Is anyone really listening? Reflections on knowledge, power and systemic resistance in research on gender-based violence

Content warning: this post reflects on the difficult realities of researching gender-based violence and mentions real cases that some readers may find distressing. Please take care of yourself – your wellbeing comes first.

What does it mean to study violence within systems that are not yet willing or able to fully confront it? This question has stayed with me throughout my research on gender-based violence, sharpening not only my analytical focus, but my understanding of what it means to be a researcher situated within the very structures we challenge.

My positionality, in this sense, is not something that can be resolved through a single reflexive statement. It is an ongoing negotiation between witnessing and interpretation and between the knowledge we produce and the systems that determine what is done with it.

Speaking truth within power

Sensitive research is necessary. Rigorous scholarship informs policy debates, legal reforms and institutional practice. It provides the conceptual language through which violence is named, understood and challenged. The persistence of violence, however, despite decades of research, produces a particular kind of fatigue among those who spend years documenting patterns that appear resistant to change.

There is an underlying anxiety that our work may be received as mere academic critique, cited but not acted upon, or selectively mobilised only when findings align with political priorities or dominant public narratives. This realisation reminds me that critical scholarship does not sit outside power. It operates within it and is shaped, filtered and constrained by the very unequal power dynamics we attempt to disrupt.

Uneven shifts

This tension becomes more difficult to ignore when placed alongside contemporary cases. In the case of Gisèle Pelicot, for instance, I have found myself reflecting not only on the brutality of the abuse, which was prolonged and devastating, but also on what it reveals about the social conditions that made it possible. Those implicated were not shadowy figures from an unknown criminal underworld. They were neighbours, workers and people living seemingly ordinary lives.

Similarly, the rape and murder of Eudy Simelane in South Africa, where perpetrators framed the assault as a means of “correcting” her sexuality, reveals how sexual violence is carried out not only as personal harm but also as a tool of gendered and social conformity.

What these cases expose, analytically, is a significant gap between formal progress in gender equality frameworks and the persistence of the social systems that sustain violence within everyday relationships and communities. These systems are deeply rooted and difficult to shift. For those of us researching in this field, they are a reminder that the systems we study are not passive objects of analysis. They push back, and this raises a difficult but necessary question: is anyone really listening?

Layers upon layers

Researching violence involves sustained engagement with these realities, including working with distressing narratives, case files that expose systemic failures, and testimonies that reveal the cumulative effects of violence over time. We use conceptual frameworks to make sense of these patterns and understand the structures of harm. This often requires us to translate traumatic experiences into analytical categories, and that process is never entirely neutral. Our positionalities and emotions shift in that process and in ways that published academic outputs rarely make visible.

For those of us working in this area, we navigate these tensions both analytically and emotionally. Detachment, in this context, is a myth. We are not external observers. We are situated within the same institutional, political and epistemic structures that shape both the production of knowledge and the conditions of violence itself.

In my own work, this has led to a quiet but persistent question: what happens to knowledge once it leaves us? Recognising this is to acknowledge that the relationship between knowledge and transformation is neither linear nor guaranteed. Change is often uneven, contested, slow, and shaped by forces that extend beyond the boundaries of academic work.

It is precisely here that researcher wellbeing enters, not as a personal concern to be managed privately, but as a methodological and ethical one. It is a constitutive dimension of rigorous research practice and institutions that take research ethics seriously must recognise it as such. Secondary exposure to emotional harm, alongside the accumulated frustration of documenting patterns that formal progress has not dismantled, forms part of the conditions under which knowledge is produced.

In the field, I am not only producing knowledge, I am also navigating trust, power and the persistent question of whether my work will create the change that the people I work with urgently need. These moments are difficult to separate from the research itself. They stay with me, shaping how I understand my work and my ethical responsibility to ensure it contributes to meaningful impact.

Self-awareness as praxis

None of this diminishes the importance of sensitive research. If anything, it seals its necessity. We continue to play a critical role in documenting harm, challenging dominant narratives, and opening space for alternative ways of knowing and responding to violence. But it also requires a more honest engagement with the realities of working within systems that do not always move at the pace, or in the direction, that such work demands. This is where my frustration lies, and where I think the field must be more candid with itself.

Research is lived and felt. It is shaped by where we stand, who we are, and the responsibilities and emotions we carry as we produce knowledge. The question, then, is not only how knowledge is produced, but whether we are paying enough attention to the conditions under which it is produced and the processes that shape its impact. What would it mean to treat such self-awareness as an essential ethical responsibility, rather than an optional one, within research practice?

Perhaps it is through acknowledging my frustrations and reflecting on them that my research becomes more rigorous. Not as a departure from, or compromise of objectivity, but as a form of reflexive transparency that shapes how I remain accountable to both the knowledge produced and those whose experiences inform it.

Dr Yemisi L. Sloane, Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences