#22 

Sally Jackson from FiLiA meets: Dr Ava Kanyeredzi author of Race Culture and Gender: Black Female Experiences of Violence and Abuse

Sally: It's Sally Jackson, volunteer at FiLiA, and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Dr Ava Kanyeredzi who was one of our speakers at FiLiA conference last year.

Ava: Hello. Hi. 

Sally: Thank you really glad you could spend some time with us today because I have to say that we had such positive feedback last year, both from the panel and the speech that you made and such an important area that you touch on and something I think we really do all need to learn a lot more about. 

Ava: Thank you. I mean, it was a fantastic experience for me as well. Slightly overwhelming, but it was a really powerful, I found it quite a powerful experience just listening to the other speakers, hearing first person accounts of abuse and exploitation and the work that people have been doing.

It was really diverse and international but also really welcoming. 

Sally: Well that’s really great to hear. And I think for me, it's always interesting that we do, as women, share their stories. We do hear some, really heavy and really difficult stuff, but equally you kind of come out feeling inspired and uplifted by the strength of women that are doing something about that.

Ava: I mean, the work is difficult. It's difficult because of what it is and having to take those experiences and it's adversity. So there isn't any way not to feel like crap when you're listening to women's accounts, because that's what we're trying to highlight, the injustice of violence against women and girls and children and what perpetrates those particular activities.

However, it's also good to speak to what women have done. To live better with the past, and also to think about what we can do now, how we can work at preventing, how the highlighting of certain situations and certain opportunities and to help women in certain contexts within women's lives that are exploited if we highlight those work to prevent further experiences of abuse.

Sally: Absolutely. I think one of the really important things is, if women have been courageous enough to share their stories, then the onus is on us to make sure that that makes a difference. And one of the things that I was really impressed with the book that you were talking about last year, when you visited us at FiLiA, Race, Culture and Gender: Black Female Experiences of Violence, was the fact that it was a real narrative form of what had occurred within these nine different women’s lives.

Ava: For me, it was fascinating the way in which in these narrative accounts, I also use photographs to enable women to tell their story, what was happening then, what's happening now, what they wanted to do.

They were phenomenal at presenting really difficult aspects of their lives. And also, within conversations, highlighting aspects of ways in which they felt intrusion that I would never have thought about. 

One of the examples was, and something that I'm working on particularly at the moment, is that the women talked about their hair and their hair styles.

And initially, I thought, what does this have to do with sexual abuse? How were they related? They were speaking about intrusions in terms of comments about their hair, comments about their bodies, as ways in which they feel abused. Not only that, it carried on even further. One woman said as the child, because she was nurtured and cared for by her foster carers, they braided her hair. She kind of felt that she was safe. They were safe people because they looked after her and she'd used these particular signs and symbols of care and nurturing as a way to feel safe. And then becoming really surprised that they were really quite physically abusive and neglectful. 

Now in thinking about black women's experiences of violence and abuse, the first thing I was thinking about, you know, women's bodies are very similar, so what's different?  How does race come into it? And then women intricately painted those narratives for me and not only painted them, but stitch them in and said these are the ways in which I feel intruded upon.

And actually in thinking about it, when I think of abuse, it's a very similar sort of feeling. Liz Kelly talks about the sexual violence continuum and I developed that sort of this continuum of oppression. So these different, and related oppressive acts that somehow shade into each other and they also alter how women think about themselves, how they feel in a particular spaces and also what they carry more importantly.

 And what that means is, it makes them silent. So as well as being directly silenced, because they're carrying so much and they're time to make sense of all of what happens to them and what they've been told about themselves and the person who's abused them. It just shocked them up for a very long time and makes it very, very difficult to talk about their experiences.  

Sally: It was really interesting what you were saying there about the silencing of women. The fact that if women do speak, then obviously that opens up some opportunities for them to access help or support, but could possibly also close off access to help and support from family members or community members.

So it's a real balance for women to get to a point where they actually feel that it would be a positive option for them. 

Ava: It's interesting because the woman had spoken before about these experiences as children. It is about women who are not speaking and others not listening to them because one of them said that I did something to myself, which I won't disclose, that ended up with me in the hospital so the abuse could stop. 

One particular woman who had spoken to her mother about family friends and the mother found it really difficult to accept, but then she did, eventually. However, this man still turned up to family events, but he was out of the family circle for a while and then he turned up, he would just be there and she says he's still sort of in her life.

And this was found also in a study in Canada with African and Caribbean heritage women. Because of that complexity and relationship between the state and black men, there is this community protective response to black men when they are perpetrators of abuse because people are fearing that they're going to get very harsh treatment, but that stops people from reporting men to the police. 

