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Manufacturing Difference:Double Standard in Swiss Institutional Responses to Intimate Partner Violence
Titre du projet
Manufacturing Difference:Double Standard in Swiss Institutional Responses to Intimate Partner Violence
Description
Due to the efforts of feminist movements, there is now a transnational recognition of violence against women as a public problem. Whereas this type of violence was originally problematized as being intrinsically associated with gender relations, more recent public policies and debates in Europe in general, and specifically in Switzerland, have focused on migration. Consequently, specific types of violence against women that a priori involve migrant populations, such as ‘forced marriages’, ‘female genital mutilation’ and ‘honour killing’, are increasingly the focus of public action. This focus implies that violence against women is primarily perceived as a migrant problem. Although various scholars have already criticized the instrumentalization of gender equality and the women’s rights discourse and its role in racializing violence against women, they have targeted the types of violence that are cast as ‘cultural pathologies’, as noted above. This research takes an alternative approach. It focuses instead on the wider public problem of ‘intimate partner violence’, conceived as a public, population-wide health issue in many European countries. This approach enables to lay bare the institutional mechanisms of manufacturing difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Through an ethnographic exploration of diverse actors’ interventions to support victims, this study investigates how intimate partner violence is identified, named and addressed differently in relation to Swiss citizens and migrants, even though it concerns the same social problem, is treated by the same institutions, and involves people living in the same territory. To this end, a women’s shelter, a medicolegal service of a hospital and a police emergency unit in French-speaking Switzerland were chosen as the study sites. Field observations and uncountable informal interviews, supported by 56 expert interviews with agents from these institutions, were conducted over 18 months from 2014 to 2016. Case studies and ethnographic descriptions of agents’ practices were complemented by a study of agents’ discourses to better understand the meanings that these agents attribute to their practices and how they emerge out of specific representations of ‘others’ and their supposed ‘culture’.
A close study of public action against intimate partner violence shows, first, that the general framing of such violence is gender-blind, revealing a politics of silence surrounding unequal gender power relations in the intimate sphere. Intimate partner violence is alternatively framed psychologically, and individually as isolated instances of deviant behaviour caused by alcohol, drug consumption, or psychological problems. In sum, non-structural explanations are offered, privileging psychotherapy and family consultations as solutions. Second, however, when the targets of intimate partner violence include migrants from the Global South, the incidents are associated with a racialized conception of culture in which unequal gender relations disadvantage women and trivialize male control and abuse. This double standard through a visibilization of gendered power relations in specific cases, and their occultation in others, leads to perceptions of ethnic and racialized differences that are subsequently equated with moral differences between ‘them’ and the ‘civilized us’. Last, the practices of institutions are critically examined to document some of the concrete consequences of these manufactured differences in recognition and naming.
This study of the institutional responses to intimate partner violence in Switzerland provides valuable insights that contribute to several academic debates. First, similar mechanisms behind the ‘racialization of sexism’ have been observed in other European countries. Hence, this case study contributes to this field of research and to the broader field of postcolonial and critical race studies by providing further comparisons of different contexts. Second, this thesis contributes to the literature on intimate partner violence, which has largely disregarded the specific effects of differentiating social groups. Last, the thesis demonstrates methodological originality, illustrating how migration studies can be de-ethnicized by shifting the focus from migrants to all of the beneficiaries and their relations with public institutions, in this case, institutions dealing with intimate partner violence. This shift enables an interrogation of the social construction of the category of ‘migrants’ by centring attention on the context in which they are categorized and labelled as such.
Through an ethnographic exploration of diverse actors’ interventions to support victims, this study investigates how intimate partner violence is identified, named and addressed differently in relation to Swiss citizens and migrants, even though it concerns the same social problem, is treated by the same institutions, and involves people living in the same territory. To this end, a women’s shelter, a medicolegal service of a hospital and a police emergency unit in French-speaking Switzerland were chosen as the study sites. Field observations and uncountable informal interviews, supported by 56 expert interviews with agents from these institutions, were conducted over 18 months from 2014 to 2016. Case studies and ethnographic descriptions of agents’ practices were complemented by a study of agents’ discourses to better understand the meanings that these agents attribute to their practices and how they emerge out of specific representations of ‘others’ and their supposed ‘culture’.
A close study of public action against intimate partner violence shows, first, that the general framing of such violence is gender-blind, revealing a politics of silence surrounding unequal gender power relations in the intimate sphere. Intimate partner violence is alternatively framed psychologically, and individually as isolated instances of deviant behaviour caused by alcohol, drug consumption, or psychological problems. In sum, non-structural explanations are offered, privileging psychotherapy and family consultations as solutions. Second, however, when the targets of intimate partner violence include migrants from the Global South, the incidents are associated with a racialized conception of culture in which unequal gender relations disadvantage women and trivialize male control and abuse. This double standard through a visibilization of gendered power relations in specific cases, and their occultation in others, leads to perceptions of ethnic and racialized differences that are subsequently equated with moral differences between ‘them’ and the ‘civilized us’. Last, the practices of institutions are critically examined to document some of the concrete consequences of these manufactured differences in recognition and naming.
This study of the institutional responses to intimate partner violence in Switzerland provides valuable insights that contribute to several academic debates. First, similar mechanisms behind the ‘racialization of sexism’ have been observed in other European countries. Hence, this case study contributes to this field of research and to the broader field of postcolonial and critical race studies by providing further comparisons of different contexts. Second, this thesis contributes to the literature on intimate partner violence, which has largely disregarded the specific effects of differentiating social groups. Last, the thesis demonstrates methodological originality, illustrating how migration studies can be de-ethnicized by shifting the focus from migrants to all of the beneficiaries and their relations with public institutions, in this case, institutions dealing with intimate partner violence. This shift enables an interrogation of the social construction of the category of ‘migrants’ by centring attention on the context in which they are categorized and labelled as such.
Chercheur principal
Statut
Completed
Date de début
1 Mars 2014
Date de fin
9 Septembre 2019
Organisations
Identifiant interne
44083
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6 Résultats
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- PublicationAccès libre
- PublicationAccès libreWhat Feminist Epistemology Has to Offer to Reflexive Migration Studies(2020)This paper investigates the normative, epistemological, and methodological challenges of achieving reflexivity in migration studies, and it suggests a better engagement with feminist epistemology as a solution to these challenges. Specifically, it argues that feminist standpoint theory and the situated knowledge paradigm can contribute to critically interrogating key concepts in the field and avoiding reproducing power structures. While this argument is not new in itself, rare are the explicit demonstrations and detailed analyses of the positionality of the researcher and its impact on research. This paper presents an example of a research design that focused on a social problem that affects society as a whole, intimate partner violence (IPV), and the ways in which it cuts across issues related to migration. Instead of taking migrant-related categories as its entry point, it took Swiss institutional responses to IPV as its object of study. The study was based upon an extensive ethnography in three institutions responsible for IPV: a police emergency unit, a women’s shelter and a medicolegal centre in a French-speaking Swiss canton. This paper demonstrates that by shifting the gaze from ‘migrants’ to the social and administrative contexts that mark them as such, we can study migration-related issues without reproducing the normative categories that reflexive migration studies aims to deconstruct.
- PublicationAccès libreLes violences conjugales à la marge : le cas des femmes migrantes en Suisse(2019-7-18)Suivant des travaux sur la (re)production des frontières par le bas, dans les pratiques des agents et des agentes de terrain et de leurs usages du droit, cet article analyse les enjeux liés aux autorisations de séjour des femmes migrantes confrontées aux violences conjugales. À travers le cas suisse, et par l’analyse des documents légaux et administratifs qui règlent la situation des migrantes, l’auteure montre comment ces femmes sont mises devant un choix impossible entre se séparer du conjoint ou rester en Suisse. L’article démontrera comment la mise en œuvre du droit devient un instrument de contrôle de la migration et renforce les frontières de l’Etat, en distinguant celles qui sont jugées aptes à recevoir une protection et celle qui, privées de ce droit, doivent partir.
- PublicationAccès libreGrounds for dialogue: Intersectionality and superdiversity(2018-3-1)This paper investigates the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between intersectionality and superdiversity. It argues that, despite the shortcomings of superdiversity, the complex migration-related configurations it focuses on can enable intersectionality to overcome some of its own challenges by becoming more precise and accurate. To empirically expose the mechanisms through which race-, gender-, and class-based inequalities are reproduced, it is necessary to anchor those mechanisms in a specific time and space ‐ a historical, social, economic, and legal context. Through a case study of institutional responses to domestic violence, the paper demonstrates that superdiversity can help clarify the context in which these responses occur. Finally, by distinguishing between the object of study (the intersectional construction of disadvantage and prejudice) and the object of observation (public institutions where superdiverse situations are created by migration-related configurations), this paper examines a challenging situation for intersectional analysis in the context of Switzerland, a context that opens up to surprising articulations of discrimination and inequality for ‘migrants’ subjects to domestic violence.
- PublicationAccès libre
- PublicationAccès libreEthnography of Police ‘Domestic Abuse’ Interventions: Ethico-Methodological ReflectionsDeparting from this deconstruction or denaturalization of home as a secure private sphere, in this chapter I draw on my own sociological research into institutional responses to domestic violence in Switzerland. I will reflect on my own ethnographic experiences of accompanying a police emergency unit intervening in such cases. The emotions and affects evoked by such events can bring into focus a specific process of home (un)making, in which I was caught, and which presented a challenge to me as an ethnographer and an analyst. My ethnography revealed the deeply contested nature of domestic space, and the lived tensions which exist between characterizations of home as an unalienated/alienated space. Attending to these tensions in my fieldwork meant resisting and deconstructing a romanticized vision of ethnographic immersion that limits the space for pain, conflict and feelings of unease as modes of knowledge production. In this chapter I explore the possibility of an intimate ethnography of violence. I suggest that emotional commitments in ethnography are not only matters to attend to reflexively but are also resources which open up the field as a space of encounter between affects.