instead of helping, I became a victim instead of an advocate. Um, that is still something I’m struggling with because I figure, you know, as a well-educated smart person [pause] I’ve, I couldn’t understand why, how I got myself into this situation. So there’s a little bit of self-blame . . . I’ve always been strong, so there was that sort of shame and embarrassment at first.

Unlike the helping others narrative, which focused on the identity shift from victim to advocate, the personal strength narrative offered a reversal—because Cindy has been an advocate all her life, her experience of abuse now positioned her as a victim. There are also some similarities with the working through the abuse narrative, such as feelings of self-blame or struggling to understand how this could have happened given her education and experience. Thus, although Cindy’s narrative has some content and structure similarities with the other narratives, it stood out as remarkably different in its emphasis on personal strength.

Discussion

Previous resilience research has identified “helping others” both formally and informally as an important component of recovery and resilience following IPV (e.g., Hou et al., 2013; Senter & Caldwell, 2002; Shanthakumari et al., 2014; Taylor, 2004). The current study examined the narratives of survivor–advocates to better understand the relationship between abuse, advocacy work—a more formal iteration of “helping others”—and recovery and resilience processes. Women’s narratives drew connections between their advocacy work and resilience-related concepts previously identified in the literature. For example, participants spoke about developing knowledge about IPV and acknowledging their own experience as abuse through their engagement in VAW advocacy. Acknowledging and making sense of traumatic experiences have been identified as IPV protective factors and key components of recovery and resilience processes (Merritt-Gray & Wuest, 1995). Other participants spoke of cognitive and emotional experiences, such as validation, a sense of hope, and overcoming self-blame, that have been connected to access to community resources, interventions, and support (McLeod, Hays, & Chang, 2010), which survivor–advocates would have access to through their advocacy work. This relationship, however, is typically conceptualized, implicitly and explicitly, in the literature as linear and unidirectional, wherein women experience abuse and then go on to help and support others, often other survivors of IPV, which facilitates recovery and resilience. The three resilience narratives identified in the survivor–advocates accounts (working through the abuse, helping others, and personal strength) suggest a more complex and multidirectional relationship not previously captured in the literature on helping others and resilience.

Consistent with previous research (Wood, 2017), advocacy work was often described as helpful in recognizing and naming women’s own experiences as abuse. The narratives in the current study highlight how recognizing and naming abuse is implicated in women’s abilities to make sense of and cope with their abuse, particularly as they are simultaneously working in advocacy roles. This is important, given the estimated high prevalence of abuse survivors who are working as social workers or in other helping professions (Wood, 2017). Staff and managers at VAW agencies and organizations are likely already aware that many of the staff they work with are survivors of IPV, but they may be less cognizant of how staff are processing or managing their own abuse experiences.

In addition, the three narratives of advocacy and resilience examined in the current study suggest that recovery and resilience processes may also differ across survivor–advocates as a result of different identities and lived experiences. For example, Cindy, a Black Caribbean woman, drew heavily on a narrative of personal strength to tell her advocacy and resilience narrative. Cindy’s focus on her strength reflects previous research with Black women survivors that highlights the role of race and racial identity in their experiences of IPV and identifies inner strength and resilience as a salient theme in Black women’s understandings of their IPV experiences (Gillum, 2008). The women who drew on the working through the abuse narrative were all young, queer identified, and professionally trained as social workers, which may have influenced the political lens through which they often framed their own experiences. The findings of the current study, particularly that survivors are often continuing to cope with the impacts of their abuse while supporting other survivors, suggest it is important that VAW agencies foster an organizational culture that values peer support and self-care and takes into consideration an advocate’s own recovery status and process in an effort to limit retraumatization (Slattery & Goodman, 2009). The potential for advocacy work to be triggering suggests that it may not be possible or advisable for all women to take on such a role. Many agencies are aware of this and offer training to better prepare survivor–advocates for their work. Although the women in the current study all self-identified as resilient and, thus, the interviews did not extensively address the challenges of being a survivor–advocate, discussions about such challenges were not entirely absent in the interviews. Thus, our findings suggest that trauma-informed training would likely be beneficial for all survivor–advocates and well worth the effort and financial cost.

Agencies that support abused women should consider offering more opportunities for survivors using their services to get involved, perhaps in more removed roles to help mitigate the potential challenges of this work (e.g., volunteer administrator, fundraising, or peer support program). Despite these challenges, survivors are often highly motivated to do advocacy work, and their expertise that comes from lived experience is highly valuable and should be financially remunerated. For example, women expressed a desire to improve the social and criminal justice systems that had been challenging or inadequate for them. This firsthand experience navigating these systems could prove useful to agencies working toward systemic change, and as the findings of the current research suggest, could also be beneficial for the women themselves.

