Abstract
Aotearoa/New Zealand’s rate of reported intimate partner violence (IPV) is among the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In this article, we step behind the statistical trends to document the ways in which violence manifests in women’s everyday lives and the subtle, imperfect ways in which they respond through the development of various resistive tactics. We explore how these women navigate their daily lives with violence, paying particular attention to moments of adaptation, agency and resistance. With the help of Te Whakakruruhau (Māori Women’s Refuge), we conducted semi-structured discussions with eight women (four staff members and four former clients) who revealed how deeply enmeshed IPV can become within the conduct of everyday life. This necessitates their development of tactics for surviving the danger associated with mundane practices, such as grocery shopping, sleeping and doing the dishes. In responding to everyday violence, the women in our study create moments of routine and radical freedom in the midst of the chaos that comes with IPV.
Keywords
Everyday gendered violence remains a pervasive public health issue and a fundamental violation of human rights (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2006; Pain, 2014). The reported rate of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in Aotearoa/New Zealand is amongst the highest in the OECD (UN Women, 2011). While violence continues to carry connotations of dramatic incidents of physical abuse, more mundane or everyday patterns of psychological control are increasingly recognised (Bishop, 2016). The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines IPV as any behaviour that causes physical, psychological, or sexual harm within an intimate relationship (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2006). We supplement this conceptualisation with Stark’s (2012) notion of coercive control in approaching IPV as a form of social entrapment that features both psychological and physical assaults, social isolation, fear and the micro-regulation of women’s everyday lives that can erode their sense of self, security and autonomy. This approach examines multiple levels of violence, from setting arbitrary rules about who women can see and when they can go out, to ostensibly mundane acts such as belittling comments and hair-pulling (Stark, 2007).
A significant body of work has examined the role of structural power imbalances and ingrained misogyny in perpetuating endemic violence against women (Pain, 2014). It is crucial that we document how gendered inequalities populate many women’s lives whilst also considering the everyday, sometimes imperfect ways in which women respond to IPV. After all, surviving IPV requires considerable strength and resilience. Women living with IPV are often proactive help seekers, hold expert knowledge on how to resist their partners’ violence, and literally fight for their lives (Family Violence Death Review Committee [FVDRC], 2017). Fighting back physically, seeking legal assistance, and leaving constitute overt ways in which women may resist IPV; however, these can also incite an escalation in violence (Shefer, 2016). Focusing predominantly on these overt acts of defiance can obscure the subtler forms of agency and resistance women create through everyday trial and error (Mkandawire-Valhmu et al., 2016). Therefore, this study explores how women navigate everyday lives that are shaped by IPV. Through instances of adaptation, agency and resistance, they regain some control and safety for themselves and their children.
Scholars have noted that violence against women living under coercive control can become as routine as eating or sleeping (Stark, 2012). When assault is an expected part of everyday life, the perpetrator’s power and behaviour can become somewhat normalised in the lives of survivors. More than a collection of sporadic disruptive events, IPV can become routinized in the conduct of women’s daily lives (Stark, 2012; Watkins & Shulman, 2008). Here, IPV becomes embedded in everyday practices, such as cooking, sleeping and getting dressed. However, this does not mean that women remain passive in the process. We are particularly interested in how a perpetrator’s methods of control may be matched by women’s agentive and often constructive responses. This is what Stark (2007, p. 387) refers to as women’s efforts to gain some “control in the context of no control.” That so many women manage to withstand violent relationships necessitates our learning more about how they navigate, resist, and triumph over adversity on a daily basis. As much as gendered relations may be reproduced through the repetition of men’s abusive social practices, these can also be disrupted and resisted though women’s creativity (Butler, 1990).
