Four young women presented themselves as fighters. Their fighting identities were not the same thing as being violent—although all four young women had participated in numerous physical fights throughout the years—but rather addressed the agency they felt they possessed, and which they had deliberately cultivated since their childhoods. At their most optimistic, they depicted themselves as in the midst rescuing themselves from impossible circumstances and reshaping their own destinies.
The earliest settings of these women’s stories were most often claustrophobic and dark. Their childhood homes were filled with poverty, alcoholism, and drug use, or at times overcrowded with children. Deaths in the family changed life dramatically for the worse. Fathers and step-fathers arrived on the scene to bully and abuse the women and children in the household, only to leave and make way for similarly terrible men. Mothers, in contrast, were “soft”—less vividly described and utterly devoted to the men who terrorized them. As a result, the young women portrayed them as putting up with the abuse at the cost of their own, as well as their children’s, wellbeing.
168 In the midst of this setting, the narrators presented their childhood selves as highly feminised. They were “good,” or “shy,” “helpful” around the house, “comforting” to their siblings who had “bigger mouth(s)” and were, therefore, punished for talking back or disobeying the men in the house. By an early age, these “good” girls had witnessed and experienced a great deal of physical abuse and fear and seemed destined to develop into women like their mothers.
If home was terrifying, the community only replicated this feeling. Outside the home, the girls were picked on and bullied by other children, who sensed or saw a difference in them, particularly if the neglect they experienced at home translated into their physical appearance. At times even adults in the community joined in with the abuse— such as when the young women’s physical “difference” was related to race. Available protection from caring adults was limited to a grandmother, a loving but “soft” mother who could not stand up for herself, and a teacher whose influence was limited to the gates of the primary school. These protectors could not always keep them safe and therefore only provided a reprieve from the world around them. Being bullied in school often led to the girls starting to skip school, and absentee parents either did not notice or did not care.
In their late childhoods or early adolescence, the young women described reaching a turning point in their lives where they had enough of victimization. With no one available to rescue them, they decided to rescue themselves. The young women began to fight back—metaphorically and physically. They stood up to bullies, abusive stepfathers, and neighbours. They told narratives of transformation, which involved an identity change of sorts, which in turn seemed to improve their fortunes. This fits in with the type of narrative Gergen and Gergen (1983) have called “progressive” narratives, although the “progression” the women identified was more related to the way they saw the development of their agency rather than actual improvements. The tone of their narratives changed, and their method of handling abuse was to fight. Fighting shifted them away from traditional gendered identities where they performed and behaved as society told them to (only to be victimized) to alternative femininities, or even masculinities as the literature has described (see Miller, 2002; Miller and Decker, 2001; Miller, 1998b; Messerschmidt, 1993) and for which they were officially penalized. The unexpected consequence of this newfound agency and empowerment,
169 of being like the men in their lives, however, was trouble with the police who did not see their fighting and violence as freeing as they did. By their late adolescences, they had been arrested by the police for violence on more than one occasion, and some had earned numerous cautions and convictions as well as restorative justice. Due to these frequent interactions, police came to represent the enemy, or authority figures who had disappointed them, having failed to protect them in their childhoods/youths only to unfairly penalize them for doing what the young women felt someone had to do—stand up for them.
At this stage of fighting and trouble with the police, most had left their childhood homes and were in the midst of constructing new lives. The settings they found themselves in, however, were not all that different from their first households in terms of difficulties. One had become involved with a series of controlling and violent men. Some had become mothers—one when she was little more than a child herself. Two women had left education in their early teens and were, therefore, limited in terms of employment and even literacy. One of these women, in looking for independence through employment was trafficked into factory work, which became hard to escape. Convictions for three of the women severely limited where they could gain employment and with what. Three struggled with serious depressions and anxieties. They described living dual lives—balancing nurturing and caretaking roles, being “soft” women at home, with being fierce on the streets. The uncomfortable balance brought out intense emotions and even shame over who they were and what they had done.
