Protecting and supporting children and women affected by gender-based violence: the role of education in survivor wellbeing

ABSTRACT

Given the well-documented toll of gender-based violence on the wellbeing of women and girls, schools and universities can be key sites of advocacy and prevention. Peace educators have identified tackling gender-based violence as a priority for the field. Yet, two gaps persist. Firstly, the lived experiences of female survivors outside Europe and North America remain little understood in research. Secondly, the severe structural barriers female survivors face risk being overlooked in overly individualistic conceptualisations of wellbeing that neglect the social context. We argue that both these geographical and conceptual gaps can be addressed by considering voices from the Global South and closely contextualising children and women’s experiences. We thereby utilise qualitative data from South Asia and the Middle East, combining the social-ecological model with Galtung’s framework of direct, structural and cultural violence to contextualise the emotions and experiences of female participants and to flag the role of education and societal structures in perpetuating or tackling gender-based violence. We conclude with an ecological conceptualisation of ‘being-well’, calling for sustainable, context-sensitive action for peace and social change and highlighting the responsibility of education to provide sanctuary to those who seek it.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender-based violence
• wellbeing
• social justice
• peace education
• women
• girls

Introduction

Eighteen years ago, a pioneering text on gender-based violence (GBV) asked, ‘Is anyone listening?’ (Hague, Mullender, and Aris 2003, 1). This question arose in the wake of the early 1990s, when GBV began attracting international attention. Hague et al. (ibid) pointed out that despite heightened public recognition, women’s voices still went largely unheard. Since then, the past two decades have seen a surge in research amplifying survivors’ voices and addressing their long-standing neglect in state and international policy (DeKeseredy and Hall-Sanchez 2018). Education is not divorced from these concerns, as schools have now been identified as primary sites for preventing (or perpetuating) GBV. Peace educators have emphasised the importance of tackling GBV and observed (as will be more fully unpacked later) that ‘the field (of peace education) has yet to fully address gender’ (Finley and Cooper 2018, 18). On a micro-level, survivors in schools and universities around the world continue to report feeling dismissed, discredited and unsupported by institutions, social actors and cultural groups (Deborah and Goodman 2019). On a macro-level, policies and interventions to provide survivors interpersonal care, structural justice and political accountability remain underfunded or deprioritised globally (Campbell and Mannell 2016). Sanctuary – defined in its purest sense as refuge and protection (Silver 1986) – appears elusive. It seems necessary to continue asking ‘is anyone listening?’

We focus on survivors’ wellbeing as it is now identified as a priority for educational and societal policy and intervention (WHO 2019) given survivors’ well-documented likelihood of depression, anxiety, social isolation, and even suicide (Ferrari et al. 2016; Howard, Trevillion, and Agnew-Davies 2010). Calling on the global community to ‘listen, believe, and support’ survivors, a recent UN Women report (2019) points out that ‘unlike physical injuries, the emotional and mental impacts are less visible and consequently, under-prioritized’, with public services ‘rarely planned with women’s safety, recovery and healing from violence in mind’ (1). This neglect echoes a larger trend of the mental health of marginalised groups remaining deprioritised and underfunded (WHO 2018). A deeper understanding of survivors’ wellbeing, and the responsibility of educators to nurture it and to promote violence prevention, thus seems crucial. The global agenda, too, urgently calls for the need to eliminate all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls, calling attention to the intersections between violence, extremism and GBV (UN 2023a), and in turn calling for education for a culture of peace and non-violence (UN 2015).

In the pages that follow, we begin by reviewing the literature on GBV and the role of education more broadly before analysing the specific role of peace education. We identify geographical gaps in scholarship and explore conceptual and ethical tensions around the concept of wellbeing. We explain this study’s theoretical combination of Galtung’s (1969) framework of direct, structural and cultural violence and Bronfenbrenner's (Bronfenbrenner 1979) social-ecological model. Next, we outline our methodological choice to utilise a narrative approach for our data collection. Then, we present and analyse two stories from India and an Arabic country,¹ each revealing a different facet of GBV, its effects upon survivors’ wellbeing, and the role of peace education. We conclude with an ecological conceptualisation of ‘being-well’, highlighting the responsibility of education and society to provide sanctuary to those who seek it.

Literature

Education systems as sites of advocacy against GBV

Given the well-documented costs GBV exerts on girls’ education and wellbeing (UNICEF 2006, 2014), scholars have been exploring the role of schools as key intervention and advocacy actors since 2000 (F. E. Leach and Mitchell 2006; Parkes 2015). Leading international organisations have developed resources for educational stakeholders to support children who are denied their right to a safe home environment (UNESCO and UN Women 2016; UNICEF 2006; WHO 2016). Universities are also increasingly recognised as sites that can either perpetuate or mitigate GBV (Burke et al. 2023; Katherine and Richards 2017) and have a responsibility to tackle it (Anitha and Lewis 2018). The words ‘in and around’ schools and universities are frequently invoked to emphasise that violence is always embedded in the norms and structures of wider society (Davies 2008).

Two important themes emerge from reports and other scholarly engagements in this area. First, school teachers and faculty members are identified as key agents of change and support for student wellbeing (Altinyelken and Le Mat 2018; Sharoni and Klocke 2019). Second, the need for systemic approaches that target schools and universities’ institutional structures has been widely recognised (Katherine and Richards 2017; F. Leach, Dunne, and Salvi 2014). While most scholars agree that education is a key site for tackling GBV, they call for further research on risks and protective factors in and around schools, universities, and community settings (Heslop et al. 2019; Landis et al. 2019). Dadvand and Cavill (Dadvand and Cahill 2021), for example, maintain that the ‘care’ that teachers exhibit needs to be understood as a form of ‘pedagogical labour’, and as ‘a collective and relational capacity’ which is influenced by the institutional, social, political and cultural context.