But not only that, the men are still in their lives and for this particular woman, the man had even tried to stop her from going to her therapy sessions because he thought that she would say something that would result in him being persecuted. So there was this real fine balance that women have to negotiate. 

I speak to my family. I ended up at the borders. I betrayed the family. I lose social contact with my family. At the same time there’s this kind of community silence around the men, the men who are the abusers and none of the men got prosecuted. I don't think anyone got prosecuted in terms of women's experiences within the book.

Sally: One of the things that personally really touched me. And I just really felt, I think it was Farah who had disclosed and then had to recount/withdraw that. That must have been so difficult for her to deal with.

Ava:  I think, if I can recall for a little bit is a young woman, she was the youngest out of all the women. The relationship between the mother and father had broken down and the mother had left the country and gone somewhere else. And then the father was then left with the three girls and he enlisted his brother to look after them. The brother then became the abuser telling Farah that, if you do this and I will leave your sisters alone. Also kind of using a cultural trope about virginity to say, well, what I'm doing is actually virginity checking, and it's a part of our culture she wasn't quite familiar with. And you knew that something was a bit off about what was happening. And she said she really wanted to protect her sisters, but then eventually discovered that he had also abused and raped her sisters.

And it had a devastating effect on her sisters resulting in them becoming psychotic and being institutionalised. So all of this had happened. And I think Farah told her aunt what had happened and then she told her father. Her father did this thing getting her to swear on the Quran that she was telling the truth. And he said, I believe you. And she said for the first time I kind of relaxed. I felt validated that my father believed what has happened to me. And then he said, now, what I want you to do is to go back and tell everyone that what you told them is a lie. She remembers the rooms. You remember the train station.

And she says ever since then, she has struggled with this concept of the truth. Did it really happen? Did it not happen? Was I lying? Was I not lying? And the only way in which he accepted that it had happened is that she had contracted a sexually transmitted infection and that for her, it was, it must have happened for this to happen.

And what that did in terms of her relationship to her body, they had this very, this feeling that they didn't own their bodies, you know, that they were almost renting tenants and their bodies, that they couldn’t fully occupy it because the abuser had intruded in a way that they couldn't quite accept.

Particularly in Farah’s case, she made the separation between her mind and her body. And she said, they're not the same because my mind can’t accept what has happened to my body. 

So really powerful ways in which women make sense of what had happened and how they cope with the aftermath. I mean, all of the women weren't believed, and this is not just something that happens with African and Caribbean women. It's really common. It's a really common experience for women when they've had experiences with child sexual abuse. 

What was interesting in terms of this context was how religion was used, how culture was used. This whole aspect of migration and moving. So children being moved from one home to the other to be looked after. In that process, the people who are tasked with looking after them become the abusers. 

And that was a very common theme across women's narratives. The abuse happened within the context of being looked after by people trusted to look after them. 

There are lots of things within in itself. Lots of things to do with women having to find work outside the home to support their children.

I think a lot of the women, when they were children, this was sort of the 1970s. There wasn't really much childcare facilities, so people were ‘helping each other out’ and within that particular context, that's how women were abused. 

Sally: It's interesting you're talking about help seeking as well, because certainly I think one of the things that we are increasingly experiencing in times of austerity is the disappearance of the specialist services that are by and for black minority ethnic women. The police not being the obvious helping agency you were referring to concerns about how black men may be treated by the police. The increased importance of being able to have those services that really understand the context in which these women have experienced abuse either as children or as adults. 

Ava: Absolutely. And, if women are silenced on so many different levels it's interesting how they might read situations, how they might see trust in relationships.

I argue that I don't think the burden should be entirely on specialised services because even with all of the funding of violence against women services, can't match the amount of women who are having particular experiences. We need to mobilise any service that the woman feels able to reach out to at any particular point.

As well as keeping that specialism that services would have developed over a long period of time, working with women from particular backgrounds, because those are the parts of the reasons why they stay silent. They don't seek help. Women wait, not necessarily wait, but they are pushed into crisis situations.

And then everybody wants to pay attention to perhaps a woman's become psychotic as a result of cumulative experiences of violence and abuse and there are a lot of health services where women tend to think that they can kind of approach non-judgemental helpers as it were.

A couple of the women knew about violence against women services, but I think only one had actually accessed a refuge or a specialised women's services. And, and even though all of the women weren’t from London, the majority of them were kind of based in London. 

It's a huge difficulty, not helped at all by a lot of those services losing their funding because it speaks volumes to survivors about the value of speaking. You know what the difference it’s going to make. 

