Gender,Free Will,and Woman-to-Woman Sexual Assault in Service Provider Discourses

Abstract

Although still less recognized than man-to-woman sexual assault, awareness of woman-to-woman sexual assault has grown sufficiently over the past three decades that we should no longer speak of its discursive emergence as the breaking of hitherto uninterrupted silence. This article begins the project of exploring and comparing discourses used to frame this phenomenon. Based on a situational analysis of interviews with service providers who had experience supporting survivors of woman-to-woman sexual assault, this text presents three discourses used to think about this form of violence: all violence is men’s violence, violence is a choice, and nonviolence is learned. Each discourse is characterized by a specific relationship between sexual violence, free will/determinism, and gender and by attendant rules for what can and cannot be said. As such, each communicates ideological commitments, which reflect and sustain specific approaches to antisexual violence work. Each seeks to negotiate a sociopolitical context of gender-based oppression and sexuality-based oppression that includes the risks and realities of silencing and recuperation of survivor speech. The objective of this article is to enable service provider reflection about the implications of diverse discourses used to frame woman-to-woman sexual assault and to discourage naturalization of any given approach.

This article presents discourses deployed by service providers, as they talk about their clients’ experiences of woman-to-woman sexual assault. Discourses identified include all violence is men’s violence, violence is a choice, and nonviolence is learned. This article opens with a brief recent history of sexual assault discourses which highlights the political context in which these three discourses compete. In particular, providers negotiate the pressures of misogyny and heteronormativity, as well as the risks of silencing and recuperation of survivor speech. Each discourse is characterized by the relationship it posits between sexual violence, gender, and choice. As such, each communicates ideological commitments that reflect and sustain specific approaches to sexual violence prevention and response. This article is intended to enable service provider reflection about the implications of diverse discourses used to frame woman-to-woman sexual assault.

Following the Foucauldian approach of Alcoff and Gray (1993), I take up “discourses” as sets of rules that determine what can and what cannot be said about a given topic. Multiple discourses typically compete to describe a phenomenon with some discourses having greater authority than others, even enjoying the status of “common sense.” Alcoff and Gray describe two mechanisms that allow discourses to maintain dominance: “silencing” and “recuperation.” Silencing is the denial of speech to particular individuals, “for example, through institutionalization, denial of access to listeners or readers, or the controlled administration of drugs” (Alcoff & Gray, 1993, p. 268). Dominant discourses have silenced survivors by excluding the possibilities of “‘rapist father’ or a ‘rapist boyfriend’” from speech (p. 266). Recuperation, on the other hand, subsumes disruptive speech into the dominant discourse. For example, when survivors are characterized as conniving or crazy, the transformative potential of survivor speech is muted. Presenting a survivor as conniving problematizes that person’s agency, while presenting a survivor as “crazy” denies that person’s agency and credibility. Despite the workings of silencing and recuperation, alternative discourses vie sometimes successfully for dominance (Fairclough, 1985).

The discourses used to frame sexual assault, for example, have been constructed and reconstructed in recent decades. As I have elaborated elsewhere (Malinen, 2014), sexual assault crisis services originated with the second-wave feminists who identified violence against women (henceforth, VAW) as an epidemic. This epidemic became visible through “consciousness raising” practices in which women began to communicate with one another about their experiences of violence and to realize that these experiences were not personal, but systemic. Much has been accomplished in feminist efforts to counteract VAW. Second-wave feminists made political and cultural inroads with their understanding of VAW as “a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women” and as a “crucial social mechanism by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men” (United Nations [UN] General Assembly, 1993). An infrastructure of VAW organizations has arisen from second-wave feminism, although at least here in Canada, service providers today face endless rounds of funding cuts. Women’s Shelters Canada (formerly the Canadian Network of Women’s Shelters and Transition Houses, 2002), which uses the motto “United to end violence against women,” had 350 member institutions in 2012, many of which referred to themselves as VAW shelters. Current membership numbers are not listed on this organization’s website. Women’s Shelters Canada in turn belongs to the Global Network of Women’s Shelters (GNWS, n.d.) that “works to strengthen and unite the women’s shelter movement globally to end violence against women and children.” The GNWS website states this organization is guided in its work by the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. This declaration contains what is likely the most cited definition of this VAW, namely, “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women” (p. 6). The “survivors’ movement” arose from second-wave foundations of activism and service provision to generate numerous “silence-breaking” publications through the 1980s and 1990s, including titles such as “I Never Told Anyone, Voices in the Night, Speaking Out, Fighting Back, and No More Secrets” (Alcoff & Gray, 1993, p. 261).

