Women Speak: The Value of Community-Based Research on Woman Abuse
Conclusion
“We wanted to ensure we could get at the women. If we were going to do that, we need to be in the community or we need the community contacts. How are we going to get that? We need to make sure that we have credibility with the community. With the contacts that CAPRO had with the people who were right there in the community, with the women, it made a lot of sense to go with that. And for us it didn’t matter whether the women had experience with research or not. We thought, we can train them on that. Between the two of us we have a lot of experience in research so we can train them on that. It was more important for us that they had a commitment to the issue and wanted to do something in their communities as well. Because we figured that was the only way this could have a ripple effect. As the federal government going in and doing research, I don’t think we ever would have had the same sort of results or impact that the research has had if we just parachuted in and parachuted out. The beauty of this research is that these women are in the communities still and so those skills are still there.”
This quotation, from a Justice Canada researcher, shows the guiding principles of the ORWAS project. The community-based nature of the project comes through in so many ways: in the importance of hearing directly from survivors in their communities; in the value placed on having researchers from the communities; in the desire to leave skilled researchers behind in the communities after the research project was complete. In all of these ambitions, ORWAS was a remarkable success.
ORWAS engaged survivors and community researchers in a process of determining the central obstacles for rural women living in violent relationships. ORWAS allowed survivors in these rural communities to make their experiences known, through a partnership between government (Justice Canada) and a rural, community-based, anti-woman-abuse organisation (CAPRO). The tangible results of the study are six community reports and a synthesis report, all of which will be valuable in future research, lobbying, and policy formation.
The study developed a research method that recognised the responsibility inherent in doing community-based research on woman abuse. In choosing to avoid a “parachute in” approach, the researchers followed the principles of the Research as Empowerment model. Throughout the process, care was taken to empower the women involved and to minimise the negative effects of participation. The survivors and community researchers alike were respected for their knowledge and contributions. The ‘empowerment through research’ process is a less tangible, but equally valuable result of ORWAS: investment in building skills among community people is a positive contribution that research can make. This is in sharp contrast to traditional research methods that take data from “subjects”, while providing little in return.
The ORWAS study laid the groundwork for social action by contributing to the individual empowerment of the community researchers. The next steps toward social action, based on Horvath’s framework, will involve support for those individuals to link with groups, and for groups to have access to resources in order to engage in community-based social action.
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