I am feeling exceptionally frustrated with uni at the moment. My field placement is happening but I am still unsure how I am feeling about it. And as for my Issues of Protection unit....argh!
I guess the biggest issue at the moment really is the Protection unit stuff. Last week's topic was Family Violence (the name the uni chooses to use for domestic violence or intimate partner violence). Now this isn't something I know nothing about. Learning more about DV has been a natural extension of my quest to find more about IPSV. So I went into the topic feeling pretty confident about my level of knowledge. Yet by today I am questioning all of that knowledge.
Part of the problem is the text book. The section on family violence shows a clear bias towards the "women are as violent as men" school of thought. This doesn't sit well with me as it goes against the majority of academic research about DV. I have also read more than one article about why the studies that lead to that conclusion need to be taken with a humongous grain of salt (many use the Conflict Tactics Scale which makes no differentiation between severity of violence or attack and defence). Yet this is in the text book we are using and we have not been given anything to balance it out. Nor is there any mention about the fact that this point of view does not reflect the majority of academic research on DV.
So that was the first thing that really got my back up. Then there was the reading on substance abuse and family violence. Whoever wrote that presented a very weak argument for his point of view (being that family violence and substance abuse are linked). He quoted general statistics (26% of children from an alcoholic home are victims of sexual violence) but made no effort to explain the findings he used. For example, if this information came from a study about children who have come to the attention of protection authorities then we would expect that the number of children abused would be higher than general population prevalence studies. We are also not given a figure of how many families or abused children were included in the study. If it was only 100 then a 3-4% difference between that figures and the standard ones used about sexual abuse (1 in 3 girls, 1 in 10 boys = approx 21.5%) isn't that big. (Of course both statistics are horrifying).
So that article didn't do much to endear me either. So far less than impressed with the reading material for the unit.
Then comes the discussion forum. Each week we do one of these. Well if the readings horrified me then this outright shocked me. We were given a case study to respond to. The case was a married woman with two kids ringing a crisis line to find out if what is happening in her marriage is normal (deja vu much. I remember wondering the same thing). She says that she doesn't get black eyes but is pushed and shoved by her partner, verbally abused and threatened. She also says that she and the children make an effort "not to upset daddy." The woman has raised her concerns with both her husbands shrink and a minister and both time basically been told she is misreading things and needs to take the good with the bad. So anyway, we had to name the types of abuse she is suffering (physical, verbal, emotional/psychological), comment on the appropriateness of the responses she had received (completely inappropriate) and then spell out what we would say to her (name abuse, ask about immediate safety, offer info on support services). I was pretty happy with my responses and thought that I had done well with them. Indeed I haven't received any dissenting opinions on my comments. But the responses of some of the other students really shocks me. Basically saying that there isn't enough info to define they types of abuse, that what she says should be taken with a grain of salt, that the emphasis should be on assisting the family to stay together.
Now, I don't think I proposed immediate separation and divorce proceedings in what I said. My point was to give the woman the knowledge to name what is happening to her and some resources to help her cope and decide what to do. At all times I emphasised her safety. One of the other respondents made the point that the male brain chemistry is different to the female brain and it is normal for a man to be upset with his wife and kids at times. He said outright that any woman who disagreed with him believed that all men are evil. Another person tried to write everything off as a possible clash of cultural ideals, although we were given no information about the cultural background of the woman. I am shocked at this type of attitude and am honestly scared for the future clients of the people who responded in this way.
The whole lot of this stuff combined really has me questioning my knowledge. Not my knowledge about what happened to me. That I know I am secure about. But my academic knowledge. Have I not been reading widely enough? Am I being brainwashed by the feminist side of he argument? I am reasonably sure in answering both of those questions as no. But that leads me to wonder about the quality of the education I am getting when the readings suck so badly and the other students can be so damn ignorant of the dynamics of DV and the accepted safe way of doing things (one person suggested one on one counselling for the woman but to bring the rest of the family into it over time. Couples counselling in cases where there is DV is a big no-no if the violence is still occurring).
Basically I am left with a really bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing and am seriously wondering if I have misplaced my passion. I wish there was somebody I could really sit down and discuss this with but I wouldn't know how to bring it up. It seems kind of a petty thing to have me so riles and fucking confused.