Gaining insight into how women survive extreme adversity requires the study of ordinary resistive practices of survival. De Certeau (1984) discusses the ways in which ordinary people can resist oppression through the development of everyday tactics of resistance that counter the strategies of control used by the more powerful. Strategies are employed by those in positions of power and establish long-term norms that benefit them, often at the expense of less powerful groups. However, strategies never result in total control. Tactics refer to the efforts of less powerful groups to appropriate the resources and strategies of powerful groups and disrupt their control (De Certeau, 1984; Graham et al., 2018). The use of tactics here can be understood in reference to Sartre’s (1948) notion of radical freedom, in that even in situations of violence and adversity women still have some degree of agency. From this perspective, human life under adversity is characterised by planned and spontaneous moments of resistance. This by no means suggests that women living through violence have control over their situations. Moments of radical freedom (resistive tactics) instead achieve some respite in otherwise extremely constraining situations.
There continues to be a pervasive public misconception that leaving an abusive partner will prevent further violence. This is sometimes reinforced by shelter workers, child protection workers, and those working in the family court who perceive leaving to be the safest and most responsible action a woman can take (Morgan & Coombes, 2016). Focusing on leaving is an inadequate response to IPV for a range of reasons, not least of which that leaving comprises one of the riskiest periods of a violent relationship, with the likelihood of a lethal assault rising dramatically (FVDRC, 2017). Leaving is a form of open insubordination that can increase the likelihood of an immediate backlash from an oppressor (Scott, 1985). The focus on leaving can also be problematic for Māori whose intimate relationships are often perceived in the context of broader inter-familial ties. This has led some agencies, such as Te Whakaruruhau, to develop initiatives for addressing IPV that involve perpetrators and broader whānau (families).
We, therefore, chose to focus on the resistance women exhibit within violent relationships. Previous literature demonstrates that women employ subtle tactics, such as hiding money, keeping keys close, or even having a tubal ligation to prevent pregnancy without their partner’s knowledge (Mkandawire-Valhmu et al., 2016; Williamson, 2010). Scott (1985) discusses the need to focus on such everyday forms of resistance, the constant struggle as opposed to outright rebellions. Scott speaks of the “ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups” such as foot-dragging, slander, arson and sabotage (p. xvi). As documented in previous feminist research (Pells et al., 2016), everyday resistance can be covert, spontaneous, premeditated, at times contradictory, and often centres on immediate survival needs.
In this article, we consider agency and resistance as central features of women’s efforts to make their lives more liveable. The tactics of resistance that women who live through violence employ may not be consistent with dominant notions of resistance, and at times may appear to reinforce their existing circumstances (Pells et al., 2016). However, this does not negate the importance of documenting how women work with, and ultimately against, the constraints imposed upon them by their abusers. Feminist scholarship has long been concerned with understanding the often-contradictory aspects of women’s everyday lives through local material practices, which are embedded within broader social structures, including patriarchy (Smith, 1987). This focus allows scholars to explore the ways in which women’s lives are constrained by social relations as well as how they reproduce and alter such relations through everyday tactics.
Complementing feminist scholarship on women’s everyday lives, an overlapping scholarly tradition on the conduct of everyday life has emerged in psychology (Schraube & Højholt, 2015). Such scholarship considers the ways in which people construct their lives in relation to others in the context of societal structures. According to this approach, the everyday conduct of human lives is populated by fluid social practices, which actively reproduce and at times disrupt socio-cultural relationships and structures. This work is particularly appropriate to our research as it centres the human agency and practices of resistance in the mundane, ordinary actions, routines, and interactions that make up people’s lived realities. This is vital given the tendency for women who live through violence to be constructed as passive and powerless, which supports victim-oriented stereotypes and restricts the ways in which agencies respond to and support their needs (Coates & Wade, 2007). What may superficially appear as trivial everyday moments or acts can covertly carry broader significance in disrupting the exercising of patriarchal power (Pain, 2014).
Methods
This research was conducted in collaboration with Te Whakaruruhau (Māori women’s refuge), with whom the authors have a longstanding reciprocal relationship (Rua et al., In Press). Ethical, mutually beneficial engagements and ongoing collaborations through research and practice remain at the foreground of our collaboration. We conducted the study in partnership with Te Whakaruruhau so that experts were on hand to help us deal with any instances where participating women might re-experience aspects of their distress from talking about particular experiences of violence. While there is no way to eliminate this risk entirely, we limited it by working with the ongoing support of refuge staff who are well versed in addressing such concerns and who enact strong safety protocols. While there may be some risks in women discussing their experiences, these need to be balanced with the right women have to share their stories, particularly where these have the potential to reduce IPV (Bender, 2017). In order to ensure confidentiality in our conversations, all names and identifying details were changed or deleted, except for Rolinda, who insisted that her name be included. It was important that we responded to this request in a positive way as it is increasingly common in Māori focused research to not use anonymity as a default setting, given the histories of research robbery that such indigenous groups have been subject to.
