This study problematizes the notion of victim in the context of women who have
experienced battering in their intimate committed relationships. To this end I interviewed four
women, using an in-depth semi-structured interview to obtain the women's narratives. I examined
the women's narratives in order to analyze how they constructed and interpreted their experiences
of victimization as well as how they perceived and defined themselves. The intent was to render
visibility to the uniqueness, complexity, diversity, and commonalities of these women's stories.
Women who have experienced battering are important to this study because the label "victim" is
frequently applied to them regardless of whether these women define themselves or construct their
experiences in terms of being victims or of being battered.
Critiquing dominant perspectives, attending to broader cultural contexts, and exploring
marginalized realities are indicative of a longstanding feminist agenda. Psychology and
counselling psychology are constructed within dominant historical and sociocultural contexts.
Mainstream and popular psychological texts, in their attempts to establish grand theories and
prevailing norms, have tended to engage in oversimplified textual constructions presumed to reflect
lived realities, yet ignoring both individual and broader contexts. In this thesis I attend both to
contexts and to marginalized realities.
The significance of this project lies in its potential to enhance current therapeutic and
counselling practices. Additionally, it provides a challenge to the often presumed innocent
employment of language without regard for its significant meanings and impact. It is critical that
professionals working with women who are experiencing battering, understand the complexity of
their experiences without imposing labels that limit these women's identities and are incongruent
with their lived realities. This thesis problematizes dominant discourse regarding victims and
victimization in an exploration of multiple, sometimes seemingly contradictory meanings, and
diverse processes. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/5921 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Carter, Margaret |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 16404982 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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