Jan Jordan discusses this when she says, you know, people can be silenced by a service that they value getting closed down. It says something about their experiences in as much as people can be enabled by having public accounts of violence against women or child sexual abuse. As we see seeing currently in this particular kind of socio-political moment, it has enabled more women to come forward and speak about experiences because they think it's more okay to do that because this person has done that.

Sally: Absolutely. It's really important that we do maintain and build these specialist services, but also I'm aware of women that have, because of the issues perhaps within, feelings about what their community might think, of actually wanting to access a service outside of the black and minority ethnic specialist for that kind of anonymity around it. And of course we need to ensure that those people are equipped to give just as good a service, hopefully and be as believing hearing those stories as, as the specialist services.

Ava: And it's interesting that you should say about that because women made a really interesting analysis of race through their experience with the violence and abuse. Because, they couldn't think it's the us and them scenario. So the people who are evil are outside and it's safe inside the home, because then after having experienced that experience, they were like, this is happening inside of my home so how do I make sense of race racism when I'm being abused by somebody who looks like me and equally maybe perhaps culturally for some women.

Having a visual picture of abuse and abuse is happening to somebody who's of African and Caribbean heritage culturally and within their circle, that's not something that happens in black communities. 

And then she stepped back and said, well, this happened to me. So what does that mean? I'm black. I'm in my community. That's happened to me. I guess there needs to be a lot of awareness raising, but also as well as that, this notion of a lot more people know about what's going on than disclose.

So this idea of talks about a public secret. Everybody knows what's going on, but nobody's really talking about it. Everyone thinks it's really, really important to talk about, but nobody really wants to talk about it. And that I experience in terms of recruiting women into the study.

So I'd be told ‘I know loads of people with that experience’ but no one's going to talk about it. And just people handing back flyers, no, no, no. I don't want to talk about experience and also feeling exposed by paying interest in the leaflets and the flyers about the research.

I think it's hugely difficult. The difficulty in working against, especially child sexual abuse, is particularly the shame that comes with it. The shame that women carry as a result of their particular experiences.

 I'm also living in a country where you're trying to represent the self collectively, in a way you might not necessarily have to do if you live somewhere everybody looks like you. So people are very much aware of how they are presenting themselves when they are not within their home. It's shaming. And who wants to feel ashamed, who wants to have an experience that makes people who feel that they are already pathologised, even more pathologised.

Sally: It's interesting. As soon as you say to that, kind of like collective, almost feeling as say a representation so that as a black woman, wherever you go, you’re a black woman and will be perceived as a black woman. So therefore taking on board, how you want that perception to go and obviously issues of shame and stigma, but then as you said, can unfortunately silence you even more.

Ava: Yeah. And also even when women don't particularly identify in that way, in certain social circles, I asked them, what was their experience? How did they define? What is it like being a black woman? Women talked about in professional spaces, irrespective of how they think or feel they're read as aggressive or very confident when they don't actually feel confident and they don't actually think of themselves as aggressive. In fact, they think of themselves as quiet and shy and lacking in confidence that they feel blackness more than others as it were. 

Why that is important of feeling racialised is that women always feel that they have to kind of manage impressions. So they always feel that they're being read in particular and restrictive ways and they don't always have that redress to challenge that. 

And who knows what a woman is feeling in that particular time? So for example, one woman said, she had gone out in her local neighbourhood and her hair was falling out because she was feeling particularly distressed and she normally wears her hair in locks. She said ‘normally I go into the newsagent’ and one day she knew her hair was falling out, she felt really awful. She went in with a wig and he was completely different. So in one sense, it almost feels quite maddening, but am I really thinking this is really happening and then actually gaining evidence that it's actually happening.

So it's in relation to this whole idea of community experiences, it really makes sense in kind of presenting for services, women may not necessarily want to speak or not be trusting because of all of these experiences that they've had. It's not necessarily that these experiences are direct experiences of rape to them, they may be indirect experiences of rape where they're left feeling those feelings of less than. That's very similar to feelings they felt at the time of abuse. 

Sally: It kind of plays into what you talk about this sort of continuum of oppression. 

Can we talk a little bit about the impact of the so-called strong black woman and its impact on their lives as well? 

