D.Litt et Phil. / The study explored strategies abused women use to overcome power and control in their intimate relationships, using their own self-agency. Data was collected through the technique of triangulation in which three women who were legally divorced, wrote their own stories, after which each was individually interviewed by the researcher to get information about the process of leaving and staying away from their abusive relationships, and clearing up and moving on with their lives. Grounded theory was used to analyse the stories, the individual interviews, and the focused group discussion to generate information about the process of leaving abusive relationships on a more abstract level. The study is based on the epistemological underpinnings of post-modernism and feminism. The categories of open coding were generated from the research process and the data: These are abuse, emotional absence, dependence, resistance, use of absolutes, expectations, idealism, independence, decision-making, empowerment, recovery, innate strength and resources, self-esteem, culture and religion, introspection, verbal conceptualisation, hope, spirituality, and absence of social justice. Participants used a broad range of empowerment strategies in the process of leaving their abusive marital relationships and showed that leaving an abusive relationship is a recursive process of leaving and returning, for which women cannot be blamed. They had to make a paradigm shift to establish a basis for leaving, use their internal and external resources to make it on their own, and utilise aspects of psychological, social, racial/cultural, and religious forms of empowerment to advocate on their own behalf. The process of decision-making enabled them to gradually reclaim control over their lives. The empowerment of abused women was not necessarily equivalent to their full recovery from abuse, even though this was a pivotal point in the recovery process that began long before the women left their relationships. The results show that those women who had innate strength and were able to use it to access community resources, were more likely to leave abusive relationships. The women who participated in this study managed to leave their abusive marriages, despite having their lives threatened; each of them grew and developed personally and transformed their lives. Each has realised that there is life after abuse.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:3044 |
| Date | 22 August 2012 |
| Creators | Dangor, Zubeda |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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