Handbook on Sexual Violence (51 page)

It is an interesting question as to whether we can work collaboratively in this context, where external motivation to change may be higher in some respects than internal motivation. We strive for transparency in our work by aiming to be clear, at every step of the way, about our thinking and our intentions. This is reflected in our early meetings with the family and stable third, where we try to identify the risks of further violence, from all three perspectives, and the means we have to work towards safety in relationships. We try to be clear about our moral position in this work, namely, that we believe that no one should live in fear of the people they love. This sounds simple to say, and in practice we know that it is often hard to live by. We try not to inhabit the moral high ground in our work by talking about our own ethical dilemmas around violence in relationships; for example, as parents ourselves, we have struggled with the issue of physical bullying against our sons and the dilemma of striving for peaceful resolutions or supporting them in fighting back. Often we do not have solutions, but we hold a commitment to try to help our clients find legal, moral and ethically responsible solutions . . . and we give people credit for trying. As the systems model is a strengths-based model, it enables us to look for success and to build on it (Vetere and Dallos 2003).

We do not offer confidentiality in the work, rather we say we need to negotiate what may be held as confidential. We explain that if the information pertains to safety, we cannot keep it confidential, as we may need to speak about it at a safety planning meeting. And of course in the early stages of our work we do not know whether what we are being told pertains to safety or not. Thus we negotiate confidentiality as we progress in the work. We realise that colleagues in the professional network have to know that we will not keep violence a secret, and that we will take appropriate action for reasons of safety and protection. At first we thought none of our clients would trust us, but we received interesting feedback – they told us that at least they knew where they stood with us! Finally, and in the interests of transparency, we make clear our relationship with social control and the agencies of social control, such as the local police family violence unit, and the social services. For example, if we know the social worker involved with the family, we talk about our relationship with the social worker and how we have worked with them in the past. We tell people that if we are worried about them, or for them, we will not go behind their backs to other professionals, rather we shall talk to them about why we are worried about safety and why we think we need to take action for reasons of safety.

It is essential that families can be seen to work co-operatively within the professional system and that they see professional workers as potentially helpful. This is a tall order for some families. We met a man and his family

where, for the past 13 years, their social worker had reviewed their care of the five children, and each time had told them their parental care was just good enough. Then the social worker retired and a new social worker reviewed the family. The new social worker did not think the level of parental care was adequate, and told the family she was going to start child protection proceedings. The father was furious – he did not understand why the social services department had deemed their care adequate for 13 years and then seemed to change their view. The father did a very foolish and dangerous thing – he threatened to kill the social worker and, overnight, he earned a reputation of being a dangerous man. We understood the father’s behaviour in the context of living with the effects of constant scrutiny. We helped the father to take responsibility for his behaviour, to apologise for the threat, and to find ways to restore co-operative working – essential if he was to continue to live with his wife and children.

Conclusion

We review and audit all our work during the safety assessment and safety planning process, with the family members, the stable third and other involved professionals. We do not progress into family therapy and couples therapy as such if the no-violence contract cannot hold. When working with couples, for example, a safe separation would be judged as a good outcome. Since much of our work is done within the child protection system, we cannot always find out what happens to families subsequently. We offer ‘top-up’ meetings and follow-up meetings to support families in their attempts to live safely. Our door is always open for further work if that seems to be needed. Our own audit processes show that safety planning work has been helpful to more than two-thirds of the couples and families we meet, both within the child protection system and with referrals from other health care professionals. We think this is due in part to the high stakes – the risks of enforced family break-up and the wish to stay connected are highly motivating for people, alongside the high level of selection that has occurred in the family’s journey to our door.

In this
chapter, I have tried to show how responsibility for violent behaviour can be developed alongside explanations and interventions that try to understand and pre-empt violence, and to understand and predict safety and protection. As systemic practitioners we try to work within a collaborative framework. We use systemic thinking to help us hold the complexity of violent behaviour in mind, while planning and working for safety, and reviewing and monitoring the development of the entitlement to safety.

Further reading

The main question addressed in this
chapter is how to work therapeutically with both victims and perpetrators of family violence with safety as the highest priority. The focus of the chapter therefore is on the development of safe practice and a visible

safety methodology. My book with Jan Cooper outlines in much more detail, and with many worked examples, how this can be done in practice, across a range of client groups, and in different health and social care settings: Cooper, J. and Vetere, A. (2005)
Domestic Violence and Family Safety: A systemic approach to working with violence in families
. London: Whurr/Wiley. If readers are interested in understanding the developmental impact of witnessing family violence for children, they might like to look at the work of the Wave Trust, and their 2005 report,
Violence and What to Do about It
. It is available at www.wavetrust.org

References

Bowlby, J. (1988)
A Secure Base
. New York: Basic Books.

British Crime Survey (2000–2010) See Home Office below.

Cooper, J. and Vetere, A. (2005)
Domestic Violence and Family Safety: Working systemically with violence in families
. London: Whurr/Wiley.

Fonagy, P. and Target, M. (1997) ‘Attachment and reflective function: Their role in self organisation’,
Development and Psychopathology
, 9: 679–700.

Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate and BMRB (2009)
Social Research, British Crime Survey: 2000–2010
. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive.

