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Studying ALLY
“Come on, stop it and sit up,” Minoo, a seventeen-year-old client, whispered with frustration to a group of young women who were playfully yet quietly arm wrestling on the round table around which all were seated. The disapproving glances of others conveyed the same message and brought their game to an abrupt end. Having just entered the room, I was surprised by the calm, serious, and disciplined demeanor of the young women, who often enjoyed loud and playful banter. “We are waiting for Ms. Maryam,” Minoo told me to remind me of their scheduled meeting with the organization’s founder and to explain the unusual silence in the room. It was clear that the clients took such meetings with Maryam, who traveled to Iran several times a year, seriously. These meetings were meant to allow clients to express freely—without the presence of other staff—their grievances, complaints, and ideas for bettering the organization’s program.
I had yet to meet Maryam, with whom I had only exchanged emails thus far. Maryam had established the organization in the early 2000s and had begun her work in a small house with no official permission and with a handful of staff and clients. Residing outside of Iran most of her life had not severed Maryam’s strong ties to her home country. Her considerable financial resources and strong networks in the diaspora had allowed her to envision and later establish ALLY as a space of refuge for young women who had ended up on the streets, in juvenile detention centers, or in the sex work industry due to poverty, neglect, and abuse. Social abandonment, according to Maryam, is the root cause of the young women’s problems, for there are no legal, social, or institutional services accommodating these extremely vulnerable women. “The girls who are aasib dide [harmed] and especially those girls who have been harmed and are from lower economic classes almost have no place in Iranian people’s minds; they don’t exist in the Iranian psyche,” Maryam told me in an interview about the society that has closed its eyes to the experiences of the most marginalized.
Maryam entered the building with her scarf laying on her shoulders rather than her hair; she wore capris pants and a see-through manto1—an outfit not even slightly in compliance with the government’s requirements of women’s clothing in public. Tall and slender, she exuded authority and warmth, and her lack of care for the government-imposed rules of hejab was a clear indication of her fearless and uncompromising attitude toward what she considered her rights as a woman. After entering the room, Maryam quickly opened the floor to clients, asking them to freely share their thoughts. She took notes of their complaints about the quality of food prepared at ALLY, about the social workers they considered to be unprofessional and a psychologist who seemed to encourage clients to get married, and about many more instances when ALLY and its staff had not met their expectations. Such meetings were held periodically for clients to share their suggestions and grievances with Maryam or the managing directors of the two centers. A desire for self-reflection, self-improvement, and welcoming clients’ voices was noticeable, especially as Maryam asked the young women to share their ideas for expanding or altering ALLY’s program and listened intently and supportively to their suggestions. This inclusive and democratic approach to organization leadership, however, was not always felt as such by clients, some of whom had told me that they did not believe anyone was “really listening.” It seemed like Maryam’s original plan to run the organization with a nonhierarchical structure had faced serious obstacles. “I used to say that this is a democracy, but now I tell them that it’s a dictatorship,” Maryam told me as she recounted all the struggles she faced when she approached management with an “inclusive and democratic” style. As ALLY grew over the years to become an official organization serving two hundred young women yearly, with two buildings, a dormitory, and seventy staff members, it had seemed impossible to incorporate the conflicting ideas of staff and clients into the empowerment program. Now, although Maryam says that she hears everyone out, she is the one who makes the final decisions, especially in those instances where staff and clients’ suggestions do not align with the feminist values on which she had wished to build the organization. In the following sections, I explain the feminist values that shaped ALLY’s empowerment program and my methodological approach to studying them.
Women’s Empowerment at ALLY
ALLY’s women’s empowerment program was designed (and changed over the years) to respond to the multifaceted and complex struggles of its clients. Using recent scholarship on adolescent development and trauma, ALLY’s program developer, Raha, worked diligently to bring the organization’s program up to par with similar programs across the world. A doctoral student in the United States, Raha had extensive knowledge on women’s development initiatives and had utilized her connections in academia and her activist circles to develop ALLY’s program. The administrators’ social and geographic background had connected them to the global stage and the “global value packages” (Merry 2006) promoted by many international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank. Through trial and error, ALLY’s program had grown to have three main components—social work, psychotherapy, and education. The in-house social workers were responsible for helping clients navigate the everyday struggles of their living conditions, such as disagreements with family members that could turn abusive or violent, a lack of access to essential resources such as health care, and the management of work and family demands that complicated these young women’s ability to attend the organization. In addition to the services provided by social workers, individual and group therapy was offered to help women recover from the trauma of neglect, sexual and physical abuse, incarceration, or extreme poverty. The third component was ALLY’s educational program, which was composed of vocational training—with the aim of preparing clients for entry into a more skilled labor market—and a social program that would provide them with social skills as well as creative opportunities for self-realization and self-empowerment. Daily life at ALLY consisted of attending a variety of workshops on topics such as sexuality, violence against women, and empowerment and taking computer skills, English, interpersonal communication, painting, creative writing, and other courses designed to provide women with vocational and life skills. During their second year in the program, clients would choose a specialty area and receive more advanced training. In their final year, they worked with the organization to find internship and employment opportunities, prepare for job interviews, and find ways to maintain a supportive relationship with ALLY after graduation.