The motivation to engage in VAW advocacy out of a desire to help others is consistent with previous research that has identified helping others as an important component of recovery and resilience (Hou et al., 2013). As Taylor (2004) noted, survivors often develop a new level of social awareness and seek to make changes to existing social conditions. This was evident in survivor–advocates’ motivation to advocate to help other survivors better navigate support systems. For women in the current study, taking on an advocacy role following their experience of abuse was an active, action-oriented way for survivors to help give meaning to their experiences (Grossman et al., 2006). Notably, a desire to help other IPV survivors, particularly through a focus on reforming systems, or at least supporting women in navigating through those systems, was central to the helping others narrative, and to a lesser extent the personal strength narrative, but rather absent from the working through the abuse narrative. This may be due to the motivation to get involved in advocacy work in the first place, which, at least as it was articulated in the narratives, was a more general personal desire among those women who had become social workers first before experiencing IPV. The women whose narratives focused on “processing” their abuse in depth were already familiar with many of the social systems and resources available to survivors and, thus, these aspects did not feature heavily in their narratives.

Our findings also have important implications for education, service provision, and clinical practice. Women who began their advocacy work prior to their abuse reported that having a critical understanding of abuse allowed them to recognize their abuse as such and to process it in a deeper or different way. Developing a critical understanding of violence is often part of programming for abused women, but it may be possible to integrate a critical understanding of abuse into different contexts that would potentially reach women before they experienced abuse, such as high school health education classes or parenting courses. In addition to seeing the possibility of advocacy engagement as a potential healing strategy, clinicians working with survivors should be mindful that the processes and outcomes of resilience, and the relationship between advocacy and resilience, are likely to interact and unfold differently for women with different backgrounds, identities, motivations, and abuse histories, as evidenced by our three distinct dominant narratives.

Strengths and Limitations

Whereas previous research has identified the important role of helping others in resilience and recovery for IPV survivors, this study is one of the few that has examined the experiences of survivor–advocates, and it is the only one that has included both helping professionals who experienced IPV as VAW advocates and IPV survivors who became survivor–advocates. This diversity allowed for a richer and perhaps more complete understanding of the multitude of ways that advocacy work is influenced by women’s personal experiences and also influences their own understandings of themselves and their advocacy work.

Although small sample sizes are not uncommon in narrative analysis (e.g., Smith, 2012), a larger sample size would have provided a greater breadth of advocacy experiences, particularly women with less formal advocacy experience. This study did not aim to provide a complete accounting of all possible narratives, but rather offers deep and meaningful insight into some of the available narratives surrounding resilience, abuse, and advocacy in the context of IPV. Nevertheless, a larger sample size may have shed light on additional narratives or may have helped to further understand the identified narratives. Women self-selected into this study by responding to recruitment posters, and as such self-identified to be some degree as resilient. Future research should include women who do not view themselves as resilient as it may provide additional insight into the development and experience of resilience in survivor–advocates. In addition, all the women were highly educated and this may have influenced their decision and ability to become advocates. An additional limitation is the lack of information collected about survivor–advocates’ positions in their agencies. Although we collected information about nature of work and agency, information about length of time in position was not collected. Future research should examine more closely the specific advocacy contexts in which women are engaged to further our understanding of the relationship between IPV, advocacy, and resilience. Future research should also explore relationships between women’s intersecting identities, including racial and sexual identities, and narratives of advocacy and resilience.

Conclusion

Previous research has identified helping others as an important component of recovery and resilience, but the current study adds to our understanding about how this process occurs in IPV survivors involved in formal and informal advocacy and activism. The three dominant advocacy and resilience narratives—working through the abuse, helping others, and personal strength—extend our understanding of the role of VAW advocacy work in the construction of identity and meaning making processes for IPV survivors. This research also contributes to the limited literature on advocacy and resilience in trauma survivors generally, and IPV survivors specifically. The findings of this study highlight the complex relationship between abuse, advocacy, and resilience for IPV survivors and the multitude of ways that engaging in advocacy work interacts with abuse experiences and women’s recovery and resilience processes. These findings have implications for service provision and education and can be applied to support women’s resilience and recovery following abuse.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the women who participated in this study, the PreVAiL research collaboration, and the reviewers who provided valuable input on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by funds from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research by the Institute of Gender and Health, and the Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addictions to PreVAiL (Preventing Violence Across the Lifespan) research collaboration.

ORCID iD

Sara E. Crann

Author Biographies

Sara E. Crann is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Windsor. Her research addresses issues related to gender and health, with a focus on sexual and intimate partner violence against girls and women. Her research is aimed at improving interventions and policies to support girls’ and women’s health.

Paula C. Barata is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Guelph. Her research has focused on issues of relevance to the amelioration of violence against women such as IPV survivors’ experiences with the criminal justice system and with housing, as well as the evaluation and implementation of a sexual assault resistance program for university women.

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