Imagining Resistance: Exploring Resistance and Recognition through a Participatory Creative Arts Project with Young Survivors of Sexual Violence

Background and purpose: This paper presents findings from a 3-year participatory creative arts project exploring how girls and young women in England (age 13-25) who have experienced sexual violence and exploitation alongside other forms of harm (e.g. criminal exploitation, gang involvement) engage in acts of resistance.

The word ‘resistance’ is polysemous; it has been adopted by activists and consumers and used by researchers in fields such as anthropology and sociology to describe how people ‘fight back’ against oppression and subjugation. However, when safety concerns arise for young people, ‘resistance’ is typically used to indicate negative or disruptive behaviours rather than evidence of young people’s resilience and strength, or their efforts to self-preserve in oppressive social contexts and relationships. Through the ‘Imagining Resistance’ project, we sought to answer the following questions:

1. What does resistance look like and mean to young people affected by sexual abuse and exploitation? 2. How do young people cope with, respond to, and develop strategies for safety in such situations?
2. How might visual and participatory methods help young people represent, understand their own experience of resistance and how might they help change professional practice and shape the discourse surrounding sexual exploitation and violence?

Methods: The project methodology aligned with O’Neil’s (2012) conceptualisation of ‘ethno-mimesis’, involving ethnographic participatory research alongside visual and poetic representations created by participants (n=15) during a series of creative workshops held in partnership with three UK charities. Philosophical conceptualizations of recognition, developed by Axel Honneth (1995) and Nancy Fraser (2003) and Judith Butler (2004) provided an analytic framework through which to identify how resistance manifested throughout the data.

Results: Findings revealed how resistance surfaces in response to misrecognition among girls and young women who have been harmed by sexual and interpersonal violence within a wider socio-political context in which they are victimised by structural harms whilst managing the expectations of professionals who are intervening in their lives. The language of resistance offered an opportunity to re-narrate experiences of violence and victimisation as inclusive of power, agency, and solidarity with others; it surfaced the philosophical tensions between recognition and redistribution, and evidenced the role of mutual recognition in relational conflict between young women and practitioners.

Conclusions and Implications: Using recognition theory as one guiding framework for the project facilitated our understanding of resistance in two ways. First, we were able to recognise, alongside participants, how both subtle (or covert) as well as disruptive and overt acts of resistance enable girls and young women to feel powerful, weightless, and agentic. Second, we identified how approaches to reframing resistance through creative methods enable both professionals and young people to reconceptualise acts of resistance across myriad contexts as evidence of resilience and health. Implications for working collaboratively with artists, practitioners, and young people to facilitate (and theorise) new multi-method participatory practices that lead to mutual recognition will be discussed.