Their ability to transform themselves through agency, however, was not limited to an early adolescent shift. Again, they reached a point where they had had enough. Again they relied on themselves and with very little outside help, they managed to leave their male partners or unsafe situations. Some became single mothers—or just single. All but one became full-time workers—even in spite of criminal convictions and minimal education, although these positions tended to be poorly paid. They moved away from antisocial family and friends, building up new social networks through work or in their new communities. They avoided going out on the weekends where they might encounter characters from their old lives. They stopped offending, relying on agency to instead carve out a “normal” life for themselves. At the time of their narratives, some had had no interaction with the police for at least four to six months and up to four years. Their new lives, however, were to some degree lived in tightly controlled bubbles, in
170 part because of a lack of trust in others. One woman avoided making new friends, believing they would betray her, preferring to only move between work and home where she took care of her son. Another woman avoided new people, including other mothers on the school run, because she feared they might hear about what she was like in her past and reject her. A third, whose story is presented in detail below, carefully chose who to let into her home. These strategies protected them from certain antisocial elements and kept risks and temptations away. It, however, also restricted them from developing support networks and meant they were constantly trying to hide what they perceived to be a shameful version of themselves. The following participant whose life story will be presented in detail, for example, lived in the “now,” rejecting her previous associations and former identity in favour for the new prosocial self she was currently developing.
Eve: past and present selves
The first words Eve spoke were, “Now, my life is good.” The word ‘now’ appeared and reappeared throughout her narrative, making contrasts and highlighting accomplishments before she even mentioned any of her offending or other difficulties (“So really I’m just relaxed now and just stay home or go to work. That’s all I do”); (“I’m completely different now but a year ago if I’d have met somebody like myself I
wouldn’t have given them the time of day.”) With this focus on ‘now,’ Eve not only
contrasted the past to a much preferred present, but also spoke of her two selves as though they were entirely separate people.
The Eve of the past was the youngest child. Her earliest memories were of “mum and
dad fighting all the time and him trying to stab her and jumping out of bedroom windows running around crying wondering why everything was like this, why am I not safe, screaming help, help, help and nobody comes. It was always the same.” Eve began
her life as a victim in a world that acted beyond her control. In her childhood, her father left the house only to be replaced with an abusive stepfather who continued to terrorize them all; again, “it was always the same.”
With a mum who worked long shifts, older siblings who wanted little to do with her, and an abusive stepfather in the home, Eve looked outside for acceptance by peers. Her identity as a passive victim, continued outside the home, however, and her “friends” often made her an object of ridicule, which she put up with because of her fears of
171 loneliness, “Not only would they gang up on me they’d get other people get involved
and I had people shut my hands in gates and all sort of things.”
Being picked on and bullied until high school, Eve continued to spend time with her tormenters, no matter how much they took advantage of or abused her in order to belong somewhere. After years of teasing and isolation, however, Eve described reaching a point where she had to fight back: “I thought I can’t have that anymore. I can’t allow
that.” When it was time to go to high school, Eve became determined to change herself
in order to stop being a victim. Eve’s transformation, however, extended beyond defending herself. She decided to become “one of the top people:”
if you don’t you’re going to get carry on being bullied because the same people you went to primary school with all got to the same high school and then they’ll start telling their new friends from other school about what a geek you are and they’ll start bullying you so the only way around is you have to become the bully and people have to be scared of you and then you don’t get any trouble.
By becoming a bully herself, Eve felt she could shed her former innocence so that others could not see it and exploit it. Eve’s life from that moment became about maintaining respect, “You just have to fight. It’s just fighting people. It’s all about respect.” Fighting created respect—not only from the “victims” at her mercy but also from the group she surrounded herself with, a concept which has recently emerged in the literature through the focus on young women’s decisions to engage in physical violence (see Heidensohn and Silvestri, 2012; Henriksen and Miller, 2012; Burman, 2008: Batchelor, 2005; Miller, 2002; Miller, 1998b, Hudson, 1989).
Even though Eve presented herself as fully a fighter, however, she hinted at feeling an ambivalence about the role, “It’s not necessarily that you want to do it or that you like
hurting people or that you want to be in the situation you’re in but it’s you that’s in that situation or you’re going to be the person that’s getting hit. You need to make the choice.” Her description of being in the situation where she has to hurt someone had
an element of the surreal, “but it’s you that’s in that situation,” and distanced herself from having to take full responsibility for her actions.
172 Fighting outside the home, however, also prepared her for more personal battles. In a seeming inevitable episode, Eve came upon her stepfather about to hit her mother and intervened, “unfortunately for him that was at an age where I was very much I am top
dog and you’re not going to fuck with my mum… I grabbed a marble rolling pin from the side and smashed him straight over the head and cut his head open.”