Kelly, L. (1988)
Surviving Sexual Violence
. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Moffitt, T. and Caspi, A. (1998) ‘Annotation: Implications of violence between intimate partners for child psychologists and psychiatrists’,
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
, 39: 137–44.

Novaco, R. (1993) ‘Clinicians ought to view anger contextually’,
Behaviour Change
, 10: 208–18.

Stern, D. (1985)
The Interpersonal World of the Infant
. New York: Basic Books.

Vetere, A. and Cooper, J. (2001) ‘Working systemically with family violence: risk, responsibility and collaboration’,
Journal of Family Therapy
, 23: 378–98.

Vetere, A. and Cooper, J. (2005) ‘Children who witness violence at home’, in A. Vetere and E. Dowling (eds)
Narrative Therapies with Children and Their Families: A Practitioner’s Guide to Concepts and Approaches
. London: Routledge.

Vetere, A. and Cooper, J. (2008) ‘Supervision and family safety: Working with domestic violence’, in J. Hamel (ed.)
Intimate Partner and Family Abuse
. NY: Springer.

Vetere, A. and Dallos, R. (2003)
Working Systemically with Families: Formulation, intervention and evaluation
. London: Karnac.

Walby, S. and Allen, J. (2004)
Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Stalking: Findings from the British Crime Survey
. Home Office Research Study 236. London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, March.

Chapter 10
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Violence and prostitution: beyond the notion of a ‘continuum of sexual violence’

Jo Phoenix

Meet Jo Phoenix

Jo Phoenix is Professor of Criminology at Durham University. She has been researching prostitution and the regulation of sex and sexuality since the mid 1990s. Her interest in the area started with involvement in the anti- pornography grass-roots feminist campaigning of the 1980s. Many of her concerns when campaigning were changed as a result of meeting, researching and working with women in the sex industry (and those organisations and agencies working for and on behalf of them). The main driver behind Jo’s research now is a deep concern about how to obtain a measure of social justice for marginalised, victimised groups of people (children, women, young people) whose lives have been shattered by their experiences of violence, poverty and so on and for whom government intervention is often experienced as a form of punishment and/or control.

Introduction

Prostitution, pornography, murder, rape, exploitation, drugs, trafficking and the sexual degradation of women are little more than standard settings and plot devices in the world of straight-to-DVD and B-rate crime dramas. Everyone knows that in these forms of entertainment, women in the sex industry are expendable or more likely ‘just’ the victims that help push the story along. Doubtless the portrayal of sexual violence in the sex industry is fed partly by stereotype and partly by a selective understanding of the empirical realities experienced by women in the sex industry. For instance, some of the more extreme and shocking forms of sexual violence are intimately associated with the sex industry. The opening decade of the twenty-first century bore witness in the UK to the serial murders of five sex

workers in Ipswich and three sex workers in Bradford. To this list of eight women we can add more than a dozen known names of UK sex workers whose murders have gone unsolved in the past two decades as well as the unknown numbers of sex workers who have simply gone missing in that time period. Qualitative academic research generated across North America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and UK testifies to the regularity with which women in the sex industry experience sexual violence. Hence, it is hardly surprising that crime dramas and thrillers draw on what have become, by now, ‘set pieces’ connecting the sex industry to sexual violence and constructing the sex industry as some dark hinterland beyond the rule of law and beyond the boundaries of human decency.

The aim of this chapter is not to catalogue sexual violence/s in the sex industry, but rather to prise it open and in so doing pose several critical theoretical questions. What does it mean to claim that, even at a very basic level, there is an interconnection between sexual violence and the sex industry? How can we begin to make sense of it, or to theorise it? In order to address these questions, this
chapter focuses on prostitution because it provides an excellent case study that illuminates some of the enduring theoretical difficulties. Sexual violence in prostitution happens at the conjunction of both ‘the sexual’ and the economic realm. The theoretical difficulties it demonstrates are those connected with trying to understand sexual violence in relation to the specific social, ideological, economic and political conditions of existence for a particular social institution (that is, prostitution). How can the relationship between the intensely personal, the social and the economic be captured and how does that relationship shape, influence and/or structure vulnerability and responses to sexual violence? To clarify, one of the defining features of prostitution
as a social institution
(and thereby not reduced to the level of the activity of selling sex for money) is the blurring of boundaries between the personal, private and intimate world of sex, the public realm of economy, and of work and the political realm of regulation and formal social control. In prostitution, intensely private experiences (such as sex) become commodities to be produced, consumed and exchanged in an impersonal, commercialised setting. As a social institution, prostitution is comprised of a seemingly endless variety of relationships and social activities, that are formally and informally regulated, policed and controlled – which in turn has objective effects on the relationships, activities and individuals within prostitution. Indeed, it may be more accurate to discuss
prostitutions
, as the experiences of those working from, for instance, the streets are substantially different from those working within, for instance, escort services or bondage, discipline and sado-masochism or parlours. Underpinning the sheer diversity of prostitution, though, is that it is one of the few social institutions which directly link the intimate and private realm (and practice) of sex to the public realm of the economic. This, therefore, raises the question of why particular types of theoretical tools are needed that do not collapse the economic into the sexual or vice versa.