The work done by VAW organizations is still needed today because the system is still rigged: On the one hand, women as a group are taught to fear rape and to manage their lives in accordance with this fear; on the other hand, it is exceedingly difficult for any specific woman either to prove rape has occurred or to speak of herself as a rape survivor without having her credibility and character viciously attacked. Clearly, the gender-based inequities problematized by feminists are central to this double bind. Meanwhile, many feminists are reasonably concerned that what I refer to as “gender-transgressive survivor speech”—speech about nonheteronormative experiences of sexual violence—will be drawn upon by dominant, patriarchal discourses that seek to defend or deny gender-based oppressions. Denying any relationships between gender structures and sexual violence can serve to discredit feminism. For example, men’s rights groups often take the position that intimate partner violence and sexualized violence are gender symmetrical in order to support the reactionary claim that men are oppressed by feminists.

Despite these real concerns, the importance of recognizing woman-perpetrated sexual assault has now been articulated by three decades worth of researchers examining gender-transgressive intimate partner violence and sexualized violence (e.g., Brand & Kidd, 1986; Gilroy & Carroll, 2009; Giorgio, 2002; Girshick, 2002; Irwin, 2008; Marlowe, 1999; Morrissey, 2003; Renzetti, 1988; Tjaden, Thoennes, & Allison, 1999; Todahl, Linville, Bustin, Wheeler, & Gau, 2009; Turell, 1999; Twinley, 2002; Wang, 2011; Waterman, Dawson, & Bologna,1989). In other words, recognition of gender diversity in survivor experiences has occasioned its own silence-breaking literature, this time breaking with second-wave traditions by writing about gender-transgressive intimate partner and sexualized violence under titles such as Naming the Violence (Lobel, 1986) and No More Secrets (Ristock, 2002; see also: Brand & Kidd, 1986; Gilroy & Carroll, 2009; Giorgio, 2002; Girshick, 2002; Irwin, 2008; Marlowe, 1999; Morrissey, 2003; Renzetti, 1988; Tjaden et al., 1999; Twinley, 2002; Wang, 2011; Waterman et al., 1989). Like VAW narratives before, gender-transgressive survivor speech has emerged in tandem with new modes of service provision. Using inclusive or gender-neutral language, organizations such as the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs provide frontline service while working to counteract gender-based assumptions about violence and victimization (Blinded for peer review). Meanwhile, new discourses about sexual violence have emerged from feminist and/or queer quarters to accommodate gender-transgressive forms of sexual violence.

Method

The interviews analyzed for this article were conducted over the course of my doctoral research on woman-to-woman sexual assault, a study that involved interviews with both survivors and service providers and that was completed in 2014. My dissertation set out to answer the question: “What are the roles of gender in woman-to-woman sexual assault?” This article provides one of several answers to my research question that emerged from the data. It draws on analysis of eight interviews with service providers from urban centers and rural areas in Canada and the United States.

In order to recruit participants, I scoured the Internet for intimate partner violence and sexual assault service providers in Canada and the United States, contacting staff at each organization I located with a request to post an online and/or physical copy my call for survivor participants. At the same time, I enquired as to whether any staff members at each organization had worked with a client who was a survivor of woman-to-woman sexual assault and if so, whether that person would like to participate in my study. Recruitment was challenging. Some were concerned that sharing my posters would compromise their organization’s public image or that the organization would be perceived as backing my research. Very often, people I contacted simply did not respond. On the other hand, some contacts obliged with numerous suggestions, including potential contacts. Interviews took place in private locations such as offices and rooms reserved on campuses or in women’s or community centers. Two interviews with providers took place over Skype and two over the telephone. In these cases, the interviewees and I were alone in our respective locations. Among interviewees were a psychologist, social workers, and counselors, all of whom had worked with survivors of woman-to-woman sexual violence, and some of whom had worked with perpetrators of woman-to-woman sexual violence.