In total, eight women participated in this study: four Te Whakaruruhau staff with extensive experience of IPV, including a senior staff member (Rolinda), as well as four recent clients of the refuge. The research corpus comprised an initial key informant interview with Rolinda, a group interview with three staff members, two repeat interviews with each of the four former refuge clients (8 interviews in total), and field notes written after each interview and following meetings at the refuge. We began these engagements by conducting a semi-structured interview with Rolinda, who is well known to us, and who has worked in the IPV field for over 25 years. Based on her expertise in the field, Rolinda then chose four clients now living free of violence who she felt would be interested in participating in the study: Kiri, Bridget, Diane, and Wendy. The first author was introduced to these client participants and took time to have coffee with and get to know them before engaging in the formal interviews. These former client participants were then interviewed individually on two occasions approximately a week apart to afford them the time and space to reflect on what are sensitive issues. Finally, a group interview designed to further explore women’s patterns of resistance to IPV was conducted with three staff members: Sophie, Greer, and Jess. This staff group interview offered an alternative perspective to the client’s experiences of IPV with a group of experts. All three staff participants had been working with survivors for several years and it was particularly enlightening to draw on their cumulative knowledge.
In terms of participant demographics, Rolinda is a 50-year-old Māori refuge manager who is held in particularly high esteem by refuge staff and clients, as well as IPV and community scholars nationally. Sophie is a 45-year-old Māori woman who works as the crisis community team leader at the refuge. Greer is a 25-year-old Māori woman who works with women in the community as part of the whānau [family] support team. Jess is also a Māori whānau support worker, who is 43 years old and previously worked in the crisis community team and as a safe-house leader. These staff members embody the traditional Māori cultural role of Aunties (the backbone of Māori communities) for refuge clients and often establish ongoing relationships with former clients. Our former client participants include Kiri, a 35-year-old Māori woman with a warm disposition who spoke confidently and openly about her experiences of violence. Bridget is a 26-year-old young woman of Māori and Pākehā (descendant of British colonists) descent who grew up with a single mother. Diane is a 24-year-old Pākehā woman who was understandably nervous when we began our conversations, quickly lighting a cigarette when we sat down to talk. Wendy is a warm, open-minded, and articulate 46-year-old Pākehā woman.
These client participants each endured long-term relationships with men who exhibited acts of physical and psychological violence within relationships that featured physical abuse, fear, oppression and coercion on a daily basis. While physical violence is prominent in our participants’ accounts, it is important to keep the broader context of entrapment in mind. Perpetrators engaged in psychologically abusive practices, such as gaslighting, isolation and threats alongside physical forms of abuse. At the time of our interviews, Kiri was the only participant still in a relationship with her partner, after working through the Kawatea program with Te Whakaruruhau and building a violence-free relationship.
Initial client interviews were textured culturally and began with general conversation, introductions and the sharing of food and coffee. The first author took the time and space to build rapport, get comfortable with and converse about issues of IPV and the conduct of everyday life in a manner reflecting the Māori cultural values of manaakitanga (responsibility to care for and host others) and whakawhanangatanga (engaging in respectful relationships with others) (Rua et al., In Press). The cultural patterning of the interviews as a space for us to dwell together contributed to a sense of comfort for participants and lessened the sense of formality and anxiety that many precariat women such as themselves often associate with being interviewed. By taking time in the interview process, the first author could open a shared space to engage in frank and, at times, harrowing conversations with participating women. We outlined five general areas of interest focused on participants’ social practices in response to everyday violence. These comprised their history of violence, violence and everyday routines, the normalisation of and resistance to violence, leaving, and safe places. Prompts for the second interview were based on a close reading of the transcripts from the initial interview in order to further explore emergent issues. The repeat interview process allowed us to discuss what happened in the previous interview and for participants to raise any questions or comments about the research and issues that the first author may have missed. Overall, these interviews facilitated a shared exploration of participant experiences, allowing flexibility in the direction of the conversation and the creation of shared spaces in which unexpected tangents, clarifications, and corrections could emerge (Rubin & Rubin, 2011).
