What Safety Feels Like: A Survivor’s Journey Through Fragmented Systems
Tracks
Room 4: In-Person Only
| Wednesday, November 26, 2025 |
| 10:35 AM - 11:05 AM |
Overview
Kellie McGlynn, Deakin University
Details
1. Systems can retraumatise
Contradictions across services often compound harm instead of reducing it.
2. Survivors are knowledge holders
Lived experience is critical to understanding and reforming family violence systems.
3. Safety must be reimagined
Feminist, relational, and survivor-led approaches are essential for meaningful change.
Speaker
Dr Kellie McGlynn
Academic And Researcher
Deakin University
"What Safety Feels Like: A Survivor’s Journey Through Fragmented Systems"
Presentation Overview
Family violence survivors are often positioned at the intersection of multiple service systems, legal, housing, counselling, health, police, each claiming to support safety and recovery, yet often acting in fragmented and contradictory ways. Drawing on feminist autoethnography and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), this paper examines my lived experience of engaging with family violence services in Australia. It explores how systems mediate, constrain, and often obstruct the very safety they are designed to provide.
Using CHAT to unpack the structure of activity systems,subjects, objects, tools, rules, communities, and divisions of labour. I identify a series of contradictions between what survivours need and what systems are structured to deliver. These contradictions manifest in conflicting institutional logics, bureaucratic gatekeeping, and emotional dissonance that require survivors to manage not only trauma, but also the work of navigating systems.
Feminist theory and CHAT informs both the method and analysis, positioning survivors as critical knowledge holders. This paper contributes to a growing feminist literature on institutional betrayal, systemic fragmentation, and the burden of care shifted onto women navigating state and non-state support. It calls for a reimagining of family violence responses that centres survivor agency, coherence across services, and feminist accountability in systems design.
Using CHAT to unpack the structure of activity systems,subjects, objects, tools, rules, communities, and divisions of labour. I identify a series of contradictions between what survivours need and what systems are structured to deliver. These contradictions manifest in conflicting institutional logics, bureaucratic gatekeeping, and emotional dissonance that require survivors to manage not only trauma, but also the work of navigating systems.
Feminist theory and CHAT informs both the method and analysis, positioning survivors as critical knowledge holders. This paper contributes to a growing feminist literature on institutional betrayal, systemic fragmentation, and the burden of care shifted onto women navigating state and non-state support. It calls for a reimagining of family violence responses that centres survivor agency, coherence across services, and feminist accountability in systems design.
Biography
Dr Kellie Tobin is a feminist researcher, educator, and advocate whose work explores the intersections of trauma, institutional systems, and survivor-led knowledge. Drawing on her lived experience, she uses autoethnography and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to critically examine family violence services and the contradictions embedded within them. Her research challenges dominant paradigms of safety and care, offering transformative insights into how survivors navigate and often resist the systems designed to support them. She is committed to amplifying the political and epistemic authority of survivor voices in policy, practice, and scholarship.