Interviews were intensive and semistructured. Intensive interviewing accords with the grounded theory approach, in that both “are open-ended yet directed, shaped yet emergent, and paced yet unrestricted” (p. 28). In an intensive interview, the researcher looks to understand a topic that “the interview participant has the relevant experiences to shed light on […] Thus, the interviewer’s questions ask the participant to describe and reflect upon his or her experiences in ways that seldom occur in everyday life” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 25). Meanwhile, the semistructured interview schedule provides a road map to remind the interviewer of ground to cover, while providing ample flexibility to respond to participant views and feelings and to pursue any conversational leads the participant might suggest. A tape recorder is used so the researcher can make “steady eye contact” (p. 32) with the participant, while supplementary notes on key points plot follow-up inquiries. Throughout the intensive interview, the researcher focuses on understanding the participant’s experience. To this end, the interview is conversational in tone but follows an “etiquette” (p. 26) whereby the interviewee talks most, while the researcher expresses her interest and desire to learn more. This dynamic is useful for uncovering data, while simultaneously demonstrating respect for participants (Charmaz, 2006). In interviews as in analysis, researchers must be reflexive about how participants relate to them and their questions (p. 32). They must be aware of “how participants’ and interviewers’ past and immediate identities may influence the character and content of the interaction” (p. 27). In this study, for example, many service providers seemed motivated to positively represent the practices and ideologies of organizations they represented. Such considerations remind us that whatever the format of the interview, “the result is a construction-or reconstruction” (p. 27).

Some participants had worked with only one client having experienced woman-to-woman sexual assault, while others specialized in intimate partner violence and sexualized violence within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. The latter subgroup of participants met survivors of woman-to-woman sexual assault so regularly they could not quantify how many cases they had encountered during their careers. Interviews lasted for 1–2 hr. Before interviews commenced, participants received consent forms, which included an option to request plain language summaries of results. Participants were also given lists of LGBTQ-friendly emergency resources in their provinces or states.

Transcript analysis was guided by Clarke’s (2004) Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory after the Postmodern Turn and Charmaz’s (2006) Constructing Grounded Theory. Situational analysis is a form of grounded theory that opens research to the overlaying of diverse perspectives and that takes the situation itself as the unit under investigation. Situational analysis proceeds according to classic grounded theory coding methods. Specifically, I engaged in line-by-line, selective, then theoretical coding of interview transcripts. Midpoint in the analytic process, three major thematic areas emerged, including the discursive terrain of service provision explored here. Service providers adhered consistently to three distinct discourses, and on the occasions when providers found their discourses to be providing shaky ground, they labored to bring the conversation into harmony with their discourse of choice. As these elements of the situation emerged, I returned to the literature seeking theoretical frameworks that would map onto thematic areas to inform my analysis. Principals of Critical Discourse Analysis proved particularly useful for elaboration of the three discourses detailed in what follows.

Indeed, in Situational Analysis, Clarke attends at length to the importance of discourse. She draws on Jawarski and Coupland in offering a typology of foci for discourse analyses, including my own focus, namely, “Producing power/knowledge, ideologies, and control through discourse” (p. 155). Researchers working from this perspective draw on Foucauldian understandings of power as they consider “[h]ow discourses are produced, by whom, with what resources, and under what conditions” (p. 155). They understand power/knowledge as having productive, destructive, enabling, and disabling potentials, and they examine how discourses delineate what may be said and what may not be said. Consistent with this perspective, I identified as discourses interconnected sets of statements that were logically consistent, logically connected, and that, as explored below, perceptibly shaped what participants could say and how they could say those things. Although Foucauldian analyses commonly focus on the most powerful “master discourse” (p. 175), situational analysis seeks to identify and elaborate all of the discourses that arise in a field, thus attending to marginalized perspectives as well as dominant ones. Each of the discourses identified in this study is positioned against dominant gender norms by its inclusion of woman-perpetrated violence. The three perspectives, called all violence is men’s violence, violence is a choice, and nonviolence is learned, are distinguished by characteristic approaches to the relationship between gender, sexual violence, and choice.

