Day 9: Visual Representations of Gender-Based Violence

On the ninth day of the 2022 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign Against Gender-Based Violence, photographers Vidya Kulkarni and Priyadarshini Ravichandran, aimed to answer the question "What are appropriate ways to represent gender-based violence visually?", in a session facilitated by Dr. Philippa Williams, Queen Mary University of London. Click here to watch a saved video of the discussion.

This discussion is part of the project Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India funded by the British Academy Heritage Dignity and Violence Programme HDV190009. Research partners: Queen Mary University of London, Chaitanya-The Policy Consultancy, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Nari Samata Manch and University of Oxford. 

"If you Google domestic violence images, you will come across images that sensationalise physical violence, depicting bruised and battered women and posing male aggressors to be carrying a belt in their hand...In the brief, we invited photographers to make photos that did not sensationalise violence or show women as battered and bruised victims of violence....The photography and the practice and process behind the photos that has come out of our interaction together, we will be discussing on this panel today.", said Dr. Philippa Williams, introducing the photographers of the discussion, Vidya Kulkarni and Priyadarshini Ravichandran.

Vidya Kulkarni:

• "Photography, as a component, was appealing to me, because we all know the power of visuals and how strongly they communicate, especially in this time when a lot of visuals are consumed, more than the texts. But, though we know the power of visuals, our feminist movements contain mostly women's texts. Therefore this conscience obtained of this project to work with the photographers is really important."
• "Violence, as it is, remains invisible. And, within that, surviving strategies are also invisible. So, to focus on them visually is a really good idea. And, I think, there is a need for more such collaborative efforts and to create gender-sensitive visuals, if you want to offset the stereotypical images around gender in the mainstream and other media."
• "With this understanding - focusing on emotion, and focusing on domestic space, I took the photographs."

• "This photo, I feel that, women are always in the background. What they feel, and what they think is also not in the forefront, and it is in the background. Their happiness and well-being is judged from the outer change, the façade....when you actually are in the field, you work with whatever is in front of you; you create images from that. So, it is not like one has a fixed idea before going to the field. One has to be open to whatever is in front of you, and it is surprising because you can get unexpected results." (photograph on the right)

• "I felt, while reading the stories, that while women go through abuse and violence, they are thinking about the options. It is not that they are mutely at the receiving end. But, they do think, while they carry on their routine, everyday activities." (photograph on the left)
  

Priyadarshini Ravichandran:

• "It was also important for me to hear that their research and writing were about the heavy silence about gendered violence. That, sort of, really initiated this work for me. The conversations really made me understand that, yet again, I just needed to follow where the medium of photography was leading me to, rather than me making very thoughtful choices. So, I took on this challenge to enter something that was relatively unknown to me."
• "All of the stories they shared, their anger, their fears, their empathy and conviction towards the need for challenging patriarchy and deepening the understanding towards intimate violence really shook me. And, it somehow directly connected me to my own inner feminine self and the capacity of this inner self to hear what is unsaid, to see the invisible and feel what is not just my own lived experiences, but of a collective, powerful whole. This really gripped me."
• "My process was to go intuitively to places that communicated what is left and heard, what is mute when very loud, and I let myself be absorbed."

Adding to the discussion, Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan, pointing at the photograph on the right, mentioned that, "this one, for example, I am not sure where she took the photo, but to me, it looks like the outside of a temple - the cloth is silk, all sorts of things are bundled but the bundle is going nowhere. And, you know, the fact that it is such a big package speaks of the burden that survivors are carrying but they have nowhere to go, the package is too heavy, and they are stranded in a place that no one wants to claim. This literally looks like the middle of nowhere" 

About Dr. Philippa Williams: Philippa is a Reader/Associate Professor in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research is animated by everyday politics of the state, citizenship, violence/non-violence in India as well as the geopolitics of digital privacy through the case of WhatsApp. She currently leads two main projects “Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender-justice in rural-urban India” www.survivingviolence.org and “The politics of WhatsApp” http://www.whatsapppolitics.org/

Day 7: The Challenges of Gender Violence Research: A Panel

The data on gender violence, both qualitative and quantitative, are still hard to come by. This is because such data is hard to collect; that is to say, research on sexual and gender-based violence is a challenging undertaking. A panel of experienced researchers and practitioners from fields as diverse as anthropology, geography, law, and politics discuss those challenges. 

Today, we had with us Dr. Philippa Williams (Queen Mary University of London); Dr. Shazia Choudhry (Oxford University); Dr. Preeti Karmarkar (Nari Samata Manch); Dr. Girija Godbole (IIT Mumbai); Dr. Ruchira Goswami (National University of Juridical Sciences); Dr. Nandini Ghosh (Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata).

The audience focussed on questions pertaining to defining violence in accordance with the survivor's notion, the absence/presence of family, navigating through consent, and on the usage of trigger words. You may find the recording on our Facebook page or our Youtube Channel.

Dr. Philippa Williams spoke first on the challenges of gender violence research. She covered briefly the critical aspects of the same by compiling it under 5 key sub-headings.

• Know your research context.
• What's the research problem, what questions do you want to answer?
• What methods can you use to answer your research question? 
• How will you collect, analyze and write up your data?
• What will you do with the research, how can it benefit different groups?

Dr. Shazia Choudhry, our next speaker, focussed on the research ethics framework. Under this, she covered the importance of confidentiality, risk assessment, and safeguarding oneself.

