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CHAPTER 6 The Politics of Awareness: Making Domestic Violence Visible in Poland
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CHAPTER 6 The Politics of Awareness: Making Domestic Violence Visible in Poland THOMAS CHIVENS In July of 2005, the Polish government passed an Act to Counteract Domestic Violence.1 Taking effect on November 21 of that year, it legally defined domestic violence for the first time in Poland. The act delegated administrative responsibilities to regional and local governments to provide support and treatment for victims and perpetrators and imposed obligations on the Council of Ministers to develop a national program to stop family violence. In addition, the law obliged the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy to determine standards for those intervention efforts, to monitor the development of the national program, and to establish and finance research and awareness-raising efforts, educating Poles on the causes and consequences of violence among family members (Open Society Institute 2007). The legislation marked a concrete legal recognition of domestic violence as a social problem in Poland, and in doing so provided a glimpse into how the Polish state imagined the policing of families at the start of the twenty-first century. Yet, more than three years after taking effect, its meanings and practical consequences are difficult to discern. Answers regarding how and to what extent the law is implemented are unsettled, while concerns about whether the provisions of the law effectively address domestic violence against women are the subject of significant debate (Mrozik et al. 2007). Starting with a description of the 2005 law, I explore the field of domestic violence intervention that preceded it. I draw on the unsettled nature of domestic violence policy in Poland to seek a better understanding of “awareness” as it pertains to domestic violence against women, a process best understood as ongoing , unstable, and contested. It is often observed in discussions of domestic violence that the absence of awareness effectively produces a concomitant silence in terms of public action (a lack of social education or a tacit acceptance of violence against women) and state interventions (a lack of education in judicial and policing systems, or the absence of statistics, tracking, 172 Thomas Chivens or support; see Fineman and Mykitiuk 1994). Lack of awareness constitutes a silence that compulsively repeats the absence of protection for battered women, an absence that unfolds unevenly in its intersections with racial, class, national, sexual, or other historically formed identi- fications and inequalities (Sokoloff and Pratt 2005). While techniques and strategies for producing awareness are familiar to domestic violence intervention expertise in all their contemporary forms, the work of awareness (and what that work consists of) becomes particularly clear in contexts where an absence of awareness is designated in advance, as has been the case in formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe. That is, the work of awareness is especially relevant to analyze in postcommunist state transitions such as in Poland because calls for awareness are juxtaposed to claims that prior to 1989 domestic violence against women was not systematically recognized or named, either in law or in policing practices (Fábián 2006; Hemment 2004; Johnson 2007; Marcus 2002; United Nations Development Program 2007). While the politics of domestic violence awareness are resolutely concerned with locality, work to refashion gender-inflected public/ private boundaries has little use for larger geographic origins or destinations aside from designating obstacles for effective intervention (such as cultural or national forms of masculinity, motherhood, or religion), or as provisional reference points for naming the origins of model programs (Kwaitkowska 1998; Shepard and Pence 1999; Walentyna 1994). Instead, domestic violence awareness is constituted by locally and transnationally linked circuits of intervention that attempt to render violence against women vocally and visibly problematic, and draw on a relatively standard set of representational modes and techniques for achieving recognition and change (such as victim stories, advertisements , instructional manuals, informational brochures, presentations of data or their absence, as well as local, national and international monitoring, research, and educational programs). To understand the emergence of domestic violence policy in postcommunist Poland, then, is to attend to the assembly of particular strategies and material forms that awareness-raising work has taken, in addition to stories, struggles, intervention infrastructures, or laws they have sought to produce. Descriptive attention to the practice of awareness-raising itself provides an important complement to understanding the complex vectors of social change charted in this volume. As Janet Elise Johnson and Gulnara Zaynullina point out in this volume, the relative absence of languages for describing abuse prior to the 1990s [18.232.188.122] Project...