@SapphosRock
Happy to share it again Quaggers. Just so people can see exactly what they are donating their money to.
Good ethos for a refuge?
What Posie is expressing here is a mainstream feminist view, albeit a liberal/libertarian one.
Here is the quote again:
》The point is some women recognise signs of abuse, some don't. Some listen to their intuition and some don't. And I am a firm believer in you are only treated in the ways that you allow.《(Posie Parker)
In the mid-nineties, several liberal feminists published books denouncing the radical feminist analysis of male violence as systemic discrimination against women and girls. They declared that this "victim feminism", as they called it, denied individual women their agency and unfairly demonised men. Influenced by neoliberalist ideas they claimed that the radical feminist analysis of male violence infantilised women and portrayed them as weak victims in need of protection when they should instead be empowered to take responsibility for their own safety (alongside taking responsibility for their own sexual satisfaction and their own personal fulfilment and their own career success and so on).
This backlash against practically all of left-wing feminism (socialist and Marxist feminists, radical feminists, lesbian separatists) as victim feminism was much acclaimed in the press for allowing them to cast feminists employing a class-based analysis as the man-haters the male-dominated press had always known they were. So they celebrated the new power feminism. Every choice a woman makes is a feminist choice and we can choose to refuse to be a victim. And have fun while we're at it. And this way of thinking gained traction until it became firmly entrenched as mainstream feminism.
Of course, that happened because it was allowed to happen. This version of feminism is no threat to the patriarchy as it denied that the patriarchy a) really existed and b) actually did anything to women as a class at all because c) victimhood is psychological, not systemic so d) victimhood is therefore weakness and e) power feminism is all about being strong and taking charge of your own destiny. No victims here. Much of the discourse btw stopped just shy of victim blaming, but in some cases it strayed right into it.
Despite that this much welcomed interpretation of feminism continues to underpin liberal feminism today. It's all about individual women getting ahead within the system while maintaining the status quo.
This way of thinking has permeated throughout women's rights organisations across the Western world. It led to Nordic countries embracing gender-neutral policy making (whose negative impact on women and girls is now finally being noticed) and to UK politicians famously describing sexual violence perpetrated predominantly by boys predominantly against girls in our schools as peer-on-peer violence.
Back to the quote then. So first of all, Posie is not expressing an extremist view here in my view but a commonplace place one pushed for over 20 years by the now dominant strand of feminism - liberal feminism.
Secondly, from a radical feminist point of view, casting male violence against females as merely individual-on-individual violence and portraying victimhood as purely psychological and not systemic is clearly wrong. However, Posie is specifically talking here about domestic abuse and its female victims.
And we now have substantial amounts of research, both quantitative and qualitative, which shows that some women are indeed victimised over and over again and that there are identifiable reasons for that.
And with those reasons came solutions, such as the Freedom Program, which teaches victimised women to recognise signs of abuse and gives them the tools they need to change the patterns of their behaviour to avoid further or future abuse.
A more nuanced view than Posie's recognises that systemic violence against women and girls is enabled in a patriarchal society. And that we as a class are neither responsible nor at fault for being victimised in this way. And it also recognises that repeated abuse has a traumatic effect on some individual women and girls that leads to them internalising patterns of behaviour that allow an abuser to take advantage.
As radical feminists who seek to protect women and girls from male violence we therefore seek to both change the system that oppresses us as a class and to teach individual women and girls how to recognise abuse so they can to protect themselves against it as long as the oppressive system persists.
Thirdly, talking about "allowing" oneself to be abused because one does not recognise signs of abuse and/or ignore one's instincts does not equate to saying that the female victim is to blame for being abused. The blame lies with the abuser. Posie's view, shared by many, though is that some women will recognise the signs and will listen to their instincts and walk away before an abuser gets the chance. And others don't. Posie's wording does not suggest that these women are choosing to not recognise the signs and choosing to ignore their instincts but that they are unable to do what other women can. What Posie believes she can.
Of course, little was known about the psychological side of abuse, and about coercive control and its insidious effect on victims in the 90s. From today's perspective it seems bonkers to claim that every woman can choose to refuse to be a victim and that's all there is to it. We now know that there is far more to it than that and that many cannot withstand the psychological damage inflicted by an abuser without outside help. We also know that we can learn to help ourselves and that we can help others.
And that is what Posie is attempting to do. To help those she believes cannot help themselves. Even if she firmly and clearly believes that she'd never be in that position.
Whatever you may think of her otherwise, this is no more and no less than what motivates many other women who work in the VAWG sector - to help women less fortunate than themselves.