![]() ♣ The most significant impacts of the various types of abuse are feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, fear and low self-esteem The following are some of the critical issues faced by survivors that have recently extricated themselves from abusive situations and could aid in future IET programmes as well as future research: ![]() ♣ The skills sessions need to be more practical and include access to information as well as tools to find employment and accommodation. ♣ The root-cause analysis allowed survivors to understand how they could attempt to break the abuse cycle, by reframing gender stereotypes for their children. ♣ The reflective sessions were found to be immensely valuable especially when combined with pertinent questions. ♣ The ethos of the IEM, if honoured, allows the survivors to fully engage and hence achieve varying levels of empowerment. The recommendations are based on the efficacy of the IET as an empowerment programme. The process, content and impact of the IET was constantly evaluated by the survivors, shelter management and myself. The IET was tested at two shelters within South Africa. The rationale was based on the psychological and psychical needs of the survivors being catered for by the shelters. ![]() Although this espouses psychological and physical empowerment, the IET focussed primarily on the cognitive understanding of lived experiences of survivors, via reflective sessions, and the economic empowerment, via skills development sessions. The IEM led to the development of the Integral Empowerment Tool (IET) that was crafted to meet the specific needs of IPV survivors residing in places of safety. ![]() Actualise economic and physical empowerment via pragmatic, practical and realistic action steps.Bring about psychological and cognitive emancipation via critical analysis of self, environment and culture.Use the African Feminist (AF) foundation of trust, care and affirmation to engage in the Western Feminist (WF) process of reflection, by coding and decoding our lived experiences.Unearth what is required to honour love for self, other and community.The revelations led to the development of a contemporary African and Feminist research methodology, the Integral Empowerment Methodology (IEM), the tenets of which include: Framed by this, the process of thesis, antithesis and fusion was used to interrogate my life as well as the field of IPV, from my perspective, giving voice to the other and finally integrating these new learnings into a freshly evolved perspective. The thesis has an Afro-centric and Feminist grounding. On further interrogation of the landscape of my broader family, l was forced to acknowledge the impact that the abuse my cousin suffered, at the hands of her husband, had had on me, and which resulted in the focus of my research being the impact that integral empowerment could have on survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). I realised that my dad’s fight against apartheid and my mum’s defiance in the face of gender oppression led me to find my passion in the empowerment of women. My inner journey unpacked the lived experiences of my parents and how this impacted me and shaped the person I became.
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