The question of choice plays an important role in legal and other social arenas where we discuss questions of violence. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that philosophers have spilled a great deal of ink over the question of if and when free will exists. Given that questions about choice are fundamental to all three discourses presented here, a brief summation of some key positions in the free will versus determinism debates will be useful. In brief, philosophers who take the libertarianism perspective believe that we have, to some degree, the capacity and responsibility to determine our own fates. Philosophers who take the determinist perspective, on the other hand, believe that all things are caused, to which is sometimes added the caveat that some things may be random, but that neither can we be considered responsible for random events. Finally, compatibilism argues that there is no such thing as being “free to choose” in the sense that we could ultimately have done otherwise. Instead, freedom is what we experience when we are not constrained from doing that which we wish. From this perspective, it does not matter that the wish and the lack of constraint are both determined. Within feminist and patriarchal cultures, there have been traditions of gendering whereby men have been understood as disposed of agency, while women have been understood as determined. According to a patriarchal version of this dichotomy, women ought to fall under the class of objects the destiny of which is determined by men, and when they fail to do so may properly be subjected to rape. On the other hand, according to a feminist version of this dichotomy, women ought not fall under this class of objects, but under patriarchy, inevitably do.

Discourses

The feminist version of this male perpetrator/female victim dichotomy is sometimes maintained in the interest of forestalling patriarchal recuperation, as suggested by a recollection shared by Sandra, a social worker interviewee. Sandra had worked with child survivors of woman-perpetrated sexual assault as a child protection worker before pursuing her master’s in social work. Due to this experience, Sandra intended at the outset of her degree to study female sex offenders. She recalled:

When I was walking home from class one night I had a group of four women from the women’s centre come surround me and say that they had heard that this was my thesis topic and they thought perhaps I’d like to change my mind about that…It was quite intimidating. They suggested quite strongly that perhaps I wanted to change my mind and do something else, that they thought it would be harmful to the women’s movement, harmful to their efforts at trying to get society to acknowledge that men are abusers of women.

Sandra’s experience of being silenced by women’s center staff who were apparently trying to protect anti-VAW efforts demonstrates the complexity of the discursive politics that surround sexual violence. ¹ Alcoff and Gray (1993) explain, “[s]peech is the site of political conflict because speech itself is that over which there is struggle” (p. 263).

I had no opportunity to speak with providers who, like the women’s center staff Sandra describes, were prepared to deny the existence of women’s perpetration. Service providers were interviewed about their professional experiences supporting woman-to-woman sexual assault survivors, so those who came forward certainly believed such an assault could occur. All participants were concerned to counteract the denial of gender-transgressive sexual violence, a denial they viewed as pervasive within sexual assault service provision and beyond. Even so, the feminist version of the male perpetrator/female victim dichotomy is maintained by one discourse that was deployed by a research participant, a discourse which I have named all violence is men’s violence.

All Violence Is Men’s Violence

All violence is men’s violence acknowledges that women’s bodies can do violence while maintaining a rigidly gendered view of sexual subordination. The relationship between sexual violence, gender, and choice characterizing this discourse is as follows: when men perpetrate sexual violence, they are exercising free will; when women perpetrate sexual violence, their actions are determined by the patriarchy. This approach is one way for feminist service providers to forestall the risk of recuperation by antifeminists. Feminist social worker and counselor Diane exemplified the use of all violence is men’s violence, as she spoke about experiences of several clients who had been survivors of woman-perpetrated sexual assault. ² In Diane’s words:

According to my understanding, male abusers often start from a logic of control, and of showing young girls what sexuality is, and the position of the object. I wouldn’t say that women start from that intention yet, necessarily. It’s as if when we look at the violence, when women happen to have violent behaviour, it’s usually not for the same reason that men dominate, or behave violently toward “the other.”

According to all violence is men’s violence, men exercise choice and act intentionally to achieve or maintain control of women, whereas women passively “happen to have violent behaviour.” While the terms “not necessarily” and “usually” suggest this gendered distinction may not always hold, Diane did not elaborate on the possibility of exceptions. She continued:

It would be interesting to look instead at women who have abused; what brought them to that? I think sometimes, I don’t know, it’s like a question of a boundary that hasn’t been recognized for the woman. But it’s also often women who learned badly about how to take care of children, okay? So there is that that’s different from men, in the sense that men have more used women to satisfy their needs, or it’s been the issue of domination, or the pride of deflowering a girl for the first time, you know, the use of rape as a weapon of war, like, in certain cultures, as a coming of age. I would say that the issues aren’t the same. I would say maybe the question is how the mistreatment lived by women causes certain lacks, or an absence of affective connection.

