Tracy Castelino

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Conversational supports for women whose lives
are affected by violence and abuse Tracy
Castelino

• Tracy Castelino

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• Conversational supports
• for women who live with violence and abuse
• Reflective preparations
• Deconstructing and reconstructing womens
  stories
• Discourses and how they pervade
• Accountability Alerts - Safety and care
• Agency context

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Reflective Preparations

• Reflecting on what we bring to this work
• Our skills
• Our ethics
• Our knowledges
• How we situate ourselves for discovery?
• Johnella Bird, 2000 p55

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Some questions

• How have you developed your knowledges, skills
  and thinkings about domestic violence and womens
  safety?
• How do you use your knowledge and lived
  experience to ask questions that makes you
  available for discoveries?
• What are your ethics and intentions for
  conversations with women who have lived with
  violence? How do you hold them in conversations?
• At times, are there aspects of your work that
  causes struggles with the ethics you hold? What
  ideas and practices do you have for negotiating
  these struggles?

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Deconstructing and reconstructing womens stories
Not to traumatise or re-traumatise women
further We are all multi-storied - we can sit
with contradictions Radically
listening to womens stories Radically
documenting womens stories Noticing and
negotiating acts of personal agency Notice and
join with womens knowledges and acts of
self-care Sharing womens stories Partner safety
enquiries Accountability Alerts
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Thinkings - Feminism Post structuralism Collab
orative therapies
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Not to traumatise or re-traumatise women further

• What do women want to share?
• How might women want to speak about their
  experiences of intimate partner violence?
• How might we listen to their stories?
• What might we be listening for?
• What are our intentions when we ask questions
  about their stories?

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Michelles story

• I cant have this discussion with him about his
  sleeping around because he just loses control. I
  know I have to learn to deal with it, it has
  happened and Paul says it was while we were
  separated, he says he was not with me. Yet when I
  went out to a party with girlfriends one night he
  text me like 39 times and then called and
  wouldnt get off the phone, blew his top calling
  me a slut, I know he is lying about it

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Some possible questions

• Losing control, whose description/words are
  they Michelle?
• What words would you use if you described Pauls
  responses to your questions about his sleeping
  around?
• Describing Pauls response as purposefully
  shutting me down what difference does that
  make to your experience of that conversation?
  Using your words purposefully shutting me down,
  what is it like to know that it is with choice,
  purposeful and not about losing control?
• Michelle says - Well I stop asking questions and
  so I put my wall up
• Whats that like putting up your wall Michelle?
  What do you do to put up your wall?

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Listening de-constructively

• to peoples stories requires situating oneself
  in the belief that the stories people tell have
  many possible meanings and that the meaning a
  listener makes is often not exactly the same as
  the meaning that the speaker has intended.
• (Freedman and Combs, 2002, p207)

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De- constructive questioning invites people
to see their stories from a different
perspective, to notice how they are constructed
(or that they are constructed), to note their
limits, or to discover that there are other
possible narratives. To accomplish this, inquiry
is directed towards the beliefs, practices, and
feelings that support a narrative or develop it.
(Freedman and Combs, 2002, p209)
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• Bries story
• I wonder how you did know yourself before Mike?
• What were the qualities that you had that were
  special to you?
• What were your hopes and dreams for your life?
• What is it like to remember these qualities and
  hopes for your life Brie?
• What is it like to remember the you before
  Mike?
• What happens to these hopes in discussion with
  Mike?
• What might it be like if these hopes were more
  present?
• How would you talk with Mike about your plans for
  university?
• How might you respond to his focus on him if
  you were holding your hopes more closely?

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(No Transcript)
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Opportunity to notice and name whose words hold
space and power Language presents, represents
and conveys
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Julies experience of his words and her
words Julie what is it like to think about the
words you are using? Do you think there is
rushed talking in your voice? Does this
rushed talking have any effects on your
experience of Paul? Of your relationship? Does
this rushed talking have any effects on your
experience of your self Julie? When rushed
talking is happening whose words might you be
using? Whose words and descriptions and worries
are you re-telling to me? Julie what is it like
to consider that these are Pauls words and
worries? And that they might be separate to
yours?
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We are all multi-storied - we can sit with
contradictions
love
despair
hope
care
pain
anger
hate
disgust
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We are all multi-storied - we can sit with
contradictions

• Asking questions that create opportunities for
  her to explore her meanings of her lived
  experiences and negotiate new or alternative
  meanings is one way of collaboratively
  constructing personal agency.

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• Michelle spoke to me, initially so awkwardly
  saying, the pain is like shattering my insides
  but I have loved him since I was 15 years old and
  he was my brothers best friend
• Asking Michelle about this love enables her to
  speak it within the context of abuse and thereby
  allows her to explore this love with her thoughts
  and words, deconstructing and reconstructing this
  loves meaning.

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She felt a fool, to be so easily duped. She felt
grief as the sharp possibility of the future
evaporated into the loneliness she had thought to
escape. She felt an unexpected shaft of
compassion for a man caught in the mire of the
present. She felt the fullness of the
complexities that kept him from her. She felt
love, and the gentle wash of memory. She felt
hard and ungiving. All these feelings and
sensations existed in her at once, not jumbled,
not in sequence, but layered, like a scroll of
possibilities that exist only in the
configuration of the moment, though had she been
asked to name them she would have said they
passed too quickly for her to grasp. Drusilla
Modjeska the orchard, p89
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Khani said, As I hear myself talking I notice
that I keep saying he only swears at me but those
words hurt, they hurt, even when things go back
to normal my memories of those words hurt me to
the core
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Deconstructing and reconstructing

• is about offering questions that allow for
  reflection and exploration of the pain and abuse
  and then a renaming of these expressions.
• Collaboratively reconstructing these expressions
  within the political context of violence can
  transport women to knowings of themselves that
  are not located in their partners words or
  stories.

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Khanis story

• Khani when you were angry with Andrew, how did
  you choose to speak?
• What values did you hold about relationships,
  your relationship that had you speaking without
  swearing and making Andrew feel like dirt?
• What is it like to know that you held on to these
  values in the face of being sworn at?
• Are there other words that you might use Khani to
  describe Andrews swearing at you?
• Khani with the values and hopes you have for
  relationships, how does Andrews swearing abuse
  fit with those values and hopes?

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Discourses and how they pervade not only do
these stories determine the meaning persons give
to experience,but these stories also determine
which aspects of experience persons select out
for expression. And, as well, inasmuch as action
is prefigured on meaning-making, these stories
determine real effects in terms of the shaping of
persons lives. (Michael White, 1991,
p28)
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• Some discourses -
• 'women need to be educated and empowered about
  their situation of abuse and then they will
  choose to leave', or 'women should leave', or
  'this is their lot in life' or 'there is an
  intergenerational cycle of abuse' or 'women nag
  men to violence'

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The power of naming, according to Mary Daly,
is to define the quality and value of that which
is named, and deny reality to that which is not
named. (in Kitzinger and Perkins, 1993,
p35)
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Diannes experience

• So Dianne, who tends to use the term nagging?
• What kinds of actions or situations would
  nagging describe?
• How would you describe your action of asking and
  then reminding Malcolm to pay the phone bill?
• When Malcolm uses the word nagging, whose
  experiences does it privilege/suit?

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When the idea of personal agency is defined as
an ability to choose to leave a violent
situation when you have all the information it
precludes the social, historical, political,
economical, spiritual and personal context of
womens lived experiences.
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sharing womens stories
Noticing and negotiating acts of personal agency
Noticing and joining with womens knowledges
and acts of self-care
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• Enquiring about Christines personal agency
• The meanings humiliation had for her, currently
  and historically
• What had she done in the past when acts of
  humiliation had been perpetrated?
• What was it like to respond by walking away and
  being with friends?
• Was this an experience of worth or further
  distress? What made it a worthy experience?
• Do you think that walking away might work now?
• What gives you the idea that it might be
  worthwhile trying walking away and being with
  friends?

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Get together in small groupsWhat questions might
you want to ask Pat? What were you listening
for?Were you holding the notion of radically
listening? What difference might that have made
to your listening? Did it have you going in
different directions?

• Pat is 76 and decided to join our womens group.
  She introduced herself by sharing the following
  story. I worked out that what he does to me, I
  just do it back to him, just worse. When I used
  to get stomach pains really badly, and the pain
  was horrible, Id double over. I would stay in
  bed some mornings instead of running around
  getting him breakfast and doing the clothes. He
  would come in and pull the bedclothes off me,
  punch my feet and yell get up you lazy bitch.
• So I waited and then a few weeks later I got up
  earlier than him, opened both the back and front
  doors (so he wouldnt know which way I had gone),
  grab the car keys, then I would pull the
  curtains, and turn the radio on full blast and
  then Id runsee I just do back to him, get
  revenge in my own way

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Some of my questions

• Pat what would you call that whole planning for
  weeks and preparation to just do it back to him,
  just worse?
• How did you come to think just do it back to
  him, just worse?
• What did you know about what he was doing to
  you, your sleeping Pat that had you thinking
  just do it back to him, just worse?
• Were there ideas of safety and care for your
  self included in your planning?

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AGENCY CONTEXT PARTY SAFETY ENQUIRIES SAFETY
ALERTS
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Agency context

• Context matters
• Speaking our intentions
• Our accountabilties

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Accountability/Safety Alerts

• Women feeling like they have to talk, that they
  have to be supportive of their partners efforts
• Women feeling like they need to be the home
  assessor of their partners behaviors and
  attitudes
• Women experiencing changes in tactics or
  practices of abuse
• Women holding complete hope for change in the
  men's behaviour change program.