Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile

6. Contingencies of Care

137 C h A P t e r 6 Contingencies of Care There is always the goal of continuing to construct democracy in the country and the home. —SERNAM official, 2009 Late one night in 2007, in the middle of a major multilane traffic artery in Santiago, a man brutally beat a woman unconscious, leaving her there. A bystander used his cell-phone camera to record the horrific scene, and Terra, a Chilean Internet-based news site, later reported on it. In the video we see the woman lying helplessly in the middle of the road, unconscious, with cars whizzing past, coming close to running her over, as two police officers watch, their hands stuffed into their pockets. Another officer arrives and also just observes the scene. The state, embodied in these three officers, utterly and blatantly failed to act, even as the abuse unfolded before its agents’ eyes. Eventually the woman regained consciousness, and the violence continued. The Terra reporter narrated: The woman again gets to her feet. The aggressor grabs her by the arm and makes her cross the street and hits her repeatedly again, this time against a wall of the police station. . . . Only 30 meters from the station the woman receives the final blow. At this point, she is not moving, is apparently unconscious, and her aggressor leaves the scene quickly. Finally, this abused woman goes away with an unknown person. There is no record of an ambulance in the area, or of a woman in any hospital that morning for such injuries. A man had blatantly beaten a woman with whom he apparently had some sort of intimate relationship, given their initial embrace. He had beaten her repeatedly in front of three police officers who colluded 138 Traumatic States with the abuse by failing to intervene. In effect, they granted the aggressor impunity as they willingly averted their gaze to the violence being done. After Terra made these events public the Chilean state finally reacted and expelled the policemen who had willingly failed to act while witnessing a woman being beaten. In the end, the state upheld its promises of gender equity and intervention on behalf of women who suffer gender-based violence. But the incident had happened. It could not be erased. We are left to wonder: Where did this woman go after she was so viciously wounded? How was she affected by the cruel public beatings and the indifference of the authorities when she was living by a thread? This incident represents the precariousness of the state’s care for women who suffer gender-based violence. Here, care was contingent on the actions of the police as officials of the state charged with enacting its laws. No care was provided here, except, perhaps, by the innocent bystander who recorded the events on her or his camera phone and then sent it to Terra, who then in turn used its Internet platform to circulate the images within and beyond Chile. The inaction of the police in this instance represents a blatant and violent lack of care on the part of the state, a lack of care that produced harm. Many other forms of care for women who suffer gender-based violence are also contingent and cause further suffering. This chapter examines various ways in which Family Care, Safe Space, and SERNAM ’s forms of care, while at times healing, have also been contingent in ways that can cause harm (see also Ticktin 2011). Contingent Care Marisol’s, Josefina’s, and Luz’s processes of recovery, like their life situations, have been very different from one another. The kinds of care they have accessed are diverse, and their emotional and material situations and needs have mirrored this diversity. They often expressed frustration at the lack of care they received. They sought care related to their mental and physical health, yet the forms of care doled out by Contingencies of Care 139 government officials, including police, lawyers, and social workers, often failed to meet their real needs. Often, their interactions with such state officials left them dissatisfied and feeling more vulnerable, a paradoxical by-product of the process of legislating and bureaucratizing care for women who suffer intimate partner violence. In the process of boiling down and “packaging” suffering to make it legible to institutions of care, an ethic of care sometimes is lost or misplaced, whether intentionally or not. We have already seen...