In this way, men’s violence is framed as a presence of intention, while women’s violence is framed as an absence—as a lack of boundary or a lack of education. Because it is difficult to see an action simultaneously as an absence and as an assault, this language functions to obscure women’s violence. Furthermore, by presenting women’s violence as an effect of women’s disrespected boundaries, this discourse positions women’s violence as an effect of men’s violence. The opposite side of this discursive coin is the assumption that men’s boundaries are always respected or that any disrespect of men’s boundaries is unrelated to any violence men commit.

One should not underestimate the degree to which this—like other discourses presented here—is a strategic formulation. Service providers certainly understood that those sexual violence discourses that take hold have profound consequences in the lives of survivors and service providers alike. In closing interviews, I asked participants if they had a message they would like people to hear about woman-to-woman sexual assault. In response, Diane raised an inner conflict that revealed the careful strategy at work in her analysis:

I would say that I’m of two minds, okay? I’ll tell you why. Right now, there’s a backlash movement, okay? And as much as we find it important to talk about the fact that we women too can have abusive behaviours, and this violence is in us too, presently when that information gets out, it’s often used to the detriment of understanding women’s contexts. It’s information that has to be brought out, but at the same time, politically and strategically…I come from a family where my mother was abusive, so it’s a reality that has always been there for me…I know that when I look at my mother’s story and all that, I can contextualize it socially. I’m not saying that it’s easier. Perhaps it hurts even more because we expect something different from our mothers, you understand?

Diane was evidently motivated during her interview to reconcile the importance of recognition for woman-to-woman survivors with the importance of resisting patriarchal recuperation of survivor speech. As her discourse shifted from professional analysis into the realm of firsthand survivor speech, absence shifted into presence: “this violence exists in us.” As a provider who had supported several woman-to-woman sexual assault survivors, Diane demonstrated it is possible to recognize women’s victims while socially contextualizing the actions of those who have violated them. Yet Diane’s inner conflict points us in the direction of a shortcoming of the all violence is men’s violence approach. In particular, it is strongly questionable whether women and men are radically distinct in their experiences of perpetration and victimhood. As argued by Hanisch and Moulding (2011), failure to acknowledge gender transgression in sexual violence has maintained sexually deterministic views while silencing many survivors and their allies. The next two discourses presented below—violence is a choice and nonviolence is learned—reject the assumption that when sexual violence occurs, men always exercise free will while women are always victims.

Violence Is a Choice

The relationship between sexual violence, gender, and agency advanced by violence is a choice discourse is as follows: perpetrators of sexual violence exercise free will, survivors of sexual violence are without free will, and gender-based analyses of sexual violence render gender-transgressive sexual violence invisible. This approach acknowledges that both sexual perpetration and sexual victimization can occur across the gender spectrum, while maintaining strict dichotomies between choice on the side of the perpetrator and determination on the side of the victim. Thus, unlike all violence is men’s violence, violence is a choice does not accept that women’s violence is an effect of men’s violence. In the words of one participant: “We think that anyone can be abusive and it’s a choice.”

Violence is a choice was favored by service providers Clarissa, Alex, and Erin, all of whom worked for organizations that specialized in LGBTQ service provision and competency training. In these contexts, correctly identifying perpetrator and victim is commonly understood as a crucial aspect of supporting LGBTQ survivors. As noted by Poon (2011), literature on same-sex partner violence often posits that specific barriers to survivor support arise when heterosexist norms cannot differentiate perpetrator from victim. For example, it is often suggested that same-sex perpetrators may strategically or misguidedly access survivor services instead of or at the same time as victims. Hence, same-sex intimate partner violence and sexualized violence experts emphasize the importance of screening tools to “accurately identify the perpetrator and, in doing so, protect the victim” (Poon, 2011, p. 105).

