Denise Saint Arnault, August 1, 2020
Most research focuses on self-disclosure and use of legal service, but we are interested in why survivors don’t seek help even long after moving to safety. Reasons described in the literature include the belief that violence was “normal/not serious;” shame; and believing that they should “deal with it alone.”
Normalization of GBV is the perceived transmission, internalization, and impact of cultural beliefs, values, and goals on recovery activity for survivors. Since normalization of GBV is a cultural phenomenon, we use a cultural perspective to understand it. However, we are not focusing so much on how normalization causes violence, but rather how normalization causes silence.
Culture is defined in our research as a collectively formed and shared understanding that is transmitted across generations. It is internalized by individuals as a set of mental perspectives, proclivities, and motivations that underlie their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Culture impacts how we understand ourselves, our world, our place in that world, and what we do as a part of that world. These perceptions motivate our behavior, which in turn, enforces and reinforces our “culture.” In this way, culture affects how we think and feel, and this affects our social activities, including whether we seek help for our suffering.
This cultural internalization is implicit. People don’t realize it is operating within them. It is the widely understood and unquestioned meanings and rules of living that are embodied tendencies that organize how we perceive, react to, and behave within the social world. We believe that this normalization of GBV can be part of the implicit rules for living, and survivors may not realize that, when they are silent, this may be in part because they too have normalized GBV. These beliefs are held by everyone around them and often is “the way things are.”
Survivors are not to blame for accepting their culture! But we are finding that de-normalization is a central process of recovery. This means discovering how normalization is part of our own belief system and challenging it in ourselves. For example, when we feel shame about our experiences, we can learn to realize that this is the “normalization talking” and that we are not at all to blame for the pain another has inflicted on us.
While we know that support groups and advocacy messages are giving de-normalizations messages, many survivors say they have heard these messages, but don’t think they apply to them. We think that de-normalization is deeply personal, and survivors need to discover how normalization lives within them. When they do, suddenly, they can recognize that these messages DO apply to them. We are finding this to be a critical and lasting step in the recovery process.