Drawing on the diary entries of twenty young women living in Kibera, a large slum outside of Nairobi, Kenya, Women’s Voices from the Margins is an in-depth investigation into women’s experiences of gender-based violence in the Global South. Elizabeth Swart employs relevant theory and feminist scholarship to ground her analysis in the broader context of globalization, while also attending to the specific responses and strategies used by these diarists to cope with gender-based violence.

Highlighting the implications of this qualitative study for policy practice and future research, this text considers the critical possibilities of localized interventions and is a valuable resource for students interested in women and violence, international social work, and women in the developing world.

Elizabeth Swart's profile page

Elizabeth Swart is a Lecturer in the Suzanne Dworak Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. She is also a clinical counselor in private practice, specializing in trauma, intimate partner violence, and refugee and immigrant populations. As an ethnographic researcher, Swart has conducted multiple research projects working with marginalized populations of women in Kenya and the United States.

“This is a must-read book if you want to understand and contribute to the fight against extreme poverty and gender-based violence in the lives of real women. It allows 20 women to tell their own stories of creative daily agency in their fight for survival—not as passive victims of male and economic and political violence, but as key actors struggling, and succeeding, to survive as best they can…. This is truly a story about how the personal is political and vice-versa.”— “Natalie J. Sokoloff, Professor Emerita of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and editor of Domestic Violence at the Margins “In this detailed, self-reflective study of how to engage across difference and listen to the knowledge of women in settings of gender-based violence and poverty, the author offers insights into her and the research participants’ journey of working for more than seven years in the Kenyan slum of Kibera. She reveals the nuanced ways women survive, and the possibilities of feminist methodologies for peeling back Western assumptions and changing how we think about learning in the university classroom.”— “Erin Baines, Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia