Decenter Whiteness in Gender-Based Violence Intervention

When responding to gender-based violence, advocates, activists, and would-be helpers must decenter whiteness and think beyond the capitalist logics of the needs of a single agency. The desire to do good does not free one of the responsibility to resist reproducing white supremacist institutional logics that disadvantage those same vulnerable communities one intends to help. This proposal for a caring economy concerns the critical services of agencies that intervene in gender-based violence, primarily domestic and intimate partner violence, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a microcosm of institutional advocacy in the United States, the institutions I center here show how white supremacy is infused in the practices and outcomes in otherwise “neutral” or race-sensitive outreach organizations. In making this argument, I suggest that one critical element in an economy of care is the mechanism through which care is distributed; distribution networks that reify ideas about race and gender ensure that care—and, specifically, forms of facilitation that enable new lives to be made or prevent death and injury—are unevenly distributed.

In the context of rapid response to increasing occurrences of gender-based violence,1 a landscape in which Milwaukee’s vulnerable communities already received short shrift, I came to understand the potential to increase gaps in services and forms of neglect in the complicity of research teams. Assessment and evaluation research, a staple of the nonprofit world, simultaneously provides important data for how to operate an existing network of care, while being intimately linked to funding mechanisms that account for unequal and inequitable distribution of resources to support care. In what follows, I will describe how these gaps opened up and compounded existing ideas about care and its distribution; I propose a way of moving forward that requires the decentering of whiteness through conscientious efforts to think about redistributing resources and engaging stakeholders with a range of experiences and backgrounds. In their desire to do good, research teams—including my own—can also participate in reproducing white supremacy. This becomes more likely when working under the pressures of producing research quickly, and because of the persistent inability of researchers and advocates to name whiteness as a feature of organizational structure. The unmarked nature of whiteness as a normative mode for conducting interventions or structuring feminist organizations is part of what Jonathan Rosa and Vanessa Diaz have termed the “raciontology” of institutions. Rosa and Diaz write of institutional racism “as a process that involves the construction, coordination, circulation, surveillance, and, frequently, overdetermination of racialized models of personhood and broader materialities.”2 In institutional contexts, raciontologies shape the distribution and forms of care for gender-based violence intervention.

In this analysis, the unmarked nature of whiteness and the assumptions accompanying those agencies that purport to be “non-culturally specific” is the dominant raciontology of the organizational landscape of both progressive feminist agencies and research teams. That is, what is overdetermined about the category of whiteness is the extent to which it is habitually unmarked and at the center of “non-culturally” specific organizational strategies. The agencies use the distinction of “culturally specific” and “non-culturally” specific to differentiate between kinds of agencies, with “culturally specific” organizations being focused on individual nonwhite or nonheterosexual communities—for example, African American, Asian American, Hmong American, LGBTQ youth, Native and Indigenous, or Muslim and Arab American. The result of this classification of some agencies as “culturally specific” is the material deprivation of those organizations. This is an effect of the prioritization of “non-culturally specific” initiatives. Our research team was complicit in this dynamic by providing the “non-culturally” specific with a research report that increased their capacity to secure more funding, potentially drawing resources away from the other agencies, making the smaller agencies dependent on the larger agency’s goodwill to redistribute resources and subjecting them to whatever future conditions the larger agency placed on access to care.

The agency landscape of Milwaukee’s intimate partner violence intervention services is relevant for understanding the local dynamics between service providers and the communities they aim to serve. Many resources are invested in the courthouse and nonprofit personnel who support protective order provisions that allow victims of gender-based violence to seek relief through civil injunctions that order respondents to stay away from petitioners. In March 2020, these services, which had solely been in person, migrated to online processes. As services have returned to being in person, the protective order petition is now dually accessible online and in person. Those who are from Milwaukee will likely know the players involved here, but I will use pseudonyms. The largest and most comprehensive domestic violence service provider in Milwaukee, Agency 1, offers a range of services, including counseling, shelter, and policy-related work. Many years ago, Agency 1 contracted with the Milwaukee County Court System to provide an embedded restraining order advocacy clinic in which all potential petitioners seeking harassment or domestic violence protective orders can work with one of Agency 1’s advocates. Advocates will help them complete the paperwork and accompany them as they appear before the court commissioner. Agency 1’s approach is distinctively system-based, with the agency working with many other nonprofits and municipal authorities to serve clients who reach out to them. Most notably, they work closely with the courts, the police, and the state’s attorney, which is not an uncommon approach to intimate partner violence intervention.