Ava: Yes, that was something that, again, like hair, just came up, all the women talked about strong black women, whether or not they felt strong themselves. They all talked about this strong black woman thing. Some had reflected on it. You know, there are women in my family who are really strong, you know, they can manage and appear to be something that's associated with being able to look after your children and not asking for any kind of support for the children, being able to manage the emotions in a sense and appearing, irrespective of how you feel, but just being able to manage your emotions and not display in public. So women were in different places where that was concerned from women thought that wasn't appropriate, wasn't an appropriate way to manage the emotions. If you try to suppress something that's then your emotions could seep out, kind of, and you may even end up an institution as a result of managing, attempting to manage these emotions. But irrespective of whether women felt strong, or they were perceived to be strong, this whole kind of construct is a controlling image of a strong black woman just leaves women feeling ashamed. So they feel ashamed that they're not strong enough. And they feel ashamed but then they still feel the emotions of the difficult experience that they’ve had. And also sometimes, you know, they get caught out.

So we were talking earlier about, you know, how you present yourself to someone who is trying to support you. And one woman said, I've had a therapy session in the middle of the session I started crying as I was talking about my experiences and I just suddenly felt that I was exposing myself. I was exposing my family. I was exposing where I've come from and what she felt was an incredible amount of shame. And the therapist at the time, she said, oftentimes, a therapist from a different culture, this particular woman was from, she was African Caribbean therapist, Caribbean heritage, but she had noticed that there were differences between her and the therapist and the therapist was more middle-class and she comes from this working class background. 

And it's not something that she had thought about, in the midst of having that conversation she just suddenly felt ashamed. And it's a particular shame that black women carry. 

 I talked a lot about controlling images of black women that have been handed down over the generations about women being aggressive and emasculating, but this particular one, I think women felt really judged by this particular trope in the strong black woman. 

Interestingly, which is not included in the book, in the wider research I'd interviewed nine women who were working in some respect with violence against women. So a doctor, people working as advocates and such like, and interestingly, among those women that have had three case studies of a black woman who experienced different forms of violence and abuse and the one who appeared larger physically, all of them identified in this particular case study as a black woman, even though they're all black women. So it's interesting that in irrespective of who you are, whether you come from a similar culture these controlling images dominate our experiences as individuals, how much we think people are coping or may not be coping with women's experiences and how women are blaming themselves for not being in a place where they think that they should be if they're looking around at their family.

One woman said in particular that she feels as if she was being covered by her mother. She noted that within her family, when people wanted to talk, they would come to her and interestingly experiences of violence and abuse, they'd then found that family members found them as safe spaces to talk about violence and abuse, but then that burdens women even further.

 The strong black woman is definitely a lived experience with the paradox. So whether or not women identify with strength cause they still, they're still kind of judged by this construct and it was very much within their lives. Some women sort of charted it as something that they'd seen in African-American movies, for example, but they all mentioned it in some way or another in relation to their experience. 

Sally: And it's amazing how strongly these things pervade, kind of like almost without realising it, it can affect the way that we think and react to people.

One of the things that, as an activist, you know, unsurprisingly, I was really pleased to see and not necessarily surprised with how in sort of talking about recovering and what helped in recovery, routes to activism were one of the things that women talked about as being kind of like a really positive way that they could use their energy to improve their own feelings of self.

Ava: So it was really interesting how they talk about activism.  One had become a violence against women support within that particular field. But it was the way that she described a route into it, she hadn't kind of realised that she was being an activist, she just found herself there. How did I end up here?  but she really wanted to work and to help.

Other women speaking so courageously and so thoroughly about their experiences that they wanted to help. They wanted to do that altruistic thing of making it better for somebody else. And one woman said actually, you know, part of the reason why I stay connected to my family is that I'm looking out for the girl children.

So they talked about these really minute yet powerful everyday ways in which they were being activists within their lives and within their family to survive and also in their own way to prevent abuse from happening to younger generations. 

Sally: It's a lot to take on as well as recovering the protectiveness around whether it's families or other young people that they are so acutely aware now that that's a risk for them as well.

Ava: And that also feeds into the strong black woman. Whether or not you want to be strong, you are made to carry more than you can in a sense. And women were also saying that there were ways in which, I mean, in this sort of later interviews, I’d ask how do you manage, how do you look after yourself and women were for grappling with how to do that. And feeling sometimes quite overwhelmed with supporting people when they haven't been fully supported. 

Of all of the nine women, five had attempted to take their own lives at some point in their narratives and five of them had thought about taking their own lives in two had made attempts.

