VOICES OF EXPERIENCE
The lived experience insights (below) reveal the ways in which the person has resisted and responded to the violence used against them. The descriptions reveal some of the context in which the violence has occurred, how people, services and systems responded and how these responses were helpful, unhelpful or harmful.
Our thanks to every person who contributed insights for the benefit of many. We acknowledge that despite our best efforts to listen to lived experiences of violence and abuse, we can never fully understand all that a person’s experiences mean to them now or through their life. We understand that lived and living experiences can never be fully represented in language or any other form.
VOICES OF EXPERIENCE - MY SAFETY KIT
The Voices of Experience (My Safety Kit) are de-identified insights of people’s lived experience of domestic, family and sexualised violence and other adversities. In this section the descriptions have been explored and assembled in the My Safety Kit focus areas.
VOICES OF EXPERIENCE
The Voices of Experience are de-identified insights of people’s lived experience of domestic, family and sexualised violence and other adversities. In this section the descriptions have been developed by the author and assembled with Insight Exchange.
VOICES OF RESISTANCE
Voices of Resistance was a project that documented four women’s resistance and responses to the violence they experienced. The project participants supported the development and prototyping of the interview process for Insight Exchange through the sharing of their resistance and responses to violence. The result of the prototyping phase is an interview process with clear protocols and steps that provides a structure for an interview that affirms agency, builds on safety and upholds dignity. These are their insights (below) of their resistance and responses to violence.
"I’ve tried to leave him that many times. I’ve left houses. I’ve fled and lost heaps of my stuff, I lost my drums. It was pretty heart breaking losing my instruments because it’s what keeps me sane; it’s my pulse and my passion."
"I did a lot of behind-the-scenes thinking in my head. It was planning to manage the outcomes as best I could in order to stay as safe as possible. I did little things like buying the right brand of butter, even though it’s not what I liked, but it meant that he wouldn’t throw it at the wall, or at me. This was me taking back power and taking control to avoid the violence and verbal abuse."
"Leaving is hard and scary. The complexity of everything you have to navigate on top of processing the abuse is overwhelming."
"When my daughter was born, there was this fresh kind of something that took over me, that said “you do have the strength, you are going to do this and you are going to do this effectively.' At that point I started thinking about my exit strategy and started to share it with a few people."