Narrator(S) And Narrative(S): A Qualitative Study of Women’s Experiences with Domestic Violence

The present study explores the multiplicity in positions and voices in narratives of female survivors of domestic violence. The paper aligns with Bamberg’s notion of identity and narrative construction, postulating the inherent therapeutic quality of a story by facilitating reconstruction through various positions. For capturing these experiences, semi-structured interviews were taken of three married women who reported to have suffered domestic violence. The gathered data was analyzed by highlighting the narrative positions that align with dominant constructions of womanhood and have the potential to produce both similar and different versions of domestic violence. The positions which emerged - ‘The Passive victim’, ‘Conceptualizing sex through self-objectification’, ‘Women as healers’, ‘Empowered survivor’ and ‘The person in the perpetrator’ were chosen to discuss the ways in which women can construct complementary and contradictory versions of domestic violence, each with its own limitations and therapeutic potential. The results speak to the need to understand the saliency and psychological utility of these narrative positions in facilitating women to claim their experience of violence.