Rules and Representations: Social Networks’ Responses to Men’s Violence against Women in South Africa

An Intersectional Analysis of Responses to Intimate Partner Violence in Two Marginalised South African Communities

“…Rather, a critical investigation into a language of responses presents opportunities for participants to speak about forms of resistance and agency. Critical qualitative methods provide the necessary tools to ask questions about responses to IPV, allowing this violence to be understood within the social, cultural, and historical context in which it occurs (Boonzaier, 2014;van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2015).…”

“…An emerging field of scholarship that builds on the importance of contextualisation is one that understands individual responses to IPV to be part of broader social, community, and institutional responses to this phenomenon. A recent study focusing on community responses to IPV in a working-class community in Cape Town found that negative and stigmatising community representations of victims reinforced discourses of victim-blaming and made it possible to see perpetrators as almost blameless (van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2015). It was also found that some survivors of IPV internalised these victim-blaming representations, which resulted in the silencing and (re)subjugation of women survivors (van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2015).…”

“…A recent study focusing on community responses to IPV in a working-class community in Cape Town found that negative and stigmatising community representations of victims reinforced discourses of victim-blaming and made it possible to see perpetrators as almost blameless (van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2015). It was also found that some survivors of IPV internalised these victim-blaming representations, which resulted in the silencing and (re)subjugation of women survivors (van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2015). Similarly, Boonzaier (2014) illustrated that abused women engage with and sometimes internalise circulating narratives about themselves and their positioning in violent relationships, resulting in implications for their subjective positionings and the possibilities for change that they are able to imagine and enact.…”

“…Responsebased work offers an alternative to understanding the experiences of those affected by IPV through asking questions about how individuals respond to this violence, and the resistance strategies available to them (Hydén et al, 2015). The social context in which IPV is located is an important site of analysis, as the conditions of those experiencing or witnessing this violence shape the kinds of responses that are possible (van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2015). This paper explores the social, material, and collective spaces that make IPV against women possible, particularly in the context of communities that have a complex history of multiple forms of violence, including institutional, symbolic, and interpersonal.…”

“Love the kin you’re in?”: Kin network responses to women and children experiencing intimate partner violence

“…Still fairly little is known about social networks’ roles and responses, and more knowledge is needed of how responses to IPV emerge as an intersubjective phenomenon actively made sense of within a wider social network. This article situates itself within a small, but emerging, field of research on the responses of the social networks of battering men and women and children experiencing IPV (Gottzén, 2016; Hydén, 2015; Klein, 2012; Latta & Goodman, 2011; Sandberg, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2016). As Goodman and Smyth (2011) argue, IPV needs to be understood not only as a matter between two individuals but as something involving both formal and informal social networks, and always occurring in a community context.…”