The role of peace education in tackling GBV

The relevance of peace education to tackling GBV has been consistently acknowledged in foundational texts (Reardon 1985) and humanitarian and development policy (UN 2023a; UNESCO 2022). Standish (2015) notes that ‘peace education is well-positioned to address forms of cultural violence that relate to gender’ (299). For example, peace education interventions in schools, universities and community settings have engaged with societal violence against women through peace museums (Velasco and Kester 2022) and post-violence truth-telling and reconciliation (Watanabe 2015). Yet, scholars have noted the need for more specific theoretical and empirical work to understand the relationship of peace education to GBV (Finley and Cooper 2018; McInerney and Tim Archer 2023).

More broadly, there have been calls for peace education to more explicitly theorise and reflect on the workings of gender in violence (Reardon 1988; Breines, Connell and Eide 2000; Cockburn 2004; Cook 2007; Davies 2008; Brock-Utne 2009; Fobear 2014; Standish 2015; Holmes 2018; Weber 2018; Finley and Cooper 2018; McLeod and O’Reilly 2019; Harmat 2020). For instance, Finley (Finley and Cooper 2018) notes that ‘while peace education has such amazing, transformative potential, that potential has not yet been reached. One reason is that the field has yet to fully address gender and sexuality’ (xviii). Cook (2007) further states that ‘removing gender makes a holistic, integrated, and respectful analysis impossible. It obfuscates the naming of alternative approaches that are at the very root of peace education’ (60). While not claiming to comprehensively address all aspects of gender-based violence, this study thus sets out to contribute to peace education literature through an analysis of direct, structural and cultural violence in the lives of two female survivors of GBV. We will now elaborate on why we have chosen ‘wellbeing’ as our conceptual focus, building on the affective turn in peace education.

The wellbeing of women and girls affected by GBV

As a complex, multi-faceted concept, wellbeing has been defined as both feeling good and functioning well (Huppert 2014). That is, an individual’s wellbeing can mean both the emotions they feel in the moment (e.g. joy, despair, gratitude) and broader dimensions of meaning, purpose, agency, and fulfilment (Kurian and Cremin 2023).

Choosing ‘wellbeing’ as a conceptual focus presents a double-edged sword. On the one hand, addressing the wellbeing of GBV-affected women and girls has been stressed as crucial in global policy (UN Women 2019) because GBV is well-known to cause massive psychological upheaval, including increased rates of depression, anxiety, and even suicidal tendencies (Ferrari et al. 2016; Howard, Trevillion, and Agnew-Davies 2010). Conscious of this type of emotional aftermath of violence, peace educators have long-argued that we cannot work for change without understanding the ‘affective politics’ of violence (Zembylas 2007); that is, the very real emotional toll of injustice. Indeed, much of contemporary peace education scholarship focussing on wellbeing and affect (e.g. Hussein 2018; Kurian and Cremin 2023) draws inspiration from Michalinos Zembylas, known for his pioneering work on ‘critical emotional praxis’ within peace education. Zembylas (Zembylas 2007) argued that ‘critical emotional praxis’ was the missing piece in peace education; that is, a historical and political understanding of emotions in relation to conflict and violence. While his own context of interest was nationalistic education in Cyprus, his calls for attuning to the emotional dimensions of violence seem just as relevant to tackling GBV. Peace scholars have flagged how emotions such as anger and humiliation and affective dynamics of possession and dominance are key to the trauma inflicted upon survivors of GBV (Berry 2020; Koos 2015). We therefore consider ‘wellbeing’ a fitting conceptual focus to underscore how the psychological and emotional aftermath of GBV forms part of the toll of direct, structural and cultural violence. ‘wellbeing’ also helps draw the analytic gaze to opportunities for healing and holistic flourishing that are either enabled or shut down for female survivors (Šiljak 2020). Paying attention to the psychosocial can therefore underscores how truly transformative peacebuilding involves recognising and addressing the intricate interplay between emotions, trauma, and the pursuit of justice.

At the same time, we are mindful of ethical and conceptual tensions around agency and structure emerging around the concept of wellbeing within peace education (see Pupavac 2001; Vickers 2022). Considerable critique has problematised the rhetoric of personal responsibility characterising some dominant wellbeing discourses – that is, the frequent assumption that ‘wellbeing’ resides within the individual and can be addressed mainly through individual actions of self-care or lifestyle changes (Atkinson 2013; Jonathan and Allister McGregor 2020; Sointu 2005). The rush to centre the individual psyche can risk myopia about the social context that shapes it. Currently, the majority of wellbeing interventions related to GBV focus on individualistic psychosocial support (e.g. training on healthy coping mechanisms and self-care activities) for survivors (Ali et al. 2020). While this work is valuable, we point out the need for wellbeing interventions and policies attuned to changing the structural and cultural causes undermining women and girls’ wellbeing; for example, forms of sexism that lead to survivors being disbelieved and forces of stigmatisation that leave them feeling socially isolated (Šiljak 2020). Otherwise, peace educators have noted that putting the onus on survivors to carve out their own paths to recovery in the name of ‘wellbeing’ does not tackle the underlying external causes that can worsen survivor mental health. For example, Šiljak (2020) points out, ‘the rhetoric of personal responsibility and agency makes women who suffered from violence responsible for recovery and healing; if they are unsuccessful, as some women never fully recover from these experiences, they are responsible for that as well’ (127).

This point about the dangers of locating change within the individual psyche relates to broader concerns and debates in peace studies more broadly. Peace educators have not only critiqued individualistic discourses within GBV, but also critiqued individualistic discourses of transformation within the field of peace education as a whole (Pupavac 2001; Kurian and Kester 2019). For example, Kester (2018) problematises ‘the underlying psychosocial peacebuilding agenda upon which much of peace education is founded’ (1). He observes that many pedagogical traditions in peace education are founded on UNESCO’s early statement that ‘war begins in the minds of men (and women), so it is in the minds of men (and women) that the defences of peace must be constructed’ (UNESCO 1945). As Kester points out, the problem with this approach is that it paints the individual psyche as the site of change. Similarly, Vickers (2022) problematises discourses of peace that focus only on transforming individual psyches; ‘the message is that peace, sustainability and global citizenship are to be attained primarily through transforming individual consciousness rather than challenging established social or political structures’ (10). In response, Hajir (2022, 3) foregrounds the need for understanding and addressing ‘the multi-dimensionality of human embodied experience and its interrelationship with oppressive structures’.