Our analysis was informed by recent writing by Brinkmann (2015) regarding the limitations of methods such as thematic analysis. Such methods can foster the illusion that qualitative analysis can be rendered more reliable through the application of often rigid coding practices that may be proceduralized across a range of studies and topics. Our approach was based on a process of repeatedly reading and discussing the transcripts and notes created for this project so that we could ‘stumble across’ and begin to formulate an interpretation of key issues and reoccurring patterns in the participants’ experiences. We then began to select, discuss and interpret key exemplars from the transcripts by writing links to meetings at the refuge and informal discussions, as well as previous research and theoretical works. In this way, our process of analysis was informed by Denzin and Lincoln’s (2013) notion of writing as analysis and the concept of the researcher as bricolar (Kincheloe, 2001). Creating a bricolage comprises a multidisciplinary approach to research which utilises the tools available to construct methods. This necessitated that we worked eclectically (combining insights from participating women’s accounts, our own notes and observations and relevant scholarly literature) with a view to developing the richest possible interpretation of participant experiences that reflects the complexities of everyday lives featuring gendered violence. Briefly, in conducting and transcribing the interviews, writing field notes, talking to each other as a team, and summarising insights from previous feminist research, we sought to construct an interpretation in the form of a bricolage of participants’ everyday tactics of resistance. This process was iterative and involved drafting and redrafting of the analysis and detailed team discussions through which we brought focus and coherence to our interpretation.
Day-to-day survival
I don’t know whether it was a survival strategy, it was just, “Do what you fucking have to do.” (Diane)
Diane’s matter-of-fact sentiment regarding the everyday reality of IPV epitomises the focus of this article. Survival is ‘just what’ our participants did. Doing “what you fucking have to do” involved the development of what Aristotle referred to as phronetic or practical knowledge based on our participants’ first-hand experiences of IPV. Such knowledge enabled our participants to anticipate their partner’s behaviour and adapt their tactics accordingly. Previous research supports the importance of women’s practical knowledge and dynamic resourcefulness in surviving and resisting IPV (Pain, 2014). Correspondingly, we begin our analysis by exploring the state of routine anxiety and disruption our participants came to know and navigate in their day-by-day efforts to survive. This leads to an exploration of how specific tactics of resistance came into play through their everyday practices of gaining access to food, sleep, and childcare.
Routine anxiety and phronetic knowledge
Violent relationships manifest in everyday situations that are chaotic, often incoherent, and full of contradictions (Williamson, 2010). As such, IPV has been identified as a form of everyday terrorism (Pain, 2014). Correspondingly, our participants’ lives were characterised by fear, anxiety and foreboding, which resulted in them living “day-by-day” and at times “moment-to-moment” (Rolinda). The nonchalant way in which our participants described acts of extreme physical violence reflects both the banality of violence in their lives and how second nature their resultant tactics became. Bridget, for example, laughed whilst recollecting the absurdity of an incident in which she reassured her neighbour that her partner had missed after attempting to run her over with his car. Our participants repeatedly utilised reference to such experiences to set the context for the tactics of resistance and adaptation that they developed in response. This section details the ways in which chronic anxiety and disruption became entangled in our participants’ lives and how they managed these complexities by drawing on their phronetic knowledge of IPV. Our participants learnt to associate everyday household spaces and items with reading their partner’s moods, anticipating their violence, and being able to respond protectively.
Perpetrators of IPV often exhibit volatile mood shifts, fluctuating between severe physical episodes of violence and moments of relative peace and affection (Stark, 2012). This fosters a sense of confusion, insecurity, and ultimately dependence. Such was the case for our client participants, where their partner’s acts of extreme physical abuse (for example, attempted drowning, hanging and torture) were juxtaposed against expressions of love. Diane discussed the resulting climate of volatility, fear and anxiety: One minute they love you like really love you. And the next minute they’re fucking – trying to kick your teeth out. That alone plays on your mind. You’re so fucking confused the whole time. It’s kind of draining on your idea of reality or something ‘cos you can’t figure out what’s gonna happen … And you never know. It is like constantly walking on eggshells, you don’t know what’s gonna set them off, you don’t know if this time they’re gonna get mad at you for eating breakfast, or for eating breakfast before they got to eat breakfast or if it’ll be fine.
Kiri similarly described her day-to-day psychological state as one of chronic anxiety, to the point of physically feeling light-headed and faint. She explained: Like really, really high anxiety… all the time … Yeah constantly. But I didn’t know that that’s what it was back then … Yes, really draining and y’know like … If I knew he was coming home, and he’d be home soon, I’d be getting dizzy, trying to think like – “hopefully, this is enough, have I done enough?”
Another example of how such hypervigilance can function as a safety tactic was provided by one of our staff participants. Jess described the way a refuge client learned to identify her partner’s likely course of action simply by the sound of his car in the driveway: One lady I worked with, she knew the way he drove up the driveway whether it was gonna be a good night or a bad night. So, if he zoomed up the driveway – do everything you can to keep it down, but if he drove up the driveway – normal. So, they’ll watch, monitor and predict his behaviour, as soon as he looks or comes back in and then they’ll settle their kids, make sure the kids don’t make any noise.
Similarly, Diane reported coming to fear the kitchen and avoided spending time there because the space contained numerous objects which her partner had used as weapons against her. The extract below demonstrates how IPV became entrenched in what are, for many people, mundane practices, such as doing the dishes: Whether we were … doing the dishes or boiling water, I hated being in the kitchen because I knew that in the kitchen there was boiling hot water and fucking knives Yeah, no the kitchen was not a fun place … If I was making noise doing the dishes, or if I was vacuum cleaning and he was trying to watch TV or trying to sleep, it just made shit worse so a lot of the time I just wouldn’t do it.
From the outside, the resulting untidy house might, as has previously been the case, be taken by child protection agencies as a marker for a neglectful mother and a chaotic home environment (Robertson & Masters-Awatere, 2017). However, from Diane’s insider perspective, the lack of attendance to gendered domestic labour, such as dishwashing and vacuum cleaning, constituted an imperfect tactic of survival and violence prevention. Rather than feeding into negative stereotypes about mothering through violent relationships, the material chaos of Diane’s unwashed dishes became a metonym for her efforts to protect herself from immediate danger.
Our participants often invoked everyday situations that would be recognisable to many people and populated these with extraordinary events that disrupted this normality and foregrounded the fear to which they were subjected. Further, our participants demonstrated their agency in creating tactics to diffuse these situations. For example, Bridget recalled an incident where her partner beat her while she tried to flee in the car to his parents’ house: I said, “ok obviously you’re pissed off I’m gonna go for a walk, give you some space”. He chased me down the road, got me in the car, gave me a hiding all the way to his Mum’s house, in the car – so this is in public as well, you know. I’m trying to pull up the hand brake and get out. He’s just, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” We get to his Mum’s place, he’s pulling me out of the car by my hair … Then his Nan, ‘cos his Nan lives there as well, started going off at me, and that I’m immature and that I need to stop causing this shit and I needa pull my head outta my ass. And that morning I had gone and gotten a flu jab, dropped our kid at kindy, came back and started cleaning and he’d just got up in a foul mood.
Food and sleep
For the participants in our study, eating and sleeping were everyday routines associated with fear and violence. The ordinary practice of having breakfast could involve having a hot cup of coffee or a toasted sandwich thrown at them. However, like other everyday practices, both eating and sleeping also proved to be sites of resistance. This section details the tactics women in our study adopted as they navigated grocery shopping, created opportunities to eat, compensated for limited food, and managed their sleeping needs. In the context of IPV, we argue that the ability to complete mundane routines such as preparing a meal or achieving a survivable amount of sleep constitutes resistance at its base level.
