Building a community of practice for promoting post-separation care in intimate partner violence cases: a cooperative grounded inquiry with abused women and their teenage children in Hong Kong

Abstract

Within the current child protection framework, abused women are perceived as the responsible ones for the negative impacts of their children and are requested to sacrifice more in order to perform ‘adequately’. This restricted model of mothering, on one hand, represses women’s construction and exercises of alternative mothering; while, on the other hand, it forbids children’s emergence of caring capacities and their claim for self-care. Polarization of abused women and their children in post-separation care fails to see how their interests affect each other’s; nonetheless, it restricts care and protection work to be performed within the mutual mother-child relationship and an even wider relationship context where many significant others could be involved, for example, sisterhood among abused women. Alternatively, ‘collaborating in transforming mothering to mutual care project’ attained in this Cooperative Grounded Inquiry refocused on partnership building within and beyond family in achieving post-separation care in intimate partner violence cases. Through partnering with teenage participants in setting care goals and care plans, abused women realized their monopolization of care work at home while teenage participants realized how they could contribute to designing and accomplishing care plans. Given the attention to mutuality, more activities which had been considered as ‘adults only’ were relaxed for participation of teenage participants. Carefully exercised partnership building in this inquiry further formed a community of practice that engages women and teenage participants to develop capacities to care for formerly abused women and their children, and to collaborate with their mothers in accomplishing daily caring goals. Only when mutuality becomes central in protection services at the post-separation stage, sons and daughters of formerly abused women could be less likely treated as passive agents, and restrained from potential developments they could have in self-care and caring for their mothers and others. Anticipated Learning: The key learning of this project is to re-examine user participation in domestic violence services by focusing on partnership making and identity (trans)formation. It enhances exchanges of situated knowledge of social work practitioners, abused women and their children in the design and delivery of post-separation care services.