“The Man Can Use That Power”, “She Got Courage” and “Inimba”: Discursive Resources in Counsellors’ Talk of Intimate Partner Violence: Implications for Practice

Abstract

Given the high rate of intimate partner violence (IPV), understanding how counsellors talk about IPV and their interventions is important. The authors conducted narrative interviews with eight counsellors from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working with IPV. Using narrative-discursive methodology, this qualitative study paid attention to the discursive resources that the participants drew upon. Two broad clusters of discursive resources and one contradictory ('nurturing femininity') discourse emerged. The first cluster engenders a sense of helplessness in the face of overwhelming power relations; the second enables the counsellors to foresee positive outcomes for their counselling. Implications for counselling include emphasising enabling discourses, highlighting multiplicities of gender, and wider-scale interventions.

The Conundrums of Counselling Women in Violent Intimate Partner Relationships in South Africa: Implications for Practice

“…They nevertheless held onto the narrative of Bbondage to deliverance^or Bvictimhood to survivorhood^as the only valid outcome of counselling. This singular narrative regarding what constitutes a 'successful' outcome of counselling women who have had experiences of IPV during pregnancy, does not take into account the sometimes very real structural and/or cultural obstacles that frequently prevent women from leaving relationships characterised by IPV (e.g., economic dependency on their partners for survival, or culturally-located customs and traditional practices regarding marriage bonds) (see Fleischack et al 2017). This 'narrow' view of counselling outcomes may, therefore, be more likely to fail than not.…”