One of the women who made an attempt on her life. She said, she'd been so terribly trained by institutions. So she was brought up with duel heritage her mom was a white her dad was black and she had witnessed a lot of racism to her father growing up. And as a result, it had affected her so badly that she couldn't read, she couldn't write until she was 12 years old. She just couldn't express the kind of trauma that she'd witnessed. So this woman, brought up in a duel heritage family and she had this distrust of services. And she said, she just said she had always experienced services as racist as not to be trusted. And she was in a relationship with a back partner who was abusive and a social worker came around. She had bruises all over her face. She had young children and the social worker offered her respite by taking her children. And then she lost custody of her children permanently. And the partner who was abusive, he'd also been in prison, then got custody of the children, and she had to negotiate access to the children with this partner who has been abusive. So she felt really betrayed. And for her, it was almost as if her lived experience of a woman who's trying to be strong, even though she had very little support going on in her life because she didn't feel able to ask for that support. And she said, it took a very long time for her to be able to trust service professionals or white service professionals.

And she said, when she initially disputed the fact that she made an attempt on her life, she was just saying, I was just going to look after my family and also she's experienced really horribly the suicide of a partner in her home. And it just tipped her over. It completely tipped her over into a space where she lost this kind of sense of reality. 

So yes, when we talked about the strong black woman. She talked about it in relation to these expectations of exceptionality that women obviously black women can't process and the extreme situations that ruin a woman's emotional and mental wellbeing.

And it's impossible to expect of one human being to be able to cope with the racial injustices, looking after the family without feeling in some way overwhelmed 

Sally: And then to experience such harsh punishment for not achieving that unattainable standard. 

So looking forward if you could have whatever would work that you could instigate, what would be top of your list to try and improve the situation for black women? 

Ava: Conversations. So what does consent look like? Women talked about spaces where they felt supported and they all talk about faith and spirituality keeping them through. So in the absence of formal support or family support, women talked about, having a guardian angel who instructed them, having dreams that it would be okay, or just having a relationship with God as their only support.

And at some point in their narratives, in their lives, trust was very important to them.

Well, one of the things that women could do is that they could weep without being judged. But one of the things I'm currently looking at is how can we make the spaces where women feel safer for them when they’re experiencing violence and abuse. Can me connect those specialised services better? How can we have those conversations, better? Churches having been the best places to talk about violence and abuse, but somehow I think particularly culturally, when women select a place where they feel safe, I think that should be respected. 

And one of the things that I argued about in the book is that women can't always reach out, you know, women can't always go to services and say, this is what's happening to me. I think some women will, but a lot of women won't. They might go and sit somewhere and cry.

So how can we mobilise those everyday spaces to be more effective in responding to women? I'm really super excited about doing that work and seeing what happens with that work and where it goes, because those spaces, again, can support women in lots of different ways. So if women have insecure immigration status, if they're looking for employment, if they want to feel less isolated, why can't they be mobilised to support women accessing further support if they've had experiences of abuse in childhood. 

Sally:  It’s an opportunity to just increase that space for action for women as you say, in a place that feels safe for them, 

Ava: Absolutely. Some of the intervention can be simply just putting posters on the wall, so women know, oh, this is something I can do. 

There’s a couple of studies coming out with women who are in churches. You know, women who are in churches are also another spaces in secular services, but they just don’t access those services because they think the services are secular and they disassociate their everyday experience when they went to church. Just not accessing those particular aspects of support and also feeling that there is a tension isn't there between violence against women services that see the church as the original oppressor and how they've interpreted scriptures and that's a tension to be worked with. 

Sally: If you are a woman of faith and that's where you're going to go to for support, then we have to support those faith organisations to provide that in a way that is more accepting and believing and helping them to find support and move forward.

Ava:  So, yeah, so it's a way in which we can have more of these conversations, even if the way these conversations are about ways in which women feel intruded upon and abuse and these conversations to begin by talking about hair and hairstyles. Initially when we started talking, I said, this is not just the responsibility of specialised services.

Some of this discussion could be introduced in lots of different ways when women seek help, like counselling help. If you introduce race into the discussion and to explore whether or not that is important for women but first investigate and explore whether that is important, whether that's an important avenue to explore.

Women may expect it, oftentimes women, if you're having a particular experience and you’ve been silenced, sometimes you get some kind of encouragement to begin to open up and begin to talk and to begin to trust.

 So, that's some of what we can do to better have those conversations, I think currently because of the Me Too, the Time's Up movement brought lots of public figures into our cultural landscapes for a discourse about violence against women and child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation. And I think that in itself has changed the way in which people feel able to talk or to even raise the issue as something that people should pay attention to.

So I feel that should be worked with and developed, you know, at this particular moment in time. 

Sally: Take the advantage of the moment and make the most of that. 

Ava: Absolutely. 

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. It was an absolute pleasure doing FiLiA. I learned so much and it was just such a beautiful space. 

Sally: Thank you. Thank you 

Ava: Thank you very much. Goodbye.