Following Poon, I observed that “screening” was seen by a number of service providers as an important element of LGBTQ competency in intimate partner violence and sexualized violence service provision. Clarissa explains her organization’s screening process as follows:

We’re always looking for that sort of building of a story: What’s the context that a behaviour happened in? What was the intent of that behaviour? Was it to gain control over the partner or was it to gain control or safety over oneself? And what was the effect? Was the person able to gain control over their partner, or control or safety for themselves? Another element we look for is agency. Who has the power to make decisions for themselves and have the decisions respected? And I always connect that one to assertion of will. Who is asserting their will over their partner and who more often is getting their way in a situation?

As evidenced above, according to violence is a choice, perpetrator agency involves intending and achieving control, an achievement which in turn requires that the survivor is unable to respond effectively. Curious to better understand this screening process, I asked Clarissa when screening might establish that no abuse is occurring. Clarissa explained that on rare occasions, her organization might determine that “No one person is able to make the other person…change their life or gain power and control over them, [which] might mean that there’s not partner abuse happening. It might mean that someone’s being abusive but ineffective at it.” This perspective forecloses situations where survivors effectively resist control, yet require support—situations which Ristock (2002) has found to be relatively common in abusive lesbian relationships.

Another mechanism for the maintenance of the perpetrator/victim dichotomy that appears in the violence is a choice discourse is the rejection of psychologizing approaches to sexual and other forms of abuse. On the one hand, Alex and Clarissa each explained to me that perpetrators of violence should not be understood as mentally ill on the grounds that this negates perpetrator free will. Each also explained that survivors should not be understood as mentally ill on the grounds that such an understanding negates the extent to which survivor suffering is a manifestation of perpetrator agency. As Clarissa stated:

I’ve worked with so many survivors who have been labelled bipolar…when really what the doctor was seeing was the cycle of abuse, you know, not mood swings. It’s just, they’re depressed because their abuser’s abusing them and they’re happy, because their abuser’s being nice now.

Certainly, living in an abusive relationship impacts the emotional well-being of any survivor. However, definitive dismissal of clinical perspectives in the interest of ideologically maintaining total perpetrator control strikes me as untenably simplistic.

When context does arise in violence is a choice discourse, it is the survivor rather than the perpetrator who lives in a context and that context is instrumentalized by perpetrators in their efforts to consolidate power and control. For example, Clarissa observed that “abusers use isolation as a tool” and that isolation can result from “disabilities or chronic illness,” “geograph[y],” “language or identity based things” or, for LGBTQ folks, the challenge of finding communities outside “the mainstream.” Importantly, the operative question in this analysis is not whether perpetrators in fact take advantage of survivor vulnerabilities (they do), but what kinds of context are ruled in and out of violence is a choice discourse.

Perpetrator context and mental health approaches are not the only kinds of explanations for sexual violence that are outside the bounds of violence is a choice discourse. The observation that gender-based analyses can render gender-transgressive sexual violence invisible places gender off-limits as a causal framework. As Clarissa puts it:

There’s a lot of myth both within and outside of our community that abuse is about who’s more butch or who’s more strong, so I think we can see that happen, but I think more often than not we don’t. More often than not what we see is that abuse—both physical and sexual abuse and assault—is really about who’s willing to use those tactics.

Violence is a choice avoids considering the role of gender by taking the stance that no matter who is the assailant in an assault, the abuse is a choice. A true “choice” in the strongest libertarian sense of the term is not shaped by gender or anything else. The negation of gender-based analysis in violence is a choice runs counter to those queer and feminist theories that have understood the will to violence as a mode of performing masculinity potentially undertaken even by feminine-identified people. This exclusion of gender-based understandings was equally evident as counselor Erin responded cautiously and haltingly to the question of whether she had noticed gender playing a role in her clients’ experiences of woman-to-woman sexual assault:

You know, it’s interesting because I don’t—I don’t see or meet the perpetrators, so I’m going on how the women describe them. They often describe the perpetrators as being “butch.” I’m trying to think of an example where that was not the case. Yeah, I would say that that’s generally the description. That’s generally the framing. But again, that’s through the client’s mouth, so…[trails off and waits for me to speak]