One of the primary everyday practices affected by IPV for our participants was supermarket shopping. Rolinda and Sophie noted that their clients typically preferred to avoid places such as supermarkets that held the potential of drawing re-traumatising attention, particularly if they were carrying visible injuries. To manage this, Bridget, for example, limited her supermarket shopping to an “as needed” basis. Kiri tactically avoided trips to the supermarket altogether, preferring the privacy of a local dairy (convenience store): … I would have rather gone to a dairy than Pak’nSave [supermarket] where like there were shitloads of people … Maybe I bump into someone, but like the dairy owner knew me, he pretty much knew our whole family all that sort of stuff. So, it was like, “ok let’s go down there”. … I just couldn’t do public places, like, ya know, some days I couldn’t even, barely even, ya know, go out the front door.
In addition to acquiring food, the practice of eating was also problematized. Participants eating too much or too often was associated with violence. Withholding, controlling or limiting access to food are all forms of violence against women, to which they respond by developing tactics of “burdened agency” (Lentz, 2018). In the interests of feeding their families, Jess and Sophie described how clients would often sacrifice their own nutritional health to feed their children as an act of maternal care. They adopted tactics commonly associated with food insecurity, such as staving off hunger, by substituting main meals with Weet-Bix (a cheap breakfast cereal) for themselves and their children (Graham et al., 2018).
Securing alternative food required our participants to be inventive. For example, Wendy described using one particular tactic to ensure she acquired a meal when her family was located at the pad (headquarters) of the gang to which her partner belonged: I’d cook breakfast because that gave me a chance to get something to eat. So, I would offer … “Do you want a poached egg?” So then I could eat as well. Otherwise, I’d go without. Just wouldn’t eat. I would sometimes spit in his food, spit in his coffees … Oh, it was great. I dunno why, but it gave me a sense that I was taking my own back. Ya know, like, “Fuck you” to his mashed spuds [potatoes]. Yeah, I’m not gonna have the retaliation of getting a smack around the back of the head or a fucking slap around the face or a kick to the stomach.
As with eating, sleep is fundamental to human survival, and our participants found creative ways to meet their minimum needs. While sleep generally requires a sense of safety, this was a time of vigilance for women in our study, for whom bedrooms were generally places of violence. Our participants utilised a variety of tactics, such as day sleeping, delaying sleep, and intoxicating their partners to avoid violence. Their tactics did not fully ensure their safety, but rather delayed or minimised oncoming violence, allowing them to get some rest. Such tactics are central to understanding how women conduct their lives with IPV. For example, Wendy’s partner was often violent at night and intermittently organised for his friends to break into their bedroom so that he could watch them rape her. She would, therefore, wait for him to fall asleep before sleeping herself: It’s funny, I always used to just, I’d wait for our Tom, wait for him to pass out and I’d be able to tell when he was asleep. And then I’d be able to relax and go to sleep. But until he was asleep, no I couldn’t sleep ‘cos I still didn’t know what was gonna come. Greer: I remember one case where the lady totally switched her whole routine around, she would sleep during the day and stay awake during the night… Sophie: They become hypervigilant eh? And over the years I’ve seen that with a few women, you know ‘cos you have Child, Youth and Family [former government child protection agency] and other agencies ask, “Why is she always asleep?” And I thought one day, “why is she sleeping [at the refuge] during the day,” y’know? And then I sat down and spoke with her and it was exactly that scenario. She wanted to be up at night to keep an eye on the kids, to make sure the kids were safe, and keep an eye on what he was doing … And she did that for frigging years … I’ve seen a lot of that … And I remembered she’d get up, get the kids to school and the babies go to day-care then she would sleep.
