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Janice Haaken Routledge, London, 2010, 208 pp., $29.99, ISBN-13: 978-0415563420
Janice Haaken, a professor of psychology at Portland (OR) State University, is both a clinician and an advocate for social justice. She has spent a lifetime in the domestic violence trenches and speaks with authority about the movement's goals and modus operandi. She understands that personal life, as well as political life, is a story offered passionately but inaccurately, sometimes half-wittedly, vulnerable to gaps and myriad agenda-driven revisions from within and without. The stories of battered women seem particularly susceptible to these narrative transformations because of their power to incite legal and social change, on one hand, and the deep-seated anxiety they provoke around gendered issues of desire, rage, power, and need, on the other. In the war of words that framed a liberation movement, some kinds of abuse stories gained traction while others remained untold.
In Hard Knocks, rather than interviewing women who used the movement to escape violence, Haaken talked to the people who staffed the movement – volunteers, program directors, political activists. She interviewed more than 200 persons working in the field to discern how their interventions may have unconsciously structured victims’ accounts in particular ways that did not necessarily reflect the totality of the women's experiences so much as reify a particular dimension that might be useful in the fight to have domestic violence treated seriously by legislators, police, the judiciary, and the public. She also investigated the scripting of psychological narratives that ignore cultural context, and media portrayals that theatricalize human suffering.
Haaken understands the usefulness of a feminist narrative