In a context of service provision that generally strives to center survivor speech, it is unusual to see survivors’ testimony doubtfully referred to as “descriptions” or “framings,” rather than as facts. These two terms function to distance Erin from the claims she is relating. In fact, if taken literally, the phrase—“this is through the client’s mouth”—denies Erin has spoken at all. In the course of my fieldwork, I received survivor accounts about “feminine” perpetrators, who of course exist in the spectrum of sexual violence. In other words, I do not mean to imply that Erin’s experience exhausts the range of woman-to-woman sexual assault manifestations. However, for the purpose of this discourse analysis, the point is that as a representative of an organization built on violence is a choice discourse, Erin appeared to struggle with whether and how to articulate the gendered observations that had arisen from her extensive clinical experience.

While violence is a choice has the advantage of supporting recognition and service provision for survivors across the gender spectrum, it also raises concerns. First, it is difficult to see how sexual violence can be definitively separated from a performance of masculinity that objectifies the feminine. Therefore, we must be able to interrogate about the roles played by masculine performance in the area of sexual violence. Second, in the interest of clearly distinguishing perpetrators from survivors, violence is a choice masks complexity. Poon (2011) worries that such thinking reduces “perpetrators…into…‘evils,’ who social workers and service providers alike frequently see as undeserving clients who cannot be helped” (p. 117). Thus, this approach relies on what McKendy (2006) has referred to as a capacity “not to know” (p. 475). In short, according to the violence is a choice perspective, in order to serve survivors, who must be radically distinct from perpetrators, who in turn must be exercising free will, the service provider must be without knowledge of any contextual factors that have caused the perpetrator to act violently. In summary, this discourse has increased our capacity to serve survivors of gender-transgressive sexual violence. However, its characteristic weaknesses include dualistic oversimplifications and an incapacity to explore how violence might spring from social norms or past trauma.

Nonviolence Is Learned

Nonviolence is learned discourse was advanced by psychologist Fiona and social worker/counselor Sandra, each of whom had worked extensively not only with survivors but also with perpetrators of sexual violence. The relationship between sexual violence, gender, and agency advanced by nonviolence is learned discourse is as follows: While certainly not all those having lived through abuses of power perpetrate violence, people who perpetrate sexual violence do so because of exposure to abuses of power. Like violence is a choice, this approach acknowledges that both sexual perpetration and sexual victimization can occur across the gender spectrum. In terms of its approach to the question of choice, nonviolence is learned has affinities with compatibilism, a perspective that sometimes includes the view that we can be considered responsible for our actions just insofar as they are neither coerced nor constrained nor random. In fact, learning to see one’s own past sexually violent actions as neither coerced nor constrained nor random is, according to nonviolence is learned, an important aspect of overcoming past trauma and learning how to be nonviolent in the future.

Nonviolence is learned holds that it is important for people who commit sexual violence to understand, in Sandra’s words, “how they planned this whole thing out, because most offenders, regardless of gender, when you first ask them, ‘How did this happen?’ they say, ‘I dunno, it just happened, I have no idea.’” Perpetrators, the argument goes, must replace ignorance of their own processes with understanding. As Fiona puts it: “You have a plan: How are you gonna get this kid? What are you gonna do? Where are you gonna do it? When is the opportune time? Oh, Mom goes to weekly quilting meetings. Okay, every Wednesday. Okay. That’s when I’m going to do it. Yup, it’s already planned.” According to nonviolence is learned, perpetrators of sexual violence must learn to recognize their own strategies. As Sandra states, “once someone is willing to see and understand all the ways in which they tricked themselves and they tricked their victim, and all of the things in their life that made them feel powerless and hopeless and want to take their power from somebody else, then they’re on the road to healing.” In other words, responsibility is not invoked to deny causes for violent behavior so much as to create a different future in which those who have been sexually violent will have learned to choose nonviolence instead.

To this end, Sandra and Fiona spoke of trauma history as something that must be approached strategically when working with perpetrators of sexual violence. According to Sandra:

When you have someone who’s sexually assaulting or who is violent, if you put a lot of energy into reminding them of how awful life has been for them and you never get them to take responsibility for their own crap, they become pretty good offenders, right? It’s a dangerous place to go. We always leave the victim work to the end of treatment, after they develop an understanding of how they have harmed someone else. And then we can talk about the trauma that happened to them.