While day sleeping worked for Sophie and Greer’s clients, our participants often still had to sleep in the presence of their partners. Therefore, they also developed pre-sleep routines based on minimising the associated risks. For Wendy, this involved delaying going to bed by playing her partner’s favourite music to distract him and appease his mood. However, this tactic only worked for a time before he became suspicious, demonstrating the provisional nature of some tactics of resistance and the need for constant adaptations. Another tactic Wendy employed to delay sleep was drinking: I’d be like “owh, I’m gonna get it [assaulted] later, I just know it.” You know, when there’s no one around, or when we go to the room. Sometimes I’d try to avoid going to bed just because I didn’t wanna [be assaulted] … Well, I used to drink like a 40-ounce bottle of Bacardi so I’d be like, “No, I’m not going to bed til I finish this bottle.” And so then I’d slow down the drinking. I’d pour him a drink and I’d make it probably stronger than what it should have been, hoping like fuck that it would knock him out. That he’d get to sleep … Thought about getting sleeping tablets to pop in his drink, but then thought, “oh imagine if you gave him too many and you killed him?” [laughing]
Mothering in contexts of violence
Our participants were all primary caregivers and worked to support their children within the constraints of both violence and broader gendered expectations of mothering and homemaking. Deficit-orientated accounts of mothers living through IPV draw on neoliberal values of individual responsibility and frame women as responsible for the violence of their partners (Radford & Hester, 2006). Women who choose to stay with their partners are frequently interpreted by organisations such as Oranga Tamariki (New Zealand Ministry for Children) as complicit in the abuse (FVDRC, 2017). The constraints of violence meant our participants engaged in ongoing tactics which influenced how they conducted everyday domestic practices, including childcare. Women in our study struggled to live up to hegemonic ideals of mothering and the trope of the “bad mother” was a constant threat to their sense of self (Morgan & Coombes, 2016). Despite this, mothering remained central to our participants’ identities and survival tactics. Theirs are stark accounts of the dilemmas that come with mothering to the best of one’s ability in the context of IPV.
Client participants contended with both the violence of perpetrators and misplaced accountability while raising their children. Rolinda noted frequent encounters with Oranga Tamariki where her clients were blamed for the impact of their partner’s violence on their children. None of the client participants reported that their partners reliably contributed to the day-to-day housework or childcare, rendering them essentially single mothers by default. As such, Wendy laughed in response to our question around parenting duties, reflecting how self-evident her role as primary caregiver was: Yeah, Fuck yeah. Excuse me yeah [laughing]. Yeah. It’s like. I’d always been a single parent even though I’d been with my sons’ Dads for a little while after they were born I was always, there was no one there helping me.
Deficit-based accounts of mothering are so strong that it is unsurprising that Kiri, like many other mothers who experience IPV, was critical of her childcare practices (Dunkerley, 2017). She expresses regret regarding her mothering: Even when you’re in quite like a low spot and stuff it was still like – well the children need to be taken care of … Back then it was like y’know I did them, I treated them like they were chores and that they just need to be done. Do them over, do them real quick, get them over and done with … yeah I did them, but I didn’t do them properly.
In addition to engaging in routines of care, our participants worked to create moments of levity and joy with their children amidst the chaos. Despite the disruptions that characterised their lives with IPV, these women made use of whatever resources they had, exercising moments of radical freedom (Sartre, 1948) to create as stable a family life as possible. These often-small moments of fun helped them to approximate a “normal” family life in extreme hardship (Hodgetts et al., 2015). Bridget discussed one of the ways she created such moments: Setting up the lounge like a movie theatre, all lying down on the beds, got our popcorn, our snacks. Ya know, just doing that really quality time together. And we – me and him [partner], ya know, did make sure we done it regularly too. It was about, ya know, making memories…
Fun family bonding activities, such as taking children to the park or chasing butterflies, are commonly reported in studies of mothering in the context of IPV as ways of bringing some normality and to help people cope (Unruh & Hutchinson, 2011). Wendy similarly took time out with her son when her partner was not around: Oh, we used to love making playdough, especially in winter because the house was so cold that would be a great way to warm our hands up. We’d go into the garden and chase butterflies. It was one of his favourite things to do was to watch me chase butterflies. He used to crack up laughing … Just be together…
Wendy and Bridget’s pursuit of leisure activities with their children undermined their partners’ ongoing efforts to control and isolate them. While leisure activities may not directly remove violence from women’s lives, they can improve their quality of life and their motivation to survive. Working to create small moments of fun, laughter and normality demonstrates resistance in the form of refusal to renounce simple joys. Whilst we are concerned with the ongoing coercive control and violence that comprise everyday IPV, it is important to not lose sight of the humanity and dignity that many women bring to such situations.
