About us

• Current team
• Aims/Principles
• History
• What people say about us

Current team

The Centre is led by Professor Aisha K. Gill CBE. Staff members research on a range of issues, including domestic, sexual, ‘honour’ based and reproductive violence, abuse and harm. Our thriving and international postgraduate community are central to this work.

Alongside regular meetings, formal seminars and reading groups, staff and students meet regularly in a more informal setting to share research, participate in local and national events, support specialist GBV non-governmental organisations, and have fun in a collaborative and collegiate environment. By working and celebrating together, the group aims to support members in what can be a challenging area.

Aims and principles

Several key principles underpin the centre’s aim to inform policy and praxis to combat GBV:

• to work alongside movements and organisations in addressing and challenging cultural and structural forms of gendered violence in different countries and contexts
• to apply feminist understandings of gender and power in relation to personal and structural violence. Broad feminist principles, including the empowerment of child and adult survivors of violence, inform all our research, training and advisory work.
• to use a wide range of research methods (qualitative and quantitative) as appropriate
• to conduct both policy and conceptual/theoretical work on gendered forms of violence
• to integrate, throughout our work, issues of difference, oppression and diversity, including on grounds of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, faith, disability, class, race and ethnicity, nationality and age
• to use a research ethic that recognises the power differentials between researcher and research subject/s
• to involve survivors/victims of abuse as participants, informants and experts in all our research and to highlight their voices, views and needs throughout our work
• to make the safety of both survivors/victims of abuse and researchers a central, underlying principle of our work
• to work, where appropriate, to inform government policy and service provision
• to contribute to feminist debates on all forms of gendered violence (e.g., family, interpersonal, structural, epistemic, cultural, and institutional).

History

The Centre for Gender and Violence Research began as the activist-based Domestic Violence Research Group (DVRG) in 1990. Its founding members were Gill Hague and Ellen Malos, who conceived the idea for the group and Marianne Hester joined in 1994.

Developing out of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the DVRG established particularly close relationships with the Women’s Aid Federation of England, whose National Office had recently been set up in Bristol. Using a gendered analysis of violence the Group conducted wide-ranging, high-quality research while maintaining an activist commitment to amplifying, wherever possible, the voices of abused women and their children.

Over the years, the DVRG expanded to work on all forms of gendered violence across a number of countries and using a variety of research methods.

In 2004, Marianne Hester brought members of her research team from the University of Sunderland to Bristol, and the DVRG expanded into the Violence Against Women Research Group (VAWRG). In October 2009, the VAWRG became the Centre for Gender and Violence Research, which continues to build on the important work it has conducted in its previous incarnations over the last three decades.

What people say about us