If we connect these critiques made within peace education to our earlier points about the dangers of overly individualistic discourses of survivor wellbeing, it becomes clear that without attention to structural questions of justice and equity, individualistic responses to the trauma of GBV may leave untouched the dynamics driving it. Thereby, a ‘context-free epistemology’ of wellbeing may ‘simultaneously serve to reproduce the very structures and meanings that cause ill-being’ (Eiroa-Orosa 2019, p. 2; see also Kester and Cremin 2017). We thus aim to connect the structural and the psychosocial, challenging dominant individualised paradigms of wellbeing and peace education by foregrounding the context shaping survivors: external structures and systems (e.g. the level of support they gain from teachers) that either nurture or undermine their wellbeing.

To adopt this contextualised focus, our theoretical framework combines Galtung’s (1969) framework of direct, structural and cultural violence and Bronfenbrenner's (Bronfenbrenner 1979) social-ecological model, as we explain below.

Theoretical framework

Given our focus on the ‘structures of care’ offered (or denied) survivors by schools, universities and other social actors (Dadvand and Cahill 2021), we found that the social-ecological model is an apt tool (Bronfenbrenner 1979, 1993). It situates individuals within five nested and interconnecting systems: the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. The microsystem contains individual and interpersonal relationships, while the mesosystem hosts interactions arising from the microsystem (e.g. home-school and community relations). The exosystem represents social services and structures (e.g. the police system); the macrosystem, societal values (e.g. gendered attitudes); and the chronosystem refers to time (e.g. the chronology of life events).

We additionally combined the social-ecological model with concepts of violence from the field of peace education, e.g. direct violence, cultural violence, structural violence, and poststructural violence to make sense of the narratives (Galtung 1969, 1990; Hajir and Kester 2020; Kester and Cremin 2017). See Figure 1 below. For example, we consider how physical violence such as domestic abuse (e.g. direct violence), discriminatory attitudes toward women and girls (e.g. cultural violence), and inequitable educational policies and practices (e.g. structural violence) manifest themselves within each distinct educational layer (e.g. from the microsystem to the macrosystem) of the social-ecological model. In addition, the educator’s role in perpetuating (e.g. poststructural violence) or disrupting GBV is a key concern. This will be further illustrated in the analysis and discussion sections of the paper.

Figure 1. An integrated Bronfenbrenner and Galtung framework for the analysis and prevention of GBV.

Employing this framework allows our analysis to ‘link the subject with her psyche and society’ (Kester 2018, 12). In other words, it enables us to identify the different layers of influence and (ongoing) violence that impact our participants’ wellbeing, ranging from their immediate surroundings to broader societal and cultural factors (see also Higgins and Novelli 2020), which would have been difficult to capture using other frameworks. It also allowed us to recognise the dynamic interactions between the multiple systems and various forms of GBV.

Geographic and disciplinary gaps: challenging dominant paradigms

We focus on India and an Arabic country to address regional and epistemic gaps in the literature. Survivors outside of North America and Europe remain underrepresented in research, although the highest rates of GBV are ‘heavily concentrated’ in non-Western settings (DeKeseredy and Hall-Sanchez 2018, 883). This neglect must be addressed, since culturally contextualised violence-prevention has been found to be more effective (Gillum 2008). Moreover, efforts to protect survivors’ wellbeing may falter without attending to the unique barriers they face in under-researched regions. Theories of wellbeing and peace education have been critiqued for deriving much of their empirical credence from Western European or North American samples, ignoring the lived realities and meaning-making of other cultures (Davidson 2019; Kurian and Kester 2018; Zembylas and Bekerman 2013). We therefore aim to contribute to a growing body of GBV research in peace education seeking to redress geographical gaps, such as analyses of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Berry 2020), Indonesia (Aisyah and Parker 2014), Kyrgyzstan (Saltanat, Gioia, and Campbell 2018), South Korea (Kim et al. 2020; Kwon, Ian Walker, and Kristjánsson 2018), and Vietnam (Shiu-Thornton, Senturia, and Sullivan 2005).

Methodology: data collection and analysis

In previous work, experience and storytelling have been conceptualised as a form of ‘living education’ (Kester 2007, 1). Foregrounding women-survivors’ voices and lived experiences is crucial given their frequent neglect in public policy, exclusion from decision-making and accountability structures, and lack of economic and social support (Hague, Mullender, and Aris 2003). As recent UN Women briefings point out, survivor consultation must take priority in any response to GBV, as ‘a survivor-centered approach places the human rights, needs and desires of women and girl survivors as the central focus of service delivery’ (UN Women 2023, 9). In particular, UN Women has called for qualitative data that examines survivors’ concerns and experiences with different social protection systems (e.g. criminal justice, education and healthcare), prioritising rich, in-depth narratives that take time and trust to elicit due to the highly sensitive nature of survivors’ personal information (UN Women 2023). We therefore present our data in the form of two narratives drawn from larger datasets and trauma-informed methodologies, each revealing a different interplay between GBV, the wellbeing of women and girls, and the role of education as well as other social protection systems. We consider that survivor consultation based on in-depth narrative can ‘expose radical social inequalities’, leaving both reader and researcher ‘shocked and humbled’ (Kester 2007, 3).

The first case study utilises qualitative data collected during a trauma-informed, nine month-long ethnographic study with teachers and children (n = 35) in a high-poverty school in India, combining semi-structured interviews, observations and children’s artwork. The second case study unpacks data collected from a four month-long intensive qualitative enquiry with 30 youth-participants in an Arabic conflict-affected setting. Due to the need to safeguard the participant, the country cannot be named in this instance, as per the British Educational Research Association and our institutional ethics guidelines on high-risk situations in educational research (BERA 2018). This particular participant faces ongoing life-threatening violence; due to a combination of extreme circumstances, she is at high risk of losing anonymity if her country’s name is revealed, which would put her safety at direct risk (BERA 2018). Hence, the researchers made an agreement with the participant to omit the name of her country to protect her from further harm. Suffice to say, the country represents an Arabic context characterised by severe struggle.

