Stigma presents specific ethical and epistemological problems for qualitative researchers of violence against women. Narrative research methods promise to enable ethical research on violence while still offering deep insight into stigmatized topics. This article describes narrative methods used in six focus group discussions and four in-depth interviews with victim-survivors of violence against women, all African migrant women living in Ireland. The article connects narrative and stigma in research with the social lives of participants. It concludes with specific recommendations for creative uses of narrative inquiry to explore stigmatized themes, noting that stigma can never be entirely removed from the research encounter.

Purpose: The challenge of recruiting participants from hidden and hard-to-reach groups to sensitive qualitative interviews is well-established. This article brings together recent thinking on trauma-informed research and research relationalities to consider methods of reaching diverse populations effectively and ethically. Design/methodology/approach: The article draws from a research study on gender-based violence (GBV) in higher education in Ireland, which recruited 18 participants to in-depth interviews about experiences of disclosing, reporting and not disclosing GBV in their higher education institutions. All participants were self-identified survivors of GBV, and interviews were potentially emotionally sensitive and ethically complex. Recruitment used social media, community networking and ongoing relational engagements. Findings: The small sample recruited was highly diverse, including participants who were socially minoritised and who might have reason not to trust professional researchers. Analysis of the recruitment approach identifies four aspects that draw on trauma-informed practice, particularly relationality. Specific to recruitment, we outline how trauma-informed and relational principles apply before fieldwork begins, and extend beyond study participants to take in multiple agents. We propose this as a unifying theme that can be ethical and effective for reaching those who are often excluded from sensitive or challenging qualitative research studies. Originality/value: We bring recent thinking on trauma-informed research practice and relationality to bear specifically on recruitment methods for sensitive qualitative research. This contributes practical insight to ongoing considerations on ethical and effective inclusion of hidden and hard-to-reach populations in qualitative research.

The persistently high prevalence of gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) in higher education institutions is a well established phenomenon, as is the inadequacy of institutional responses and the silencing of those who aim or attempt to report it. Drawing on Ahmed’s concept of ‘non-performativity’, ‘institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name’, this paper argues that the non-performativity of anti-bullying and harassment policy is an exercise of power, consistent with Agócs concept of institutionalised resistance. Reporting misconduct is intentionally transformational, but seen as a threat to powerful organisational actors, who exercise institutional power to enact procedures in such a way that victim-survivors are unvoiced and tricked into ‘reluctant acquiescence’ with adverse consequences on their personal and occupational health. We employ documentary analysis to critique policies and procedures for GBVH in Irish universities, and specifically how institutional power is exercised through policy documents. The analysis is based on ten pseudonymised universities, rendering a sample size of 23 documents, pertaining to GBVH for staff. We find that the tone and language employed in policies, and the way in which the informal and formal approaches in anti-bullying and harassment policies frame the problem, serve the interests of the institution. Confidentiality clauses, the framing of the problem as an individualistic, incident-based problem, to be resolved case-by-case, and quasi-legal processes facilitate non-performativity, preserving institutional power and the status quo. From a public health perspective such inertia undermines efforts to prevent harm and promote workplace wellbeing. Meaningful reform will require that HEIs employ alternative tools capable of unsettling these entrenched institutional arrangements and to adopt alternative, proactive tools that prioritise accountability, transparency, prevention and health gain. We suggest new tools in the form of victim-centred, trauma-informed, remediation- and restorative-based approaches.

This article makes a novel contribution to the literature on the impacts of intimate partner violence (IPV) through a qualitative study across specific spaces in Ghana and Pakistan, namely home, work, religious institutions, and marketplaces. We argue that women's ability to capitalize on the symbolic and material value of place is crucially mediated by violence. We further argue that the impacts of IPV in relation to use of space are intensified by the threat of re-perpetration and the stigma associated with IPV. The article thus contributes a spatial analysis to the understanding of the costs of IPV, including the complex dynamics of IPV beyond the domestic space.