Conclusion
Intimate partner violence remains a significant health concern in Aotearoa. While women resist violence in a range of ways, there is a need to understand more overt behaviours, such as leaving or fighting back physically, in relation to the tactics women carry out within everyday life. The many imperfect tactics our participants utilised throughout their relationships compel us to broaden our understanding of resistance to IPV. We have documented how, even within situations of extreme control and coercion, women in our study found the means to express moments of radical freedom and shape their lives in small ways that allowed them to make it through the day and maintain their humanity (Sartre, 1948).
Concealing victims’ resistance has been highlighted by the FVDRC (2017) as a way to blame women for the violence of perpetrators. To overcome narratives which frame women as passive victims there is a need to focus on women’s resistance and resilience even amidst the direst circumstances (Paterson, 2010). As such, we have sought to re-contextualise women’s everyday practices as moments of resistance within constraint. This research orientation contributes to the IPV field more broadly by helping to reconstruct some of the entrenched and harmful stereotypes about women who live through violence with a more nuanced understanding of women’s agentive resistance within violent relationships.
Our participants responded to adverse situations by developing a range of everyday tactics that ultimately did not end the violence perpetrated against them, but which were critical to maintaining their survival throughout their relationships. Their very survival necessitated the development of phronetic knowledge and tactics of resistance. It is important that we keep their agentive resistance in focus in order to avoid caricaturing women who live with IPV as passive and culpable for their situations (Coates & Wade, 2007).
This conceptualisation has important practical implications. The significance of women’s knowledge and resistive tactics could easily be missed by agencies and legal actors if the everyday context of IPV is not considered. Many women’s protective actions have been misrepresented as signs of pathology, neglect or mental illness (Tolmie et al., 2018). Some judges and Family Court practitioners have been identified as failing to recognise and support women’s proactive safety tactics (Morgan & Coombes, 2016). As Tolmie et al. (2018) point out, practitioners, advocates, and government agencies need to be able to accurately record the context of violence, including the perpetrator’s use of violence and the ways in which women resist in order to secure their safety. This means recognising the resistive tactics women have already used when developing safety plans, many of which, like those used by women in our study, may not be immediately obvious. Women have both died and been wrongfully charged with murder as a result of authorities mistaking situations of violent entrapment (and the resultant resistance) for relationship dysfunction (Tolmie et al., 2018).
In considering how IPV, associated anxieties and states of hypervigilance become embedded within the conduct of women’s everyday lives, we have contributed further insights to a body of knowledge regarding women’s efforts to resist IPV (Morgan & Coombes, 2016; Pain, 2014; Shefer, 2016). Ever-present anxiety, although exhausting, was somewhat functional in the situations in which our participants found themselves. Rather than pathologising women for this state of hypervigilance, our analysis points to the protective role such an embodied understanding of IPV can have in their lives. Further, we have demonstrated how, contra the negative interpretation of agencies such as Oranga Tamariki, women may, for example, sleep during the day, as a deliberate tactic to minimise the risk of harm to themselves and their children at night. Others may choose not to do the dishes as a rational self-protective tactic to prevent or at least delay violence.
In line with the recommendations of Coates and Wade (2007), our research helps reveal the situational logic by which women’s everyday actions can become understood as forms of resistance. In doing so, we have grounded Stark’s (2007) conceptualisation of coercive control and the materiality of IPV. Our analysis reveals both the mundane ways in which coercive control manifests in women’s lives and the tactics with which they resist.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Rolinda Karapu for her support, guidance, and for making this research possible, as well as Te Whakaruruhau and each of the women who volunteered their valuable time and energy to share their stories.
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) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
