Jeanne Sarson & Linda MacDonald refuse to abandon victims to a vicious world

Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald have spent decades developing ways of offering care and protection to women who desperately need it. As the description for their new book Women Unsilenced points out, they’ve made it their goal to break the silence, the tyranny of silence by which gender-based violence persists. They explain in this conversation that they developed a network of care for women in these circumstances because they couldn’t just passively take in the information, they needed to intervene. And while I don’t agree with every single one of the claims that they make in Women Unsilenced, I absolutely respect their fundamental motivation. There is an attachment in their book to the criminal justice system, a sense that we can’t necessarily quickly move away from the system that we have. I feel somewhat differently, and agree with my next guest for the podcast Ardath Whynacht that this violence in some ways comes from living in a carceral society that “relies on binary categories of good and evil to avoid any sustained response to the causes of domestic violence.” But I absolutely agree with Jeanne and Linda's sense that care networks are vital for providing an alternative space of safety outside of a punishing, individualistic society, outside of the coordinates of possibility provided by patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, domination. It’s a wide-ranging and difficult conversion, so please do be aware that we’re going to be talking about gender-based violence, we’re going to be talking about subjects that not everyone will be comfortable hearing. We talk about the ways in which victimization dehumanizes people. We talk about what it means to, as Jeanne puts it, “rescue the act of caring” in a society that doesn't just dismiss, but even criminalizes caring in certain ways. They talk about the ways in which their own place in the story is crucial to how they theorize gender-based violence. And I ask them how they cope through the work they do. They make it clear that it’s not a question of coping, but a question of responsibility for them. You can find the book in bookstores in Halifax, NS, and online at Friesen Press (https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000164461020/Jeanne-Sarson-and-Linda-MacDonald-Women-Unsilenced).