We selected these case studies from our previous related research to provide two different examples of the interrelation of direct gender-based violence with social structures, and the subsequent impact on female survivors. Thus, each case represents a unique context and illustrates the complex dynamics of gender-based violence there.

To disclose researcher positionality: the first two authors, Nomisha and Basma, are Indian and Palestinian-Syrian female scholars respectively and initiated this paper with a mutual aim to honour the voices of women from the Global South. In their recent co-authored work on researcher positionality in crisis settings, both reflect in depth on the risks and opportunities of sharing core identities with participants in sites of struggle (Cremin et al., 2021). Nomisha documents how sharing her participants’ gender and ethnicity in her study of GBV included forging reflexive bonds of solidarity with fellow women who were her teacher-participants, as well as reflecting on the ethical dilemmas of navigating cases of violence together in low-resource settings without systemic support for safeguarding children and women (see Cremin et al., 2021 for a full explanation). Meanwhile, Basma discloses how working with her Syrian youth-participants, and their shared experiences of injustice and resilience, fortified her hopes for ethical and cognitively just futures in academia (Cremin et al., 2021).

To collect the data shared in this article, both researchers designed and executed trauma-informed methodologies, as witnessing and reporting on severe inequalities in their countries of birth gives them a strong commitment to rejecting extractive data collection in favour of an ethic of care. Nomisha devised five principles for trauma-informed care in her methodology that included investing two months of building trust and relationships with participants before official data collection, ‘giving back’ to participants through skills-based volunteering, wellbeing-supportive use of body language and space, and measures to avoid psychological re-traumatisation given the sensitive nature of the research topic (see Kurian and Cremin 2023 for a full overview). Similarly, Basma utilised trauma-informed methodologies in her interview with her female participant. This included offering the participant multiple modes of participation to help her feel safe and comfortable in a precarious context; volunteering to research, locate and secure for her free professional psychological support; taking measures to preserve her anonymity in an unpredictable, high-risk context; and maintaining contact after the research to monitor her safety and wellbeing.

Kevin is a transnational scholar, originally from the US but living and working for more than 20 years in various contexts, including East Africa, East Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He is currently professor and director of the Education, Conflict and Peace Lab at Seoul National University in Korea. His experience working in a variety of Global North, developing and conflict-affected contexts informs his (decolonial) thinking at the intersections of two related yet distinct fields: ‘peace education’ and ‘education in conflict’.

Institutional ethical approval from the University of Cambridge was secured for primary data collection. Thematic coding has been used to analyse the data.

Out of our combined dataset of over 200 hours of interview data and 65 participants, we chose these two narratives to act as intentional contrasts to one another. The first narrative showcases teachers as transformative agents for preventing violence and fostering healing; in the second, the role of teachers is practically invisible as they are not considered supportive or helpful for gaining justice. In other words, Reshmi’s story is one of education’s supporting capacity while Salma’s is the opposite. For this reason the analysis of the two cases is presented separately to highlight these two aspects of education to support (or impede) women survivors of GBV. We use this contrast to show the ‘dual face’ of education as a system that can either transform direct, cultural and structural violence or leave violence unchanged (Bush and Saltarelli 2000). Across both narratives, we analyse ‘structures of care’, that is, contextual factors that create ‘spaces of possibility’ (309) for teachers’ willingness and capacity to act. Hence, we examine two different cultural and educational contexts to illuminate how survivor wellbeing is affected by violence ‘embedded and produced differently in diverse moments, contexts, spaces and places’ (Parkes 2015, 11).

We turn now to the presentation of our data.

Findings

Reshmi’s story: India

This extract is from an interview with a teacher-participant. Her pseudonym is Reshmi.² The district Reshmi identifies – Turbhe – is known as the ‘Red Area’ of Mumbai, with high rates of trafficking and brothel numbers rising from 205 in 2016 to 236 in 2019 (Ganapatye 2019). Reshmi learned that her student’s mother was pressured into trafficking.

I had a sweet eight-year-old - Lila. She got very depressed one day. Stopped paying attention in class, stopped playing with her friends. She comes all the way from Turbhe, so I keep an eye out for her because that place is a bit rough. Initially I asked her, ‘Lila, what happened? Have you not eaten properly?

She began to confide in me, saying,

I don’t like that Mummy leaves me and goes away. Mummy leaves me alone at home every night and goes out, she is never back until the next morning. I lie awake in my bed wondering where she is. Why does she go out? I get scared lying there alone.

I called the mom and told her, ‘I assure you that I don’t think what you are doing is wrong.’ I had three other cases like this but every time, for the mother, it was the need of the hour. I don’t think these women are to be blamed, they are trying to survive in a city that is nirdayi (cold, heartless).

Lila’s mother was terrified when I called her in, she thought I was going to throw Lila out of the school. She said she was being beaten and forced to sell herself. She had almost no money, she was desperate. She kept thanking me for not calling the police. I said,

No need to thank me; why would I lecture you when I know you can’t put food in your children’s stomachs if you don’t have work? I know you are struggling. But you have to quit. Now, I understand that you can’t quit straightaway, it will not be easy. I get that. When do you think you can quit?

The mom said, ‘One year.’ I said, ‘OK, maximum one year. Or the child will come to notice.’ I also warned her, ‘All those who are taking you and going, soon they will not be looking at you but at the child. Soon she will turn 13, become a teenager. What will you do when she is 14–15? They may be harassing you right now but, like a hawk, they are looking at the child. What if they raise a hand against her too?’

She told me later,

It’s true, when I go, the men have already started asking questions, like - How old is your daughter? - or - Why do you bother sending your daughter to school? I think they are going to try and get her to come with me.

She cried and told me she is ‘just a second standard pass’ - she dropped out of school at age 8. She said, ‘What can I do, I don’t have any options.’ But I kept encouraging her to quit. I told her, ‘You are healthy and smart, you can work, there are options, don’t give up. I reminded her that whatever you do, the children will do eventually.’

