F0REW0RD

I am honoured to have been invited by the authors to provide a foreword to Childhood Experiences of Family Violence Among Racialized Immigrant Youth: Case Studies. For well over two decades, much of my research and teaching has focused on violence in the familial context. Conceptualizations of this violence have changed over time, as have understandings of its etiology and impacts. Our understandings are now more complex, nuanced, and attendant to diverse realities than they were two decades ago, but as the case studies in this book show, there remains much to learn.

The ongoing shifts – and deepening – in understandings of “family violence” (itself a contested term) have been propelled by the centering of the experiences and voices of those not reflected in dominant conceptualizations and discourses. For example, Black women’s scholarship and activism, in centering Black women’s experiences, has revealed the race-based assumptions underpinning notions of genuine victims of gender-based violence, and Queer scholarship and activism, the heteronormative assumptions baked into the “violence against women” frame. The centering of these experiences has uncovered the harms worked by these assumptions and underscored the need for radically different social supports and legal responses (for example, transformative justice rather than criminal law intervention).

The Case Studies book centers other voices long neglected in the family violence literature: the voices of racialized immigrant youth. As the authors note, while there has been growing attention to children’s exposure to adult violence in the family, the voices of children themselves – and especially the voices of racialized children – have been largely absent. In fact, in my research over many years I have not come across a single study on family violence that centers, as the one undertaken by the authors does, the voices of racialized, immigrant youth. As the authors implore, “there is an urgent need to expand the limited body of knowledge on racialized immigrant children impacted by FV [family violence].”

The racialized young adults whose narratives of navigating family violence as children form the twelve case studies in the book reveal the gaps, limitations, and harms of current understandings of, and responses to, family violence and offer many profound insights into how family violence ought to be conceptualized and how legal and social systems could and should better respond. For example, while the concept of “coercive control” has existed in the literature for quite some time, only recently has it entered the legal domain (in Canada, particularly through reforms to the Divorce Act and the family law legislation of several provinces). The literature on coercive control has positioned patriarchy and gender inequality as central to its deployment. But this single axis view fails to attend to how other structures of power also enable coercive control and how the tactics that comprise coercive control vary. The narratives of the youth make clear that other structures – racism, ablism, migration status, for example – are central to coercive control. The narratives also challenge us to think more deeply and robustly about the concept of the “best interests of the child,” a concept that is central to decision-making in various realms. The concept has long been critiqued as ambiguous and hence often infused with the prejudices and stereotypes of decisionmakers. The youths’ narratives prompt us to think about what the concept of “best interests” might look like if materially grounded in their experiences.

This Case Studies book complements the authors’ earlier book, Breaking the Silence: The untold journeys of racialized immigrant youth through family violence. The two can be used together, or separately. Breaking the Silence provides a thorough, engaging, and highly readable overview of relevant research, thematic analysis of the twelve interviews with racialized young adults, and a host of well-conceptualized recommendations with detailed steps for implementation. The Case Studies book, while covering some aspects of the literature, provides much greater detail of the narratives of each of the twelve participants in the authors’ study, followed by a series of questions to prompt discussion, question assumptions, and deepen learning.

Both books benefit enormously from their interdisciplinary co-authorship. The various theoretical frames the authors describe and draw from include intersectionality (prompting the reader to consider the multiple and complex intersecting structures of oppression in the lives of the youth and their families); critical race theory (underscoring the importance of centring marginalized voices, here racialized immigrant youth); and anti-oppression theory (imploring the reader to attend to the operation of power, especially how systems and structures are themselves often sources of violence in the lives of marginalized youth, families, and communities). Importantly both books underscore how deeply interconnected structural violence and violence as it manifests in individual relationships and families are. This insight is one so often obscured in the rush to blame and punish individuals.

Both books are excellent resources for educators, service providers, lawyers, and all those whose work interfaces in some manner with racialized families struggling to survive in the face of oppression. Among the qualities that I greatly appreciate about both books is that they do not elide complexity; they steer away from simplistic renderings of family violence and from individual blame. Significantly too, the case studies remind us of how much we stand to learn from racialized children and youth, if we take the time to truly listen.

Janet Mosher

BMusA (Western Ontario), LLB (Queen’s), LLM (Toronto), of the Bar of Ontario

Associate Professor

Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Email: jmosher@osgoode.yorku.ca