'Encountering' violence: White sexual assault counsellors and race.

Description

This research, which employs a feminist anti-colonial theory of sexual violence, explores how colonization shapes the racial encounter between white sexual assault counsellors and Aboriginal women in a Prairie city. Through semi-structured interviews, counsellors revealed that they employ various strategies of ignoring race when counselling, which aligns with a liberal feminist view that imagines all women as unified through their shared gender oppression. The analysis indicates that when white counsellors encounter Aboriginal clients, they reproduce racism and perform dominance through strategies of racelessness. Counsellors desire to know more about Aboriginal women and their culture, because due to their different social locations, counsellors are often unable to relate to their clients' realities and "vulnerability." When vulnerability is empathized, pity and empathy become the emotional responses, but as I argue the problem with these responses is that it does not lead to respect, nor any structural change in the system of oppression.

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