Misogyny, Epstein and NVR

What’s NVR got to do with misogyny? After all, it’s all about parenting, a parent-coaching approach, isn’t it?

The scandal around prominent, wealthy and powerful people who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein throws a light on how sexual violence, financial and political power come to be associated. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet we hear “Something is rotten in the State of Denmark”… Notwithstanding the remarkable gains women and girls have been making since the early years of the past century, society remains saturated with patriarchal discourses and gender inequality, with moral corruption. Just as racism grew to justify slavery, colonial expansion, ethnic cleansing and genocide, misogyny gives license to the many injustices women are exposed to. The rot is in the air, all around us and internalized in us, baked into language, etched into our daily practices. Often, misogynistic discourses construct the way we see and construct reality not only in what they communicate, but also what they omit.

NVR is not free from such omission. When the literature speaks of “parents” or “the parent” or “mum and dad”, it omits difference: difference in who attends multi-agency meetings more often – women or men? Who will be the object of parent-blaming more often? Who will be injured by their child’s violence more often? Who will more often be the target of demeaning language such as the c-word, the b-word and will smile ashamedly when their use is spoken about? Who will more often find themselves criticized by professionals for not setting a boundary when in actual fact they feel threatened or diminished? Feel guilty when in their minds they associate the controlling behaviour they experience on a near daily basis with the domestic abuse they may have suffered for many years, silenced by the shame that rises in them for being a victim, and the shame that rises for having likened what they experience to the coercive control they, as women, may be all too familiar with? I remember a professional remarking how harmful she experienced a mother who had recorded an incident of her teenage son’s physical violence and verbal abuse against her, so that professionals could understand what she was up against.

She was seen as harmful to her son for recording the insults, the blows, the breaking of her much-loved decorative plate, an heirloom. The professional felt that the mother was demonizing her son and thereby causing his behaviour. An act of victim blaming. I remember many mothers who have suffered intense distress when their child has been exposed to a father who had acted with domestic violence or coercive control over many years - based on the assumption that it is almost always in the child’s best interest to have contact with their father, a judicial default position. I remember how many of these mothers then have had to deal with the child’s emotional turmoil upon return.

When theory supersedes a mother’s experience, when professional perspectives silence a woman, even in her own mind, there is something rotten in the state… Mental health and social care have long ignored female rather than just parental experience – in a manner that is not dissimilar to the way medical procedures and treatments have long been shaped by research on male patients, seatbelts in cars are designed to fit the male body, temperatures in offices and showrooms are more comfortable to men than they are to women… the list goes on and on. And, mental health and social care have a history of holding mothers to account in ways they do not hold fathers to account. By diagnosing “disorders” as personal traits of patients rather than seeing their experience and behaviours in context, mental health practices individualize women’s distress. Their distress becomes a property of their disorder alone, divorced from the contextual forces and misogynistic discourses we are all immersed in or, as Sheila MacNamee puts it, the disordered social environment they are exposed to. Mothers’ emotional difficulties are discussed in terms of their impact on the child and as individualized traits, not as responses to social forces in their environment. As Alan Wade asks: “Is it depression, or is it oppression?”.

What can this mean for the practice of NVR as a parent-coaching or therapeutic endeavour?  It isn’t rocket science. The NVR practitioner can help the parent recognize the ways in which misogyny impacts on her emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally, both on the level of societal discourse and in their daily interactions with professionals around them; those interactions which contribute to keeping them locked in what Dan Dulberger, Michaela Fried and I have conceptualized as “parental erasure”. This is a state of consciousness in which they feel they do not matter to their child or to themselves, feel they have become an irrelevance. Recognizing and verbalizing are a first step out of oppression. The second step is to help mothers resist nonviolently. The resistance methods NVR has to offer don’t just help in relation to feeling empowered in parenting; they can help feeling empowered in response to others, whose actions and communication are shaped by the misogynistic rot that is all around. An announcement to professionals of resistance to their parent-blaming, a refusal to respond to a divorced birth father’s incessant, blaming texting… these are all forms of resistance.

The Anishinaabe writer and academic Gerald Vizenor created the neologism “survivance”, a combination of “survival” and “resistance”, to signify the processes by which North American Indigenous people and peoples, by virtue of their resistance, continue to survive disadvantage, marginalization and ignominy bestowed upon them by White racism. While some current discourses allow us to characterize women who have experienced misogynistic abuse as “survivours”, they rarely offer language in which resistance can be verbalized as a definitional aspect. This post concerns itself with the survivance of mothers. Yes, many fathers have a rough deal when it comes to child-to-parent violence and abuse as well, but I have seen how beneficial it can be to the survivance of mothers when their specifically female experience is given conversational space in NVR therapy and parent coaching, and when in this space resistance is considered, planned and reflected upon once it has been carried out – not just resistance to coercive child behaviour, but also resistance to the rot of misogyny that is all around us and in us and that compounds and often gives license to the controlling behaviour of a young person.

References:

Beckers, W; Jakob, P. & Schreiter, M-L. (2022). Mattering and Parental Presence in Systemic Therapy using Nonviolent Resistance: The Utilization of Imaginary Methods. Family Process 61(2), 507-519.

Carina Brown, ed. (2025). Reframing Trauma through Social Justice. Resisting the Politics of Mainstream Trauma Discourse. Routledge.

Jakob, P. (2025). Nonviolent Resistance in Trauma-focused Practice. As Systemic Approach to Therapy and Social Care. Routledge.

McNamee, S; Rasera, E. F. & Martins, P. (2023). Practicing Therapy as Social Construction. Sage.

Vizenor, G. (1993). Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Wesleyan University Press.

Wade, A. (1997). Small acts of living: Everyday resistance to violence and other forms of oppression. Contemporary family therapy, 19(1), 23-39.