‘GBV is not one thing’: reflections from long-term fieldwork engagements in Kenya on how researchers' and participants' concepts of violence change

This chapter offers two fieldwork accounts from researchers who did research in Kenya but started with very different positionalities and perspectives on gender-based violence (GBV). In the first, Anne, a Kenyan researcher, asks herself some hard questions about what it might mean to redefine others’ experiences as violence when they do not frame it that way themselves, including whether she has been socialised to think some form of violence is normal and expected. In the other, Gem, a British researcher, describes how she did not, at first, ‘hear’ violence in her research participants’ stories because she did not understand the ways it was talked about, that is until she found herself a participant observer in a story of GBV that played out outside her house. Both accounts stress the importance of not treating GBV like ‘one thing’ and call for a need to reflect carefully on not only our own, sometimes changing, understandings of violence but also the meanings and actions that are attached to violence in the contexts we work.<p></p>