An "Other” Paradigm of Help: The Impact of Ni Una Menos Lambayeque’s Activist Work on Help-Seeking and Help-Giving for Gender Based Violence in Lambayeque, Peru

This paper describes and analyzes the activities of a feminist activist group, Ni Una Menos Lambayeque (NUML), in the city of Chiclayo, Peru, as they organize to prevent and respond to gender-based violence. This paper shows how NUML activists engage in community-based problem identification, strategy development, targeted actions, and process and outcomes evaluations in ways that challenge norms and empower mujeres abusadas (abused women: a local term that does not suggest an evaluation of individual agency, unlike “victim” and “survivor” in US English) and potential help-givers.

Drawing on 24 months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, this research examines how NUML’s activism opens alternative routes for help-giving and help-seeking while challenging existing formal support services and systems of power. Building on decolonial feminist theory, this paper reconceptualizes activism as a third, “other” form of help-giving that is outside of the typically recognized forms of help-giving and challenges the commonly accepted binary of informal or formal help that is typical in the help-seeking literature. This paper argues that this “other” form of help-giving challenges, augments, and reinvents these more commonly recognized forms of help through consciousness-raising for mujeres abusadas and the general population, and training and empowering potential help-givers to create new support systems. NUML’s activism impacted local help-seeking and help-giving in four key ways: First, their community education and organizing illuminate the local socio-cultural and material conditions that help-seekers and help-givers must navigate, and they identify how existing supportive options need to be tailored to better meet mujeres abusadas’ needs. Second, their activism helps to reduce barriers to informal and formal help-seeking and help-giving. Third, their activist work helps facilitate informal and formal help-seeking and -giving. Fourth, their organizing augments informal and formal help-seeking and help-giving options by creating alternatives like mutual aid supportive services, systems change, socio-cultural change, and prevention efforts.