Martialing Resilience within a Critical Framework to Address the Underlying Causes and Consequences of Violence Against Indigenous Women
Resilience theory has gained momentum in social work research and is being used across multiple substantive domains. A critique of resilience is its tendency to focus on the risk and protective factors that enable people to recover from adversity while failing to examine the structural causes of adversity. The proposed presentation responds to this critique by reporting on resiliency research conducted within a critical framework, directly incorporating the structural causes of adversity as societal and community-level risk factors. Indigenous peoples in the United States experience disproportionate rates of violence, and culturally distinct societal risk factors, such as historical oppression and marginalization, which are implicated as underlying causes of violence. Rather than ignoring the structural determinants of social problems, critical ethnographies make paramount the patterns of power and domination that perpetuate inequality and oppression across generations. The purpose of this critical ethnography was to use resilience theory to identify societal and community risk factors that relate to violence against indigenous women in the United States. The overarching research question was, what societal and community risk factors relate to violence against indigenous women?
Methods:
Data for this paper presentation were derived from a larger critical ethnography with 28 participant observation sessions and 29 life history interviews with indigenous women purposively selected because they had been personally affected by violence. Women were recruited through community news sources, word-of-mouth, posted fliers, and referrals. Martialing a critical ethnography with extensive validity requirements, the following cyclical research stages were conducted while living near a Southeastern tribe over the course of the summer of 2012:
1.) Compiling the primary record, which included 28 participant observation sessions with indigenous community members to understand patterns of interaction.
2.) Preliminary reconstructive analysis (used for all data) included pragmatic horizon analysis to understand the implicit and explicit meanings of communicative acts embodied in data.
3.) Dialogic Data generation included 29 life history interviews with women who experienced violence across their lives.
Results:
Multiple societal and community level risk factors emerged in relationship to women’s experiences of violence. Women reported a context of historical oppression, which impaired family functioning across generations. Examples of historical oppression included boarding school assimilative experiences, sharecropping experiences, and micro-aggressions. Manifestations of historical oppression included a loss of language, impairment of cultural traditions, changing values and beliefs about women, and changing male gender roles.
Conclusions and Implications:
Examining resiliency within a critical framework enabled the identification of holistic risk and protective factors relating to the structural causes of adversity, which are linked to social problems such as violence. This presentation explicated how resilience theory can be martialed under a critical framework to both highlight the underlying causes of violence while simultaneously identifying protective factors to recover from violence and provide pathways toward its amelioration. These risk and protective factors across multiple levels can inform social work prevention and intervention efforts to address the underlying causes and consequences of adversity.