She told me she was still being beaten but I didn’t call a social worker because the school doesn’t have any. Plus, I wouldn’t want the child to be taken away from her mother. And the police don’t care. They already know everything that goes on in Mumbai. Thousands of women are being beaten or are selling themselves in this city. If I walk into a police station, they won’t pay any attention to me. It wouldn’t be safe for the child or her mother, how could I betray their trust like that? We have no idea what would happen in the hands of the police … you cannot trust them, it is not safe. We aren’t big people, we wouldn’t have money for bribes.

I asked around to see if there was anyone who could hire her. She confessed that she was desperate to stop having to go out at night, she didn’t feel safe, but she didn’t feel confident she could get something else. Finally, I helped her get a job as a maid. The child would come and play in the staffroom, and say, ‘My mother no longer goes anywhere in the night.’

I would tell Lila, ‘Your mummy has always been working very hard to support you and put food in your tummy, be proud of her.’

I was so relieved. Lila is doing okay now. She is studying hard. She’s bright, curious, loves asking questions about everything.

As she got older, she began to realise the truth about her mother’s past. I told her, ‘You focus on school, your friends. Your mother is healthy and well. Be happy.’

Once, when Lila got depressed about it, she said, ‘I wish my mother had never done this in the first place, I feel ashamed.’ I told her never to look down on her mother. I said, ‘Whatever your mother did before, that is not wrong. She did it to support you. There was no other way. You focus on your learning now. Whatever she had to do in the past, that’s all done and over with now. That money has been spent on the basic necessities you needed to survive. Now it’s all gone, never mind. What you’re doing now will be tomorrow’s cheque, look towards the future.’

Salma’s story: an Arabic country

Salma is a 22-year-old girl who woke up on a Saturday morning looking forward to a relaxing day after a week of hard work with an NGO that tackles violence against women. Meeting with survivors of GBV is part of her responsibilities. She always encouraged women to speak out and to transform their silence into language and action.

In the morning of that day, Salma was having breakfast with her family. They started a conversation, and she expressed her opinion. Her brother did not agree with her. Irritated, he asked her to leave the table. Not the type of girl who abides, Salma only left the table when she finished eating. She narrates what happened next:

The moment I turned my back, he threw the pan at me. His hand then surrounded my neck. He landed continuous punches on my face. He pulled my hair and kicked me. The blood ran down my face. It was not the first time. I usually defend myself, but this one was different. He took me by surprise.

After having her wounds treated, Salma registered a complaint against her brother in the hospital and reported him to the police. Adamant to practise what she preaches, she filmed herself and posted a video on her Facebook page. Her left eye swollen with stitches applied, the video went viral. Two days later, she took it down following threats from her family. The story slowly died out.

Two months later, I reached out to Salma, and sought more details. She narrates:

I posted the video because I wanted to confront the patriarchal structures that govern our lives. The reactions of staff in the hospital and the police station when they heard I want to report my brother were stifling. ‘Are you sure? He’s your brother after all’ - My family was enraged at how I tarnished the image of our ‘happy’ family. They’d rather have me silently endure violence than challenge it or publicise it.

Salma talks of how her mom threatened to disown her should she not drop the police case. How can a mom not support her daughter in such a situation? Salma was at a loss to understand.

She arrived back home to find well-known figures from the community in her house. ‘Al mukhtar’, the most prominent figure, and a female member of the parliament (MP) were also there. Before arriving at Salma’s house, the MP contacted Salma and expressed her support. However, when she heard the story from her family, she thought that Salma was at fault, and that she should drop the police case. Under intense pressure, Salma had no other option. Al mukhtar accompanied her to the police station.

Upon dropping the case, the police suggested that they can issue a warrant whereby her brother will have to pay a fine of £1000 should he cause her harm again. Salma felt unsafe. She said: ‘Can you please increase the amount?’. Al mukhtar responded: ‘No. Don’t. He won’t be able to pay’. Al mukhtar wanted the amount of money to be within the capacity of her brother. He wanted her brother to be able to beat her up again. Salma was left painfully speechless. Since then, she has been leading an agonising life. She says:

Emotional violence weaves through the daily tissues of my life. My family continues to threaten me. My mom enters the room, invites my sisters for dinner, and leaves me to eat on my own.

Her family also decided to stop funding her education. Salma studies at a private university. She had only one year left to graduate. Left without the financial capacity to cover the fees, Salma’s education has been interrupted. Despite promises from community members not to allow the incident to impact on her education, all promises were false. Salma talks of her disappointment with how her university tackled the situation:

I was not any student. I was one of the top students in my cohort. I was widely recognised by my lecturers for my academic distinction. You’d expect to receive support – financial or psychological – when it became known that my education was interrupted because of the violence I’ve been through, and because my family do not want to cover the fees of my last year. My university knows everything but they chose to do nothing.

Upon asking her if she tried to reach out to the university and seek support, she explained how among the people who visited her family on the night of the incident were members affiliated with her university. ‘If anything, my university is also part of the network of violence’, she said.

Salma never regretted what she did. She says that if time goes back, she will do the same. Salma did not gain justice. Her brother faced no consequences. Her speaking out added layers of pain and hurt. She said:

I wanted to be a good example. Instead, I am now an example of what happens to girls if they ever dare to speak out. I am facing daily threats from my family whom I still share a roof with. I am tired. They’re pushing me to commit suicide, but I have enough faith not to achieve what they want.

Having now introduced the stories, we turn next to analyse and discuss these cases through our socio-ecological model and peace education lens for combating GBV. The discussion will follow in the order of cases presented above. Before concluding, we offer some novel conceptualisations of ‘being-well’ as a new form of educational agency for peacebuilding. We begin with Reshmi’s story.

Analysis

Finding sanctuary: Reshmi’s story

Previously, it has been argued that empathy falters when societal condemnation ‘clogs the affective space’ (Kurian 2019, 133). Without structural and cultural resources for child safeguarding, teachers may be unsure, reluctant or even apathetic upon witnessing students and families in crisis (Kurian 2020, 2020). Rejecting GBV survivors when they seek support can be particularly damaging, given the social isolation and ‘stigma of shame and guilt’ they often face (Šiljak 2020, 123). In fact, it can perpetuate ‘sanctuary trauma’, a form of trauma that occurs when survivors expect a welcoming and supportive response from the institutions designed to protect them, but find no refuge (Silver 1986, 215).

