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.