The Role of Sexual Violence in Shaping Women's Understanding of Possibility

Abstract

This thesis examines women’s understandings of the relationship between sexual violence and their expectations for the future. Rooted in an anti-oppressive feminist theoretical framework, this thesis uses narrative inquiry in its analyses of individual interviews with eight women to develop “possibility” as an analytical concept that holds relevance to social work practice. It identifies and describes a possibility story structure common to women’s accounts of the impact of sexual violence on their sense of possibility, and it positions these possibility stories as sites through which to connect the individual psychological impacts of sexual violence with the economic, educational, employment, and other social costs of sexual violence. This thesis makes connections between sexual violence in shaping women’s possibility stories and the power that dominant systems, structures, and attitudes hold in shaping notions of opportunity, hope, and imagined futures in the lives of survivors of sexual violence.