Female survivors in India rarely find sanctuary due to inadequate legislative protection and socio-cultural norms such as son preference, bystander-ism and shaming. These cultural and structural factors surrounding the direct violence of sex trafficking, then, further complicate the issue and make it difficult to speak about, thus impeding justice. Reshmi’s empathy towards Lila’s mother is thus no small matter. Hermans’ (1992) influential work, Trauma and Recovery points out that a woman-survivor is ‘already devalued’ in society and so ‘she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality … her experience becomes unspeakable’ (16). Hermans notes that we ‘must constantly contend with this tendency to discredit the victim or render her invisible’ (16). Reshmi’s refusal to condemn Lila’s mother, and her unconditional positive regard for both mother and child, therefore afforded the kind of sanctuary that significantly subverted macrosystemic forces of shaming and silencing.

Moreover, the moment she learned about the situation, Reshmi contextualised it within women’s attempts to cope with precarity in a high-poverty city. This type of ‘empathetic imagination’ is ‘not easy or feel-good’; however, through its ‘sensitivity to societal power imbalances’, it can ‘spark compassionate action for change’ (Kurian 2019, 132). Reshmi’s empathy contrasts with the disbelief and invalidation Salma endured. Genuine sanctuary – that helps women-survivors feel seen, heard, and believed – must disrupt cultures of silencing and show empathy for the ‘fundamental injustice of the traumatic experience’ (Hermans 1992, 120).

In addition to macrosystemic social forces, exosystemic constraints may also undermine survivors’ wellbeing. Similar to Salma, Reshmi had few safe spaces in the public sphere. Reshmi felt unable to call social workers, which reflects the sparse population of social workers in India: 0.06 for every 100,000 individuals (World Health Organization 2018). Mental health professionals too tend to represent a ratio below 1 due to ‘very meagre’ funding (WHO 2018, 2). Reshmi’s distrust of the police and the challenges she envisages – from indifference to bribery to danger – echoes patterns observed in developing countries, where it has been noted that the police might not be considered legitimate or trustworthy sources of justice or authority due to bribery, corruption, political pressures, brutality, and harassment (K’nIfe and Haughton 2013; Tankebe 2010). Over a thousand people are killed in police custody each year in India, with the marginalised and poorer classes vulnerable to being beaten, extorted for bribes, raped, tortured, or otherwise abused (Epp 2012). Female survivors of trafficking in Mumbai are particularly vulnerable to extortion, even abuse, by police and state actors. Reshmi’s choice not to involve any other professionals therefore stems from the desire not to re-traumatise Lila or her mother, fitting larger macrosystemic patterns of distrust in public institutions and the high likelihood of sanctuary trauma (Silver 1986). Thus, as shown in her repeated use of ‘I’ (‘I called the mother’, ‘I told the child’ and ‘I got her a job’) Reshmi carried her responsibility alone. Thus, structural barriers presented a situation of potential structural violence preventing Lila and her mother from getting the assistance needed before, during, and after sex trafficking.

We find ourselves caught ‘between idealism and realism’ here (Hajir 2019, 88). On the one hand, since Reshmi was unsupported by any other actors or institutions, it seems vital to recognise the depth of her pastoral care as a form of emotional labour that teachers may undertake to combat broader dynamics and structures of violence. Unlike Salma, who did not enjoy solidarity or validation from other social actors, Lila and her mother received multiple forms of support through Reshmi. Reshmi monitored Lila’s wellbeing, taking into account her dangerous neighbourhood; helped Lila feel safe to confide her worries; called her mother into school and initiated a respectful dialogue; alerted her to Lila’s vulnerability to being trafficked and beaten; helped her obtain safer work; and provided both mother and child long-term emotional and practical support to rebuild their sense of dignity, self-esteem, hope and aspirations for the future. Reshmi offered ‘faith, healing and a critical mind’ (Kester 2007, 11). This trauma-informed care that educators can provide is crucial to recognise, given that undertaking this emotional labour is even more challenging amidst macrosystemic forces of shaming and stigma and few exosystemic resources.

On the other hand, Reshmi’s courage and compassion should not be idealised without acknowledging the need for systemic justice and supportive societal structures. Her emotional labour would have impeded her ability to care for her other pupils. It seems unfair to leave the responsibility of rescuing and healing to individual women educators lacking resources for systemic justice. Reshmi’s experience highlights the importance of understanding wellbeing as a product of the social ecology, rather than solely the responsibility of individuals.

When sanctuary is a mirage: Salma’s story

Utilising the social-ecological framework and peace education lens to analyse Salma’s case reveals the insidious ways through which patriarchy is perpetuated and reproduced within a set of nested structures.

The linkage of Salma’s ‘home life’ and ‘professional life’ at the mesosystem level helps us to understand her response to violence. Salma works with women survivors. She possesses a high level of knowledge about gender (in)equality. Simultaneously, she herself is frequently subject to violence. This dissonance that she contends with seems to have shaped her decisions. In contrast to Reshmi’s decision not to involve social authorities, Salma chose to report her brother to the police. The attempt of police officers and hospital staff to dissuade her exposes how these institutions are influenced by the attitudes (i.e. culture and politics) at the macrosystem level and how they play a role in suppressing female agency in this context. As expressed by Salma, their reactions exacerbated her anger and disappointment and contributed to her decision to post a video on social media. The role that women played (her mom, female MP) in consolidating violence and ensuring male dominance is particularly striking. Their invalidation of Salma’s account has generated feelings of distress and powerlessness. The fact that Salma was not only bullied into taking down the video, but also dropping the police case enhances Šiljak’s (2020) note of how women are often forced to ‘sacrifice their own subjectivity, pain and suffering for the sake of their own families’ (126). Almokhtar’s complicity with the brother was evident when he asked the police officer not to increase the amount of money; a moment that Salma describes as ‘painful’ and ‘shocking’ especially when her request to increase the amount resulted from feelings of helplessness and lack of protection. This indicates the amplification of direct and cultural violence through systemic indifference and resulting structural violence.