Agency 1 had reached out to my colleagues at the university in March 2020, concerned about the transition to virtual services, and watching with consternation as data suggested that domestic violence related homicide was on the rise (see footnote 1). One colleague assembled a multidisciplinary research team to work collaboratively with Agency 1 to conduct a telephone survey of and interviews with people living with domestic violence. I was one of two social scientists on this interdisciplinary team. We quickly sought funding, designed our survey and interview questions, and recruited research assistants to place calls. The research design was in close consultation with personnel from Agency 1 who had particular questions they wanted us to address in our study. Agency 1 shared a list of over four thousand individuals with us, of whom our research assistants called about eighteen hundred people over several months. Our design included recruiting and contacting participants at three distinctive time points, essentially following them over a six-month period. After completing the first round of calls, we had recruited a total of ninety-two participants. All four thousand individuals whose information was shared with us, including those who we successfully contacted, had been referred to Agency 1 through three different pathways: (1) they called Agency 1’s hotline themselves seeking services, (2) they had called the police because of a domestic violence incident, or (3) they had filed for a protective order in the court.

The city also has many other well-established but smaller agencies that provide services aimed at individuals coping with intimate partner violence from specific ethnic minority groups. These agencies, of which I will concentrate on two dubbed here Agency 2 and Agency 3, have their own intimate partner violence advocates and legal experts. Agency 4 worked closely with Agencies 2 and 3, often subcontracting to enrich the extent of their legal services. A final group, Agency 5, also worked closely with Agencies 2, 3, and 4. Germane to this discussion, Agency 1 is a “non-culturally specific” agency, whereas Agencies 2–5 are “culturally specific.” Because Agency 1 had initiated the research project, we did not incorporate any of the other agencies into the original research design. When the research team realized that we were missing several very important perspectives, we initiated contacts with the other agencies and conducted interviews with personnel from Agencies 2, 3, and 4. Agency 5 generously gave their time to meet with me to discuss the project. They then declined to participate, rightly pointing out that the project had, at that point, been proceeding for many months and their inclusion was an addendum rather than a central feature of the project. I will come back to this observation at the end of this chapter.

In addition to providing advocacy in cases of intimate partner violence, Agencies 2 and 3 offer more broad services relating to financial, immigration, housing, and food security support, which are critical needs for some of their clients. Like Agency 1, they also had some ties with system-based resources, and regularly communicated with the police and the courts. Their work with the police and the courts, when compared to Agency 1, was not built into the daily operations of their many duties. This difference in type of relationship and collaboration with the police and courts may reflect the knowledge of Agencies 2 and 3’s leadership that the clients who sought their services were hesitant when it came to working through the courts or the police. Thus, they sought to support their clients through a range of other interventions. The leadership of Agencies 1, 2, and 3 describe their cordial and supportive relationships with one another. They often work collaboratively to increase the capacity of the agencies to provide critical support and services for their clients. None of the agencies are adequately funded, and regularly operate with strained budgets and resources. The agencies are frequently eligible for the same types of funding, and they have unequal success in accessing that funding. Thus, Agencies 2, 3, and 4 have significantly smaller budgets and staffing than Agency 1. This reflects the broader distribution of care and the resources to support survivors of gender-based violence in U.S. society, which sets up agencies as competitors for the same relatively small pools of funds. As one local nonprofit worker explained, it also favored larger agencies with dedicated grant-writing staff. These larger agencies tended to be the “non-culturally specific” agencies, thus disadvantaging gender-based violence agencies that specialized in working with vulnerable populations such as undocumented victims of domestic violence.

In considering how we built up the participant list for our study, the three avenues for being referred to Agency 1 seem to select for individuals who might rely more confidently on criminal justice interventions, such as court orders and police. This raised concerns for some members of our research team about the experiences of communities who might be more wary to seek a protective order, dial 911, or even call a hotline, like those who often worked with Agencies 2 and 3. In the list of potential research participants, we would have selected for communities and individuals who were somewhat invested in the efficacies of courts, police, and hotlines. This excluded many who could not call or did not want to call, but still had needs requiring support and services. This too reflects the distribution of care and how it has become embodied in practice, leading some people to internalize expectations about what forms of care they can receive through access to state and nonprofit agencies.

