A colleague of mine drew my attention towards an initiative by Women's Rights International and Voices In Empowering Women, a Liberian women organization. Together, these two organizations conducted two surveys with women and young girls in Liberia during the first eight years of the conflict. It was their aim to document the impact that the conflict had on the female population of the country.

What i find so remarkable about this study is how they presented their findings in a way that made the surveys results easily accessible to the women they were studying. One method was to show a stage play that presented the major research findings, carrying the results back into the community (see a video here; texts of the plays are transcribed in the final project report, see link below). They further depicted the statistical results of the surveys with the help of simple visualizations, providing explanations of the graphs that made the overall results very comprehensible even for people who are not familiar with statistics (for closer inspection download the report here).

In the report, the authors explain the method of how the surveys were conducted. It seems to me that this project is a great example of PAR, because it shows how the research method was developed within the context of the local culture, engaging local women, aimed at documenting the hardship they experienced throughout the conflict. The research results empowered them to address the past, ease their suffering by showing them that they were not alone in the violence they experienced. I can imagine how this project assisted women in their healing process.

Initially participatory research (PR), for me, condensed into (1) questioning, (2) learning and (3)action-taking to be done by individuals/groups with concerns about their/or another’s specific community with intended outcomes of gaining practical knowledge to apply to everyday relationship issues resulting in empowerment and human rights.  

I say initially re PR, because I learnt from experience that such a definition is simplistic. I’ll briefly share some of my experience so the rest of my comments make sense. Confronted with the reality of one woman who asked for help because of torture victimization in the domestic sphere inflicted by non-state actors triggered the PR QUESTION: Was her reality unique? Answering this question meant reaching out into the larger community; other women confidentially presented themselves to my colleague and I who were willing to disclose non-state torture (NST) victimization. PR LEARNING meant a specific group existed and redefined the meaning of ‘group’. Group came to mean women who endured the same NST patterns of victimization who wanted their realities of NST exposed without being identified because:

1. The destructiveness of NST victimization had made them extremely vulnerable, they’d taken years to gather stability and could not risk identifying themselves for fear of breaking down their present day coping strategies,  
2. Learning over time that this initial specific provincial ‘group’ became representative of national and international NST victimization of women who were generally invisibilized,
3. They endured oppressive socio-cultural legal and structural forces that maintained their invisibility, i.e., labelled ‘crazy’, told they were lying, fears of discrimination and stigmatization that they would be seen as evil and with no law specifically acknowledging NST victimization in Canada for example their victimization did not exist – no law, do data, no crime; they would eventually endure the knowledge that when their testimonials were presented to CEDAW that they would also be left unsupported and invisibilized.

PR ACTION-TAKING: Under the above restraints how to proceed became the issue; the solution became becoming the visible representatives for the ‘group’ of women who contact us. These contacts transform into PR partnerships in that women share their testimonials, drawing and insights and we take action/responsibility to try to expose the reality of NST victimization, building strategies that provide empowerment. For example:

1. PR findings took five years of intense listening to design a model of ritual abuse-torture victimization, one form of NST victimization, that represented what women were telling us; they evaluated the model and for the first time stated they felt heard and understood.
2. Over the next 10 years we learned of other forms of NST inflicted by such perpetrators; it took this long for our PR knowledge to be published which has since grown into opportunities for international publishing and visibility and empowerment of women whose testimonials are always included in our writing as a way to adapt PR ‘group’ involvement and equality in the process by maintaining their safety while visibilizing their voices and NST ordeals,
3. The PR is on-going, into the 18th year of strategies and building and maintaining PR partnerships with women so harmed, asking, for instance, for input when designing survey questions to expose specific NST issues or asking for their own words to be shared in the articles we continue to submit for possible publication. The women constantly state how empowering this framework is for them because “I want to spread the word that these horrendous things do happen ... it makes me feel I’m helping”.

ACTION-TAKING: THE PR RISKS/HURDLES: When initiating actions to address the group’s reality and invisibility of NST victimization we honestly did not anticipate the risks/hurdles we would be confronted with, such as:

1. ACTION-TAKING mean how to deal with the ethical and moral professional/personal dilemmas/responsibilities created when such knowledge is gained, for example: How could my colleague and I walk away from the fact that we had learned that NST torture was/is occurring, inflicted against infants, children and women? We couldn’t, so our lives and that of our families have been profoundly changed as did the longevity of the PR we originally committed to.  
2. As the PR ‘researchers’ ACTION-TAKING mean, for example, exposing the ‘groups’ invisibility, defying the status quo which generally labelled the women ‘crazy, ‘treating’ them as such. This action-taking brought, for instance, professional and personal attacks, attempts to discredit us which created serious professional/personal isolation issues and in the early years dealing with all of these challenges felt like ‘battle fatigue’ combined with deep ethical/moral duress as mentioned.
3. ACTION-TAKING meant considering how to deal with the positional power and use/abuse of power of some of the alleged perpetrators and these potential risks. For example, one woman who reported being held in captivity, tortured and trafficked for four and one-half years by her spouse/friends before escaping had been silent for 25 years then several months after she started disclosing to us she received a middle-of-the-night phone call threatening her to stop talking. This exposes the organized criminal element that was a constant identifying feature of the group of women who have spoken to us regardless of which industrialized country they are from. It also exposes the risks that occur when the socio-cultural and legal framework denies and invisibilizes the existence of NST victimization.

I share these years of experience of PR because it makes visible more insights into what PR can involve.