• 
  "Recognising that you may experience secondary trauma as a result of this trauma, is important. A quick way of dealing with that is to participate in a quick debriefing with your team where you talk about what came out of that abuse, and if necessary consider individual counseling."
• "It is also important to end the interview on a note that emphasizes a woman's strengths, to try to minimize distress....you have to remember that they have never had someone say that this is unacceptable, whatever has happened is not right and no one should be treated that way; to say that shows you have been heard, seen and you have made some contribution."
• "If you are not going to add anything to the literature, why put the women through those interviews? And, if you are doing the research, it has to be done in an ethical way. It can be empowering for women to participate in the interviews. It is important and really, really difficult for the respondents to trust you. So, it is essential to approach the survivor in an ethical way."

Our next speaker, Dr. Preeti Karmarkar, looked into the Do's and Dont's while interacting with survivors, especially those who have undergone violence and on navigating difficult questions.

Some of the Do's that she gave the audience a perspective on covered explaining the purpose, ensuring the survivor is comfortable and assuring confidentiality. The Dont's looked into topics of interruption, judgemental statements, and offensive tones, to name a few.

• "Talking about trauma is again a trauma. If the interviewee gets tired, ensure you take a small break with snacks and tea. Keep tissue papers ready."
• "What if the respondent refuses to talk, or weeps during the process? We need to be calm and give them enough space to get comfortable...if the respondent refuses to talk, accept their emotional disturbance, assure them of confidentiality, clarify her doubts and accept her decision [to proceed or not proceed with the interview]."
• "Survivors see privacy in terms of their safety. That is their concern. Rather than [viewing it as] privacy, it is about their safety."

Our fourth speaker, Dr. Girija Godbole, spoke about looking after oneself as a researcher and dealing with difficult questions.

• "Researching sensitive topics can be traumatic for the researchers and the researched participants."
• "We also need to remember that the relationship [between the researcher and the participant] is inherently artificial and it is basically to get high-quality usable data and relationship is temporary in nature..... how much ever training or guidance one gets before the research, it cannot prepare us for all the eventualities."
• "It is also important to remember that we know domestic violence is a serious domestic problem. But knowing something and confronting something with data is different, so the impact will be different."
• She also suggested a few ways for the researchers to work on their emotions. This included having a regular, structured, critical reflection that helps one understand their position as a researcher. She said, "it is important to maintain relational boundaries and is useful for the existing researcher relationship." She also highlighted journaling or diary keeping to be a useful way to look at the research in a detached manner to a certain extent and this can help one develop a deeper understanding of the incident and the emotional impact of the same.

Dr. Ruchira Goswami spoke next and highlighted the legal aspect of the research on Gender violence and data collection.

• "Legal research, even if it is around social and economic issues, research is largely based on case laws, legal commentaries, etc. That's why in India, socio-legal research where you go in the field and conduct qualitative research is less done. Within that, in sensitive areas, researching on violence against women is extremely difficult. This is because it might trigger trauma in the respondent. But, doing it in a legal research framework, I think, is more challenging."
• "The case laws of higher courts are available [AIR or supreme court]. But if one wants to conduct research on domestic violence victims in trial court....you will see case laws are not updated electronically for all trial courts in all the states. Therefore it will be very difficult to conduct research on any of these sensitive issues in trial courts."
• "Sometimes, you have to take out the real critical part of it, make it sound a little less critical, and say little nice things. When you are critiquing the administrative system and the judicial system, the possibilities of facing the ire of the state is very high."
• "A lot of legal research is conducted using case laws, etc, and much less on what survivors are facing. But, perhaps there is no research, and I will be happy to stand corrected, on the lives of survivors post-trial."
• "Socio-legal research focuses more on illegalities, bottlenecks in the system....there is much less research on how respondents make sense of the system, a process we call hermeneutics....those kinds of work are just beginning to happen in India, but we need more and more work in sensitive areas around violence against women which will talk about longitudinal research and move beyond illegalities and bottlenecks in the system."
• "We should keep in mind what the additional ethical safeguards are when we are talking to children, we must keep that in mind. But having a parent during the interviewee is problematic because that would definitely influence the responses of the child....we have to, as interviewers, figure out if this is going to make the life of the child far more difficult. One way is to go through organizations and institutions that work with children directly, and speak to them on whether it is okay to speak to children."

Our last speaker, Dr. Nandini Ghosh, gave us a perspective on the barriers that exist in conducting gender violence research.

• "Feminist scholars, despite the lack of funding, have devised innovating ways of highlighting gender violence research, the public, and the private forms and how this violence is impacting lives of women across the country."
• "There is a problem of state-funded research which is that it is bound by time; you have one year to complete the research or three months to finish a report, which doesn't help explore the extent of gender violence that women might be facing."
• "The kind of permissions and protocols that you are required to follow when you undertake the research is a problem. When you want to do legal research or domestic violence research, we want to talk to the stakeholders who are responsible for rolling out acts and legislation. We want to approach them but we find ourselves coming up with barriers by the organization and by the individual, and they ask us to get permission from the state....there is a kind of avoidance of what the findings are gonna reveal of state of implementation of policies, programmes, etc."
• "What is clearly evident is that there is no spirit of collaboration.....there is also the tendency to say we have done enough and there is nothing more we can do.....there is a refusal to acknowledge their own shortcomings and there is a reluctance to take remedial action." 

You can watch the panel video here. 

GRITPrajnya Channel: A New Resource

Prajnya is primarily a research organization, with a commitment to public education (making information accessible to people) and networking (bringing together and working with others).

On the sixth day of the 2010 Prajnya 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence, we are particularly delighted to bring you something that allows to fulfill all our mandates: A new single point compilation of audio-visual resources on gender violence that are available in the public domain, the new GRITPrajnya YouTube Channel.

We hope this will cut short search time before each new project, each new training programme. And we invite you to point us to resources we might include.

Email your suggestions to: media.prajnya@gmail.com