When violence isn’t violent: Interpreting social problems and dialectical knowledge construction

The underlying discursive power of who gets to represent and speak for a population is directly linked to the construction of knowledge in our group about the social problems affecting the four research locations. While this is significant in its own right for the way it can affix certain notions of identity to individuals and groups, these knowledges also lead to concrete and tangible realities in the research locations in the form of organizational interventions or changes in practice by leaders and community workers. In this section, I reflect on two ways that our group produced or perpetuated certain knowledges which, in the end, resulted in tangible impacts on Mae Sot and Phob Phra’s migrant populations. The first relates to an interpretation of the term violence and the second highlights analytical maneuvers to draw comparisons and make programming decisions.

In conducting thematic analysis of the data, a pattern emerged in interviews conducted by multiple different co-researchers. They asked participants about violence in their communities and participants often answered that this was a non-existent social problem. The following excerpt serves as an example.

I: How about violence between husband and wife?

R: Between husband and wife, it does not commonly happen. They only fight verbally. There is no such violence in this section between women and men. I: Then in this section, is there any bodily harm occurred between couples? R: No.

I: How about psychological violence? R: No.

I: When husband and wife fight, what are they doing?

R: If husband and wife fight, they shout and scold each other. I: They shout and scold each other. Then?

R: Then “you are what?” “I am what?” “You take a stick, I take a knife.” I: Do they beat each other?

I: They beat, they shout.

R: If the women are beaten by men, they shout, they cry. (HT F2Fw-7)

Aside from the number of interesting observations one can make about this excerpt, I focus here on the interview style and the evolution of a “no” answer to a question about violence to a “yes” answer. At first when the interviewer asks about violence, the

participant explains that it is something that “does not commonly happen” as “there is no such violence” but a moment later when the interviewer asks if partners “beat each other” the answer is yes. What changed in the interview for the participant to make her decide to discuss the nature of physical and verbal violence between couples in Htone Taung? Did the interviewer’s repeated questioning wear down the participant? Or is violence

somehow not the same as physical beating?

Consistently in almost every interview when this type of interaction took place, interviewers used the Burmese word “ajanpet mhu,” which is a literal translation of violence. One finds this term in Burmese language media headlines describing riots and military conflict or attacks. It is also a term commonly used in NGO trainings on

women’s rights, human rights, and gender-based violence, but less in everyday life.13 It was only when interviewers used the term “yaigt,” which translates to “beat” in the infinitive, that it was possible to achieve understanding. Thus, it is not that participants do not consider what goes on in their neighborhood to be violence. Rather, there appears to be a language barrier between the professional Burmese that interviewers were using and the Burmese that participants could understand. This may also be a conceptual barrier as well to the extent that “ajanpet mhu” as violence is an abstract term while “yaigt” as beating is concrete.

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In such moments during interviews, which clearly demonstrate the types of subtle social hierarchies and lines of difference that separate interviewers and participants, I identify sites for the construction of particular knowledges about the migrant population. This is because I worked with co-researchers to divide the data up into administratively useful categories to aid our efforts in designing programs appropriate for migrant workers. This produced numbers for “how many people are talking about, for example, physical violence or emotional violence…from each community” (IFGD, CC). Such considerations ultimately factored into discussions during the interpretive focus group about which sites were in need of which kinds of interventions. Some co-researchers interpreted interactions like the one quoted above as a sign of participants’ acceptance of violence: “According to their answers, they are used to these problems. They don’t report it as a family problem” (IFGD, MM). The assumption that intimate partner violence is part of the banality of everyday suffering affixes violence to the people and the

communities in which they live in a way that speaks less to participants’ lived reality and more to the research team’s expectations and interpretations.

Another site for the construction and circulation of knowledge was when the interpretation of our research findings intersected with the tendency to essentialize participants along cultural and religious lines, a form of othering. This was particularly the case when some co-researchers formulated analyses in reference to the Kyuwe Kyan neighborhood. Buddhist and Christian Burmese co-researchers pointed to the all-Muslim site as illustrative of gendered violence as an aspect of that neighborhood’s residents’ culture. At one moment during the interpretive focus group discussion, a co-researcher reflected on the prevalence of gendered-violence in Kyuwe Kyan and identified

“attitude” as an issue in this site where “if a wife is forced to have sex, it does not mean it is a rape case, but if a wife makes a mistake, it is acceptable for the husband to beat her” (IFGD, NO). Following up on this, another co-researcher added, “They have the belief like that in some communities.” Co-researchers did not make comments like this about other locations, though during a one-on-one interview with me, one co-researcher explained that in Phob Phra sites, “the Burmese…are very…they didn’t go to school when they were young so they don’t have any idea…how to deal with their life” (CC). These are clearly co-researchers’ ways of making sense of the fear and violence migrant workers revealed to them. Nevertheless, these moments are also productive of knowledge about migrants as our team divided participants into analytical categories as if culture, ethnicity, and religion were static traits.

The decision-making process—both in the deliberate sense of what takes place in debriefing sessions and the interpretive focus group discussion in our trailer meeting room and in a more nuanced subconscious mediation of power-laden discourses— directly relates to the range of ideas considered reasonable and appropriate as ways to engage with the migrant population to decrease rates of gender-based violence, both in the domestic sphere and public abuses that are the product of a more generalized violence affecting Burmese people. The interpretive focus group discussion, which, as noted above, was structured as a forum for analysis, interpretation, and action-planning, generated much debate and discussion about what each of the co-researchers’

organizations might do with the assessment’s findings. The meeting surfaced different individual and group agendas and interpretations of the data. Eventually, the advisory

group and co-researchers came up with a condensed list of potential projects their organizations could implement in the four sites. I include an abbreviated version here:

1. Information center on Thai law/legal services 2. Drug awareness training

3. Integrating videos and cartoons into outreach because of illiteracy 4. GBV trainings to men and women (separately)

5. Shelter for women and children 6. Awareness raising for men

7. A new organization that can “take action effectively” or a network of Burmese, Thai, and “NGOs” to collaborate

8. Women’s associations in communities/women’s exchange/women talk 9. Resource library in each community

10.Radio or film production for outreach

11.Domestic violence awareness training for health workers and teachers 12.Basic first responder trainings

13.Better referral network

14.Integrate GBV knowledge into school curriculum 15.Involve religious actors in awareness raising

These suggestions cover a wide variety of activities that attempt to deal with the social problems as co-researchers and members of the advisory group interpreted them.

Interpreting violence as a symptom of attitude or lack of education, for example, inspired awareness-raising activities. Agreement on the need for greater coordination among those organizing responses to violence coalesced into activity ideas relating to referrals and the training of “first-responders.” The list of possible actions here also communicates an absence of a more transformative approach that would confront the structural violence that resonates so clearly in the narratives of Burmese migrants on the border, including co-researchers themselves. More dominant are activities that educate communities towards a more peaceful existence and strengthen services for victims. As noted above, this adheres to a more passive NGO focus on biowelfare, which, despite co-researchers’ personal encounters with exploitation and violence, proved to be the dominant discourse. Thus, in this sense it is possible to see the link between individual and collective forms of

knowledge, the construction of social hierarchies, and the process of using a variety of logics to determine social service programs for a subject population that ultimately have an ordering effect without confronting the systemic or structural inequalities that frame the setting for the interpersonal violence these groups are committed to stopping.