The moment appeared pre-destined and representative of a full realization of Eve’s fighting identity. The victim who used to jump out windows of her home, asking for someone to help her and her family, was replaced with a newly empowered version of herself, trained on the streets. Through hitting and overpowering the man who used to terrorize her and her mother, she could be the person who helped. By calling herself “top dog” Eve both adopted a masculine power (Miller, 2002) and hinted that she was simply sliding into the natural order of things—as someone young and strong it made sense that she should usurp his place.
Rather than the happy ending that Eve’s story built towards—getting rid of the abuser— Eve’s attempt to protect and earn respect failed. Her mother viewed Eve’s contribution as an unwelcome intervention in her relationship. It was contrary to everything Eve had learned about violence from her peers—where one fought to show loyalty and was rewarded for such loyalty, “Because with the friends I had, if you protected them that
was a great thing. If you beat somebody up it was a great thing but for her it wasn’t a great thing. And that really confused me. I didn’t get this.” It was a pivotal moment in
their relationship, and shortly after this incident, Eve left home.
On her own in the world, Eve battled with drugs and alcohol and continued her quest to belong by dating powerful men who made her the “centre of (their) world.” Rather than escaping the type of man she had attempted to overpower by becoming “top dog,” she found herself once again in a position without power. Inside the home she was abused by men, and outside the home she fought women who showed her the slightest amount of disrespect—becoming a complicated mixture of victim and abuser. In a moment reminiscent of her first breaking point as a child when she had had enough, a combination of a betrayal of her partner and the sudden death of a family member, hit her with a sudden realization, “I sort of sat there and said hold on a minute.” With the same sense of drama with which she described her first transformation, Eve announced,
173 “Changing” her life again involved a complete identity change. Eve moved, cut herself off from previous social circles and family, and was very much in the process of creating a new world for herself, as suggested in her use of the present tense and the word, “now.” Her new life, however, was a strictly controlled environment, “people
don’t come here unless they’re my very close friend or my family.” She also constructed
a social network of women like her. These women, like Eve, were all desisting, “We’re
all similar. Like we all used to do the same things and we all just work now and do the things the way you’re supposed to do them so you don’t get in trouble. You know. We don’t want. We sort of don’t want the attention from everyone else and questions all the time and drama.” Unlike other social circles Eve had belonged to, there seemed to be
no power differences among its members. The group functioned as a support group and helped replace the social scene they all sought to avoid.
Not everyone she knew approved of this process, claiming she had lost who she was. “‘Certain people are just like ‘oh you’ve lost who you are blah blah blah’ and no I’m
like ‘actually I’ve finally, just sort of recently, found who I am.’” According to Eve, the
self was something one had the power to deliberately construct and deconstruct, as seen in her first transformation from a “good” girl to a “bully.” Eve, however, also seemed to view “doing” and “being” as the same, as illustrated in this simulated defence to one of her critics, “I’ve changed the way that I am and you think it’s not right but really
when you look at what you do that’s not what’s right.” This belief that what one does
is who one is perhaps explained why Eve was unable to separate her behaviour from her notion of self (perhaps indicative of shame instead of guilt, as described by Leith and Baumeister, 1998). Shame might explain why she, in order to move on, had to create a new identity rather than simply change her behaviour. The concept is similar to a concept Maruna’s (2001: 87) calls “‘knifing off’ one’s troubled past,” which his mostly male desisters rejected in favour of a process, “involv[ing] more self- reconstruction than amputation.”
The restriction of movement across space she initially spoke about—going from work to home and nowhere else—signalled some of the active work she was undertaking in avoiding “trouble.” Living in the “now” was also a strategy that was equally restrictive, and, of course, difficult. In spite of the commitment to the “now,” for example, Eve struggled with letting go of the past—in particular her experiences as a victim. She had unanswered questions for her past abusers, and she did not feel as though she could
174 move forward before she had resolved and created a coherent story around her victimization. This concerned her far more than her history of offending.
One positive development, however, which was perhaps an avenue toward creating coherence, ironically came about through punishment for a previous offence. As part of her sentence, she received a referral to a counsellor. This was her first counselling appointment, and at the end of it, the counsellor offered her the opportunity to help other women who’d faced similar kinds of abuse.
After that session she asked me to come back and help other women, you know, that were in situations with domestic violence with drug abuse and all these sorts of things. And I just thought to myself there and then, you know, what if somebody’s asking me to do that that must mean that you do speak some sense and you have got some life