To review, consistent with Alcoff and Gray’s (1993) definition of discourse as classificatory and exclusionary rules that determine what can and what cannot be said, each of the three discourses presented here excludes certain classes of statements: all violence is men’s violence excludes statements about agency of female perpetrators or about victimization of male perpetrators; violence is a choice excludes statements about victim agency or aspects of the perpetrator’s context that have a causal relationship to the violence; while within the specific domain of the treatment program, nonviolence is learned excludes statements about traumatic perpetrator context until the moment deemed opportune.

Overall, nonviolence is learned eschews dichotomous thinking more thoroughly than the other two discourses outlined above. It defies the male perpetrator/female victim dichotomy maintained in all violence is men’s violence as well as the degendered choosing perpetrator/caused victim dichotomy of the violence is a choice discourse. In other words, nonviolence is learned discourse goes most thoroughly against the grain of dominant discourse. Taking such an oppositional perspective poses challenges. Over decades, Sandra battled against systemic actors who “wanted to treat girls as victims” to have girls admitted to Canadian treatment programs for sexually inappropriate youth. Victim treatment, Sandra argued, would miss out on what nonviolence is learned discourse advances as the critical “responsibility” piece of perpetrator recovery. Challenging gender-based dichotomies, Sandra argued, “The girls have been victimized, but no less or more than the boys; the boys are victims too.” Later, Sandra problematized the dichotomy of victim/perpetrator arguing: “[People] think you have to separate ‘them’ from ‘us’ instead of seeing that one little weird thing could have happened and I could be just like that person. You know? People are too terrified by that.”

Two critiques of this final discourse present themselves. First, it is interesting to consider the question, raised by Maruna (2004), of whether the avowal of responsibility is in fact associated with the desistance of violence at all. Maruna uses the term “responsibilization” to refer to “the construction of blame through a process of coerced confession” (p. 181). Maruna’s methodologically sophisticated study, carried out in Liverpool, suggested that coerced internalization of blame serves only to stigmatize offenders, to enforce and maintain the construction of the offender as “the criminal type,” and ultimately to encourage recidivism. Questions raised by the Liverpool study are particularly relevant here, given that Sandra and Fiona often worked with clients mandated into programs. Maruna’s critique might suggest that a fourth discourse, one which foregoes responsibilization to emphasize context alone, might be useful in some contexts.

Second, we might turn to Butler (2004) who, in “Giving an Account of Oneself,” has suggested that “if we require that someone be able to tell in story form the reasons why his or her life has taken the path it has, that is, to be a coherent autobiographer, it may be that we prefer the seamlessness of the story to something we might tentatively call the truth of the person” (p. 34). This tentative “truth of the person,” as Butler sees it, is that we are opaque to ourselves, that we are subject to fully social unconscious forces, and that we inevitably offer up several origin narratives, none of which one can “say with any certainty…is true” (p. 26). Butler thus detects violence in the demand for autobiographical coherence, a demand appearing in Fiona’s and Sandra’s prescription that perpetrators own responsibility by explaining “how this happened.”

Conclusion

While many publications have considered research about woman-to-woman and other gender-transgressive forms of sexual violence as silence-breaking work, the distinctive contribution of this article has been its elaboration of three separate discourses vying to frame woman-to-woman sexual violence. We have seen that each discourse approaches the relationship between gender, choice, and sexual violence in its own way, with its own epistemological, ontological, and pragmatic strengths and weaknesses. Each discourse includes rules for what can and cannot—or at the very least what should and should not—be said. Each seeks to negotiate in its own way a sociopolitical context of gender-based oppression and sexuality-based oppression. Each is alert to the risks and realities of silencing and recuperation of survivor speech. If one thing is clear, it is that there exists no easy answer to the question of how best to frame the problem of sexual violence. I have elsewhere suggested integrating the ways both gender normativity and gender transgression occur in sexual violence by drawing on Butler’s theory of performativity (Butler, 1999; Malinen, 2012). While seeing the strategic and practical value of each perspective elaborated above, I continue to view the performative approach as an ideal framework for understanding the social problem of sexual assault.