Agency As Process: Service Provider Accounts of Domestic Violence Survivor Strategies in Nepal

Background and Purpose: Agency, as exercised by domestic violence survivors has often been constructed in binary terms where actions such as helping seeking or leaving are presented as evidence of survivor agency and survivors who do not take these actions are implicitly or explicitly constructed as passive. However, scholars have pointed out that survivor agency is a process which must be understood within structures of constraint, that agency may take many forms, and that it includes covert actions, subversion, and other forms that cannot be seen from outside. Feminist researchers in South Asia have described processes in which survivors have sought to carve out spaces of greater livability, or to assert their rights, within or even through their affiliation with extended families and community groups. This study begins to make sense of survivor agency in the rapidly shifting gendered contexts in Nepal through analysis of service provider perspectives on the strategies they’ve seen survivors use in response to domestic violence.

Methods: Fifteen qualitative interviews were conducted with government and non-governmental organizations (NGO) in Pokhara, Nepal. Snowball sampling was used to recruit service providers representing organizations that were diverse in terms of organization size, geographic reach, and primary target group. Interviews were conducted and transcribed in Nepali language. Standard practices in the analysis of qualitative data were used, including multiple readings, coding, categorizing, and the use of memos and diagrams to find patterns within the data.

Results: Service providers discussed an array of strategies used by survivors to address domestic violence. Given the central role that the family plays to connect women to important social, economic, and legal resources and rights in Nepal, service providers described actions that survivors took to shore up these resources. Shoring up social resources was generally the first step, which included direct help-seeking with members of the extended family, community, and/or organizations. This also included building credibility within new families and communities after marriage and participation in community activities. Survivors sought to shore up economic resources through pursuit of education, livelihood opportunities, and seeking employment. Finally, survivors sought to strengthen their legal rights by obtaining citizenship cards, marriage certificates, birth certificates for their children, and property rights; gathering evidence of abuse; and seeking legal counsel and support from government offices. Such strategies, often used sequentially or in tandem, could open spaces to increase survivor options and negotiating power, whether or not they ultimately separated from those who had used violence against them.

Conclusions and Implications: By demonstrating the creative and complex ways that survivors carved out spaces of agency, these findings move discussions of survivor agency beyond discrete categories such as coping, help-seeking, and separation. They demonstrate the crucial roles played by family, community members, and organizations to support survivors to live without violence in Nepal. Policymakers and practitioners should work to decrease the structural and normative constraints on survivor agency and to bolster the affiliations, structures, norms, and resources that support this agency.