As we quickly mobilized to launch our research project, I raised the issue of conducting interviews and surveys in both English and Spanish. The most recent census data for the county set Milwaukee’s growing Latino/a population as about 16 percent of the total county population, and it was likely that in calling the research participants we would encounter potential recruits who preferred Spanish to English. Some of my colleagues suggested we exclude them from the study, pointing out that including them would necessitate additional labors of translating surveys and interviews from Spanish to English, and hiring research assistants who were fluent in Spanish. These additional steps would inevitably delay the start of our data collection. It would be easier simply to focus on English speakers, they reasoned. The ease with which the primacy of Anglophony is our taken-for-granted approach in research design, often in the name of producing efficacious research, is one of the ways English speaking—one of many proxies of whiteness—is centered within academic raciontologies. With support from the other social science colleague collaborating on the project, we insisted that a delay in data collection was a fair trade-off for a more inclusive research practice that incorporated non-English speakers through some modifications to our research methods.

As the data collection proceeded, it became increasingly obvious that relying on the viewpoint of Agency 1 was limiting our perspective on the challenges faced by service providers and service seekers in Milwaukee to one agency. We then turned to Agencies 2, 3, 4, and 5 to see if we might incorporate other communities into the research. Because our research design involved working with service-seeking clients over a six-month period and interviewing and surveying them at three distinctive time points, we were unable to begin recruiting more service seekers at this point in the study. This left us with no choice but to focus on service providers as we sought to broaden our perspective on navigating intimate partner violence intervention services. At this stage of the study, I was also aware that our research had been anchored by Agency 1 and its standing in the community, which opened many doors for the research team, while potentially foreclosing others. As noted earlier, Agency 5 refused to participate, and such acts of refusal are important to respect and uphold. Such refusals are critiques of care’s distribution, and mark the inequitable raciontologies of both research and nonprofit service provision.

Because of the way we chose to incorporate Agencies 2, 3, and 4 into our project, changing and expanding the research design several months after we had begun, we could only focus on agency leadership and not the client communities they served. By burdening the agency leadership with representing both themselves and their clients, client voices were excluded from the study. The study then reproduced a problematic social dynamic in which women of color are viewed as being representative of other women like themselves, a burden that is rarely, if ever, placed on white women. Our own research design normalized the work of Agency 1 as “non-culturally specific” by initially treating the work of Agency 1 as though it was representative of all of Milwaukee’s intimate violence service providers and all the communities who accessed these services.

As our interviews drew to a close in July 2021, it was clear that Agencies 1, 2, and 3 shared many concerns. The staff were overwhelmed and the financial footing of all three agencies was rife with insecurity. Given the ever-expanding needs of their clients, the need to provide previously unavailable virtual and telephonic platforms for support, agencies were feeling drained and exhausted by the continuous hustle of funding vital services and adapting to new challenges. But the intensity of this financial insecurity was not evenly distributed across the three agencies. Privileging whiteness by centering the needs and approaches of Agency 1 even produced an inordinate amount of emotional labor by Agencies 2 and 3 who were especially frustrated with the need to expand the services they provided while facing narrower funding streams. Where it could, Agency 1 facilitated some entry and connection for Agencies 2 and 3 to the courts, offering training on the new virtual systems for filing restraining orders. All three agencies were focused on how to maintain virtual support while continuing to offer in-person support. Agencies 2 and 3 were also committed to a more capacious understanding of safety and security, and also worked creatively to supply their economically vulnerable clients with basic needs such as food and housing.

A more caring economy would allocate resources across these agencies in a distributive fashion, rather than favoring those institutions who occupy the “non-culturally specific” position. A more caring economy would incorporate all these agencies into a research design on equal footing, with more opportunities for research participants from all walks of life. As it is currently structured, through institutional raciontologies, the configuration of research about the distribution of care reinforces ideas about who is valuable to society and who is not by reproducing problematic assumptions about whose experiences are generalizable to different communities and whose experiences are marginal or ungeneralizable. The honoraria that circulated to the clients referred to Agency 1 were a form of material support from which clients of Agencies 2 and 3 were excluded. Their voices and experiences were represented through agency leadership, whereas those from Agency 1 were directly consulted in the project. A more caring economy does not default to the dominance of English-only research projects, incorporating the needs and requirements of many languages that are represented in the impacted community. The “institutionalized perceptions of racial difference,” here encoded as the distinction between the “culturally specific” and the “non-culturally specific,” “can overdetermine what kind of a thing one is and authorize extreme, indeed existential, measures,” as Rosa and Diaz write.3 In the case of this research project and the struggles of local agencies to address the harms of gender-based violence, the extreme modes that are “authorized” here are in the continued deprivation of material resources from service providers who work with racialized and minoritized populations. This is enabled through a raciontology that structures the distribution of care in an unequally caring economy. Research and intervention must include diverse stakeholders, reaching beyond agency leadership and to impacted populations in order to prioritize safety, and capacitate survival.