Abstract
This chapter aims to draw attention to the structural components that contextualize gender violence in spaces of poverty. For this purpose, information is used drawn from the last 16 years of investigations, in order to review the permanence of the forms of violence. From a purely qualitative approach is presented the voice of these violated women from the reconstruction of a “life story” that allows the creation of a narrative puzzle. We conclude that being a poor woman, young and with children are three of the basic characteristics of those who live in violent relationships in our country. The lack of education, spatial segregation and informal work are three other features that appear in women who face domestic violence every day, turning this phenomenon into a complex process of violence overlays. If this is added to the iterative and transversal concomitance of labour, economic, food and “emotional” problems, the painting of a world made by “blows” is very obvious.
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Notes
- 1.
We considered in-depth interviews of women in poverty living in different locations of Buenos Aires Province, metropolitan area of Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires city with the purpose of mapping the problem.
- 2.
In the references, those documents appear as Observatorio Violencia de Género.
- 3.
According to information from this institution, those in this age range are the most affected.
- 4.
The reconstruction of the life story is taken as an analysis modality, as carried out in Scribano (2003). In as much it allows one to narrate a present interaction—through a life—in which it is tried, through the trajectories of the interviewed women, to make the reading of a society (Ferrarotti 1982). The stories taken are anchored in processes, phenomena or experiences of women, which does not imply “navigation” through a personal history but rather the apprehension of the narrative moments of the experiences (Scribano 2008).
- 5.
A first factor that emerges when they compare stories, narratives and quantitative information (OGV 2009a, b, c, d, 2016) about women who suffer violence in domestic contexts is their structural and structuring character. The beginning of all inequalities and violence is evident: not going to school, child labour, blows at home. The children of poor women are full of abuse; it is a moment in life that is seen by many of them as the beginning of their history of beatings.
- 6.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 7.
Poor adolescents suffer sexual harassment in such a way that they “apprehend” to defend themselves, to be alert, to be the object of invisible and unnoticed practices. Violence is doubled: rape and threat. The multiplication of forms of violence and their overlapping is a feature of sexual violence as a symptom of violent structures where the word is taken from fear. The victim’s blame, among many other problems, involves systematic complicity with a set of social relationships that contextualize forms of sexual violence. While the need to apologize for such violence “for going wrong” is filtered. Becoming a body, as a mark of the depth of identity.
- 8.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 9.
The world of disappointments, work and abandonments begins in childhood. A feature that can go unnoticed in many of the stories of violence is that of economic violence. From child labour, through trafficking in persons, to servile labour is a common “experience” among many of the poor women subjected to violence. Within the framework of the denial of desires and wills, the stories draw a very narrow and, for some, nonexistent range of autonomy.
- 10.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 11.
The instability and emotional and economic precariousness of poor girls who will then be violated are common denominator of women who tell their stories of abuse. The rupture (almost permanent) of the affective ties with family members first, and couples later, is another of the threads that weave the narration of women under violence. In this account, the impossibility of nomination as a result of abandonment is an example of the aforementioned ruptures. Loneliness and not forgiving the abandonment of the mother which is then repeated with her children, as will be seen later.
- 12.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 13.
Physical aggression as a behavioural corrective, and as a form of interrelation, is systematically apprehended by the transfer of violence towards children. The blows always teach, and can even be cute, perhaps by comparison with the following in their trajectories.
- 14.
Autonomous city of Buenos Aires.
- 15.
Working at an early age, beatings, emotional precariousness, coming together as a way out of blows, the place of failure as a means of connection between body, emotions and destiny, that it “naturalizes” in various ways in them. One of the most common chains of iterativities among battered women: Back. Together, with one of the most recurring emotions: guilt, fear and some justification. The combination of the return to the place of abuse and the feeling of guilt is plotted in the most widespread narratives of the various phases through which the poor woman passes violated.
- 16.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 17.
In a situation of poverty, becoming part of a couple is usually a link towards work and/or family independence—the possibility to stop working as a full-time maid or “bed inside”.
- 18.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 19.
The triangle—pregnancy, become a couple blows—is revealed as an unavoidable destiny that begins almost in childhood, in this case, at 14. I already passed through this triangle, and the fourth element has arrived: to separate. Although it is well known and has been the object of study and intervention, we must not fail to “weigh” the role of teenage pregnancy in domestic spaces marked by violence.
- 20.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 21.
It is possible to establish a classic journey among poor women: they arrive from the interior of the country with expectations of starting to work, which fade when they begin to perform domestic tasks with their “beds inside” as maids. But this place of confinement can be a safe place against blows, in the face of fear.
- 22.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 23.
The poor woman understands that she will base what she does in her life on her child; in her effort, from a very young age, she “earns” in order to buy, for all asymmetric and aggressive emotional relationships are inscribed in a relationship of self-support and economic abuse, and at the crossroads of these types of relationships, a clearly violent context emerges. And the measure of time is the children.
- 24.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 25.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 26.
The reference to hell is characterized by physical violence and deception endured by the woman, who chooses impoverishment rather than continuing to endure this suffering. In this narration, you can see an action that is repeated in the life of the person subject to violence: leaving without anything as a last resort of defence.
- 27.
Children are witnesses of abuse; the childhood is built between family ties crossed by violence.
- 28.
Judicialization of abuse is a necessary and very important path but full of bureaucratic meanderings where the fact and compensation acquire dimensions not known by the victims. In this case, when you are told that life is at stake, the answer is replacement: What am I going to ask?
- 29.
Other characteristic features of the stories of abuse are the erasures, overlaps and invisibilities between domestic and extra-domestic work by victims in situations of violence. This overlap “collaborates” in the logic of the reproduction of accepted schemes about the feminine.
- 30.
The situations of violence entail circumstances of individual disability that, as in this case, leads to the idea of committing suicide as a way out of hell. Anguish and depression are usually affective states in the situations of violence.
- 31.
Another couple, another daughter, another life … repetition or growth? No one can say it, which is clear for these women subjected to violence; the triangle described is part of how they live.
- 32.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 33.
In the course of the voices presented here, women manage to separate themselves from the aggressor, but the “natural” of the blows, the confrontation with economic violence, the resort to a community canteen and the daily life of the children of the many violence are highlighted.
- 34.
Autonomous city of Buenos Aires.
- 35.
Women must respond to the cult of the motherhood and feminine that imposes social contexts so that any rupture of that statutory order operates as a threat to male integrity (Segato 2003).
- 36.
Separation as an inevitable or better destination; it is the only one that avoids “being 10 meters underground”, and the presence of the children serves as a way to tolerate it.
- 37.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
- 38.
An experience of which “there is almost no talk”, about which there seems to be no analysis, is the experience of women (of the situations analysed here) about the permanent leaving of fathers, mothers, brothers, relatives, husbands and sons. They also leave, but their lives can be narrated from the recurring games of the people who embody the affections. It is a world linked in outcomes, where the affective “costs” of them seem to diminish with their repetition, but which, when transformed into cognitive-affective schemes, make the consequences of all separation come to fruition. History as an inevitable destiny: it repeats itself. Everything is repeated, bed inside, violence, reproaches, separation.
- 39.
Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
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De Sena, A., Scribano, A. (2020). Poor Already Hits: The Voice of Violented Women. In: Social Policies and Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34739-0_6
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