Another male instructor at a workshop had talked about his discomfort at his own silence when women came into his class with bruises. Because he was not from the same culture as the students and they were not telling him that the injuries were caused by male violence, he felt unable to say anything. Together we thought about what he could say that respected their silence, did not make him the judge of their lives, yet was not complicit. His plan in future was to say: "I don't know how you got those bruises, but if somebody hurt you I want you to know that I don't think violence against another person is ever OK. Nobody ever deserves to be hurt." I have not heard if he used his prepared approach, and do not know how it has been received, but I have offered many workers that approach since in the hope that it could give a clear message about violence. Preparing a response to a range of possible situations can be very helpful for both men and women in literacy - helping to avoid the silences that give messages we would rather not send out.

Increasingly, I have come to argue that there is no neutral place to reach by staying silent. Silence gives the message of complicity with the dominant messages of society that condone violence. We can break the silence using posters, pamphlets, reading materials for students and teachers, workshops, ground rules about violence, and responding clearly to violence and to the pressure to "get over it." When I was asked to create a tutor training kit(6) I wrote a set of statements: Key Messages(7) about the unacceptability of violence and asked literacy workers to discuss how they might make these messages visible in their program. One worker was a little uncomfortable with the idea of prescriptive statements, but others had many ideas about ways to make these statements (or modified versions) visible in their programs, including making individual posters with each statement to display in the program.

Naming violence is not disclosing

Katy Chaffee, a literacy worker in the New England project, mentioned that the disclosures she hears in groups using the arts to explore well-being and support women's learning in her welfare to work program do not burn her out the way disclosures did in the course of her more traditional teaching work, heard around the edges of teaching. She thought the difference was the stories emerge within the class as part of each woman bringing her whole self to learning. In that instance, they were not in a "fix it" frame, but were simply part of the naming of the presence of the whole person, including her past or present experience with violence. In contrast Katy Chaffee realized she had been exhausted by hearing stories previously in a frame that said, "I have this problem - fix it" while it was also not part of the work. This recognition might be useful for other workers in the face of the fear that opening up the issue will be overwhelming.

(6) Drawing the Line: Dealing with affective issues in literacy is available from the Saskatchewan Literacy Network at their website at NALD: http://www.nald.ca/Province/Sask/SLN/Resource/newordrs/drawline.htm (7) See appendix for an edited version of the "key messages" included in the kit.