Unlike Reshmi’s story, the absence of support from Salma’s educational institution added an additional layer of disappointment and trauma. It has been observed that educators are capable of perpetuating sanctuary trauma; ‘the condition that results when trauma survivors turn to those from whom they hope to find sanctuary only to encounter a reception that is not supportive as anticipated’ (Wolpow et al. 2009, 13). Salma’s account of how she chose not to turn to her university for support because she is already aware of their indifference and complicity pushes us to contemplate the gravity of the trauma she must have been through when ‘sanctuary’ is not even an option within her university system. It compels us to pose questions around the role that educational institutions can possibly play (or not) in coercive contexts where female students might be contending with emotional and physical challenges that pose serious barriers to their education.

Commenting on how her story evolved, she said that ‘emotional violence weaves through the daily tissues of my life’. Salma’s wellbeing is constructed by her relationship with her immediate family who, after more than two months of the incident, continue to threaten and exclude her. Atkinson (2013) calls for an understanding of wellbeing as an ‘effect’ rather than a state, since wellbeing is produced through the ‘mobilisation of resources from everyday encounters’ (137). Salma’s wellbeing has indeed become an ‘effect’ of wider social and cultural structures that have clearly failed her.

It can be argued that Salma lives in a context that is fraught with patriarchal violence that even the mother, the female MP and al-mokhtar have all internalised patriarchy and therefore supported the violence of the brother (see Kester 2019). Another interpretation is that while they oppose the violence of the brother, they objected to the means that Salma chose to resist. Salma’s story has thus the potential to expand an important debate on women’s agency and ‘speaking out’ in dynamic social-ecological systems where patriarchal violence is endemic. According to Salma, her response to violence yielded no positive outcomes. Rather, it has undermined her own self-interests, especially that she has been forced to drop out from college. Salma’s case unravelled in a way that corroborates scholarly engagements that expose the potential gulf between western conceptualisations of ‘agency’ and lived experience of women in extreme settings. For example, Bordonaro and Payne (2012) argue that western conceptualisations of agency may reinforce the domination of violent men in other contexts. Reflecting on how Salma’s agentic practice seems to have tightened the grip of patriarchy, we agree with Campbell and Mannell (2016, 4) that ‘much work remains to be done in developing strong and realistic understandings of the possibilities and limitations for women’s agency in coercive situations’.

Furthermore, Salma’s words ‘I wanted to be a good example. Instead, I am now an example of what happens to girls if they ever dare to speak out’ are particularly disheartening and deeply meaningful. They push us to move away from analysing her case as an individual instance of oppression towards conceiving of it as closely interconnected with the struggle of other women in her context. Her words prompt us to not only understand her wellbeing as nurtured and constructed by the ecological – structural and cultural – conditions surrounding her, but also as contributing to nurturing and cultivating the collective struggle against patriarchy. In this way, the results of her agentic practice, including her subsequent wellbeing, are meaningful to the collective struggle. In her recent book, Abdul Hadi (2020) casts self-care as a political act rooted in the impulse toward self-determination and empowerment. She perceives ‘healing and care as the positive counterparts to struggle’ (3). Approaching Abdul Hadi’s argument in light of Salma’s case and the struggle against patriarchal, structural and cultural violence in coercive contexts more broadly yields valuable insights. It seems justifiable to conclude that a conceptualisation of women’s agency that does not foreground the wellbeing of marginalised women risks further disempowering vulnerable individual women, negatively impacting on the collective struggle, and possibly extending a favour to patriarchy. We thus advocate for conceiving women’s wellbeing as bound up in their struggle for liberation and inextricably interwoven with their agency. This is particularly pertinent in contexts where trauma, violence and systemic injustice are relentless.

Discussion and conclusion

Wellbeing as agency: fresh conceptualisations of ‘being-well’

The two stories above offer different ways of “seeing’’ women-survivors’ fraught realities. The first is seen through the eyes of a female educator helping another woman in India; and the second takes us directly into a survivor’s intimate reality behind closed doors in an Arabic country. By contextualising our women-participants’ experiences of sanctuary – offered or denied – we follow rising calls in wellbeing literature to speak about ‘uncomfortable topics’ such as ‘social power, stigmatisation and exclusion’ (Eiroa-Orosa 2019, 2).

Education plays diverging roles across these stories. For one survivor, it acts as a tool for healing. For another, it perpetuates sanctuary trauma. Reshmi and Salma’s stories suggest that the micro-level empathy and compassion given or denied to women-survivors shapes the macro-level scope of justice available to them; their capacity to continue their education and life aspirations; and their sense of self-worth, hope, dignity and safety. Devising realistic ways for educators to tackle violence – and its structural and cultural enablers – remains a ‘nagging question’ (Hajir 2019, 89).

If education is to provide sanctuary, then a holistic integration of care for individual wellbeing and collective concern for structural justice might mean generating fresh conceptualisations that transcend standard dichotomies between individuals and structures. For example, previous work has questioned the notion that resilience signifies a passive internal acceptance of the status quo; instead, it has been suggested that a new conceptualisation of ‘resilience as resistance’ could help highlight how local actors in crisis and conflict-affected settings may view their resilience as a form of political opposition to an oppressive regime (Hajir, Clarke-Habibi, and Kurian 2021). Similarly, we seek to transcend traditional conceptualisations of wellbeing as an internal psychological state. Instead, we conceptualise wellbeing as contextual agency, disrupted or nurtured by the ecological conditions surrounding individual women and girls. Furthermore, we advocate for conceiving of women’s wellbeing as bound up in their struggle for liberation and inextricably interwoven with their agency. This is crucial if educators are to avoid conceptualisations of agency that are divorced from the lived reality of vulnerable populations.

