Research

We completed our first research project ‘Salvage: Gendered Harms in Activist Communities’ in September 2016. On this page you can find more information about the project including our report-zine, toolkit and our fieldwork materials.

Project Summary

How to best deal with sexual violence in radical social movements is a contentious issue in the UK Left. The persistence of and inability to deal with sexual violence contradicts the core values of equality and social justice at the heart of radical social movements. A legacy of being marginalised and subjected to state repression and scrutiny has led radical activist communities to develop important self-protective strategies to establish trust and belonging. Safer spaces policies, transformative justice and community accountability processes have been attempted to address gendered violence without recourse to the state. Debate has focused on the effectiveness and negative impacts of these interventions often at the expense of survivors and anti-violence activists. However, safer spaces policies and accountability processes are set up to fail without a critical exploration of wider power relations and self-protective cultural practices that already frame activist communities.

We chose to develop knowledge and understanding about gendered violence in activist communities from the perspectives and experiences of survivors. Our project has a particular focus on exploring the experiences of  women, transgender and non-binary individuals. August 2015 and January 2016 we interviewed 10 survivors who had experienced sexual violence within a range of different activist groups and communities across the UK. These accounts map out how layers of silence and denial can work in activist groups and communities to allow and maintain violence, abuse and harm. There was little evidence of a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Instead there is a need to better recognise how intersections of cissexism, homophobia, classism, racism, sexism and ableism shape survivors’ experiences and meanings of harm, available resources and solutions, and impacts of harm on individuals and communities. Understanding what can produce a ‘conducive context’ for sexual violence against women, transgender and non-binary individuals in activism offers crucial clues in how we can undo these harms. Progressive change requires no less than a reconceptualisation of culture that recognises violence as embedded in an ongoing struggle for power and control of activist arenas.

Publications

• Salvage Report Zine
• Salvage Toolkit
• It’s Not the Abuse That Kills You, It’s the Silence”: The silencing of sexual violence activism in social justice movements in the UK Left (Justice, Power & Resistance)
• Reimagining an End to Gendered Violence: Prefiguring the worlds we want. In, Emily Luise Hart, Joe Greener and Rich Moth (eds) Resist the Punitive State. London: Pluto Press.

Fieldwork Materials

• Information Sheet (the whats, whys and hows)
• Informed Consent Form (to check you fully understand your rights)
• Support Services Information and Resources Sheet (where to find support)
• Project Flyers (to help spread the word) A4 (b&w) front & back
• Joint Working Accountability Agreement (how the research team has agreed to work)
• Research Team Confidentiality Agreement (our commitment to confidentiality)

What do you think?

We are really interested in hearing about what you think about our zine-report, toolkit and research process. Get in touch!

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