This framing of wellbeing as agency compels us to shift towards the language of ‘being-well’. In other work, we have utilised the phrase ‘being-well’ as a linguistic and conceptual provocation: to stress that wellbeing is not a static entity or exclusively individual property, but dynamically constructed by the relationships, structures and cultures surrounding teachers and learners (Culshaw and Kurian 2021). As an active verb, ‘being-well’ is a state swayed and shaped by external forces, including pressures and barriers that undermine the capacity for wellbeing: ‘how can we seriously talk about being well if we do not understand what it means to be struggling?’ (Culshaw and Kurian 2021, 7). We use the same language here to ‘humanize and recognize our interdependencies’ (Kester, Archer, and Bryant 2019, 276) and underscore the social, political, economic and historical struggles influencing wellbeing. Participants’ emotions – from fear, shame, and horror to hope, trust and comfort – show how structural constraints and supports ‘reverberate in the body and mediate how the world is experienced’ (Coffey 2022, 1).

With this conceptual shift towards being-well as a structurally mediated state, the desired locus of intervention also changes. Traditional discourses of wellbeing are increasingly critiqued for encouraging individualistic policy solutions that place the responsibility on individuals to alter their behaviours (Atkinson 2013; Jonathan and Allister McGregor 2020). Indeed, individualistic solutions may be particularly damaging for survivors of gender-based violence.

Across global humanitarian and development policy, peace education, too, has been positioned as a vital tool for addressing the harm and injustice of GBV (UN 2023b; UN Women 2019; UNESCO 2022). Peace educators themselves have acknowledged that the field has a valuable opportunity to strengthen its advocacy and transformative potential to tackle all forms of violence against women and girls (Cook 2007; Fobear 2014; McInerney and Tim Archer 2023) but that peace education has yet to fully explore the nuances of gendered violence (Finley and Cooper 2018). We therefore utilise a social-ecological perspective to offer two sets of recommendations for the field of peace education. The first concerns how peace educators help mainstream education systems to reflect on their own internal, institution-specific cultures and attitudes towards GBV). The second concerns how peace educators help students reflect on the broader external social conditions affecting GBV survivors.

First, we call on peace educators to help key stakeholders in mainstream education systems determine the degree of agency and care that their institutions afford to women-survivors to ‘be well’:

• What relationships are forged between teachers, learners, and families?

• How do educators respond to disclosures of GBV?

• What mechanisms are in place to train educators to support survivors?

• How are educators sensitised towards different cultural and psychological stages of the life-course in order to provide developmentally-appropriate and carefully contextualised support? (e.g. understanding how the emotional needs of a young child might differ from, or overlap with, a university-age woman)

• In what ways do educators encourage survivors to seek institutional support?

• What avenues of support are available?

• What guidance do educational institutions offer to remove barriers to learning resulting from GBV?

• How might education in other ways assist survivors?

Second, we call on peace educators to interrogate how education systems engage with broader ecological conditions beyond education, since it may prove ‘pointless’ to champion survivors’ wellbeing if the sanctuary provided cannot ‘lift structural inequalities’ (Hajir 2019, 90). Peace education curricula can help students understand the affective and relational dimensions of direct, structural and cultural violence (Zembylas 2007) by teaching students to think critically about societal conditions:

• Are women and girls believed by their families and communities?

• Do they exercise any power in family and community decision-making?

• Are they able to place trust in community leaders?

• Are they able to seek support from their local police station, healthcare systems and other community governance mechanisms, without being doubted?

• Are they able to share their experiences via local communication channels, such as the media and social networks?

• Do they have women in positions of power to reach out to for support?

• Are they able to share their voice in research?

• Are their needs recognised and prioritised in national and global policy?

• Do women and girls have a participatory role to play in the construction of new policy and strategies for survivors’ wellbeing?

These questions, while not exhaustive, can be used in peace education curricula to conceptualise wellbeing as the level of agency enabled within structures of care (Dadvand and Cahill 2021) and thereby support education for peacebuilding in the ways envisaged in global policies for sustainable development and human flourishing (UN 2023a; UN Women 2019; UNESCO 2022). At each level of the micro-, meso-, exo- and chrono-systems, we call for ‘conditions of possibility’ that nurture women’s lives and freedoms (Coffey 2022, 2). ‘Being-well’ depends on whether women’s voices are amplified or silenced, resource-distribution in the local context, and the actions and attitudes of actors and institutions.

We therefore call for interventions and policies that tackle the root causes of survivors’ suffering, that allow women, men, girls and boys to co-construct ecologies of care, and recognise how ‘wellbeing is structurally patterned’ (Coffey 2022, 3). Rather than portraying the individual as the ‘primary agent in the creation of personal health and wellbeing’ (Sointu 2005, 255), it is the social ecology that must be responsible for providing the sanctuary to be well. Our analysis closes with the hope that education systems and peace education more broadly can offer validation, support and justice, fostering ‘healing and care as the positive counterparts to struggle’ (Hadi 2020, 3). Wellbeing as contextual agency, disrupted or nurtured by the ecological conditions opens space for the politics of the possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nomisha Kurian

Nomisha Kurian: Dr Nomisha Kurian is a University of Cambridge Teaching Associate and Research Bye-Fellow (Churchill College). She specialises in child wellbeing and co-chairs the Cambridge Wellbeing and Inclusion Special Interest Group at the Faculty of Education.

Basma Hajir

Basma Hajir: Dr Basma Hajir is a Lecturer in Education at the University of Bath. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Basma’s research interests lie in Education, Conflict and Peacebuilding, Higher Education, Education in Emergencies, and post-colonial and de-colonial theories.

Kevin Kester

Kevin Kester: Dr Kevin Kester is Associate Professor at Seoul National University and Director of the Education, Conflict and Peace Lab. His research interests lie in the sociology and politics of education with a focus on the intersections of peace education and global citizenship education; higher education in conflict-affected contexts; the global governance of education, conflict and peace; and decolonizing education. His latest publications are in the International Journal of Comparative Education and Development; Journal of Peace Education; and Routledge’s Innovations in Peace and Education Praxis.

Notes

1. To safeguard the participant, the name of the Arabic country has been withheld, as we clarify on page 6.

2. Reshmi spoke in ‘Hinglish’ - the hybrid mixture of English and Hindi commonly spoken in Mumbai (Mehta, 2009). After translating her words to English for the purpose of this extract, I showed her my translation to check that she agreed with my interpretations.