Throughout the three-year program, ALLY also provided its clients and their immediate family members with a variety of resources including food, hygiene products, health insurance, and medical treatments. Living in extreme poverty, many of the clients could not afford the expense of the daily commute to and from the center. The organization covered any such costs that would deter families from supporting their daughters’ involvement in the program. Covering the expenses of clients’ health insurance and their medical bills as well as the medical bills of their immediate families helped to defuse families’ resistance and provide a healthier home environment for clients’ psychological well-being. Family members’ resistance often emanated from the importance of the young women’s labor at home or at sweatshops as a source of aid and necessary income. Thus, convincing parents to allow their daughters’ admission into a three-year program required persuasion and incentives.
In the beginning, ALLY identified and admitted at-risk women by working within underprivileged communities. But after years of establishing itself as a trusted advocate, most of the clients were referred by either women who had graduated from the program or juvenile detention centers or charitable organizations with which ALLY had worked before. ALLY also admitted clients who were dealing with the extreme deprivation of legal and material resources due to immigration, such as Afghan immigrants. While the Iranian clients of ALLY could seek the help of other governmental agencies or charities, Afghan clients heavily depended on ALLY in the absence of alternative resources for undocumented or documented immigrants in Iran. I elaborate on the social and economic vulnerability of Afghans in Iran in the next chapter.
Both ALLY’s buildings were located about thirty minutes apart in quiet, narrow alleys close to two of the busiest city centers of Tehran. The rustic and old exteriors of the buildings were not marked by any sign, keeping the identity of the organization concealed. The location of the centers, I later learned, although great for me and the middle-class staff of the organization, required a long daily commute for the young clients who lived in the slums and outskirts of the city. During my fieldwork, clients’ participation in ALLY’s empowerment program required attendance five days a week from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. To get to the organization on time, many of the young women had to leave home as early as 5:00 or 6:00 A.M. Traveling another three to four hours back home in the afternoon rush hour added up to a total of five to seven hours of daily commute. Many of the clients, especially Afghans, got home around 8:00 P.M. only to start work at sewing shops until after midnight. For many of the young women, this was the only arrangement that would allow them to attend the organization while providing financial support to their impoverished families, who depended on the girls’ meager income. Most families were hoping that the girls’ educational training at ALLY would help them in the future, as their income increased with their skill sets.
Maryam, Raha, Marva, and the remaining members of the directing team regarded their program as a feminist one due to their investment in women’s well-being, their commitment to upholding the principles of gender equality, and their objective of challenging patriarchy. Soon after establishing ALLY, they understood that patriarchal attitudes were common among not only their clients but also their growing team of staff. This had become apparent when some of the staff (psychologists and social workers) had blamed clients for their “poor judgment” when they were subjected to date rape or chose multiple partners. To remedy such problems, a variety of workshops on sexuality and women’s rights, including a performance of The Vagina Monologues, were offered for clients and staff. The workshops and performances, which challenged the cultural gender and sexual norms in Iran, were designed to nurture a “feminist consciousness” that was seen by the founder as necessary for personal and social change. Maryam believed that with appropriate training, the staff would embrace liberal feminist values and transform their patriarchal mindset. Yet, the imposition of such trainings, as I show in Chapter 3, had resulted in growing conversations and conflicts about the feminist values of ALLY, their cultural resonance, and ALLY’s definition of women’s empowerment.
It is also important to note that while some of the staff and administrators openly identified as feminists, many others advocated for the marginalized women’s rights and helped with implementing the program without necessarily identifying as such. Except for a handful of staff, no one at the organization had engaged with gender studies or the internal debates within feminist scholarship. I investigated staff’s assumptions about feminism, empowerment, and gender oppression by analyzing their accounts of clients’ struggles and the cause of those struggles, by asking for their definition of women’s empowerment, by examining the content of the courses they offered, and by listening to many classroom conversations. As I show in Chapter 3, (sexual) autonomy and individuality were valued at the organization while religion and tradition were seen as limiting women’s agency. These liberal and secular feminist values did not appear on the written agenda of the organization, but my data reveals that they shaped the content and approach of the organization’s program and the staff’s assessment of clients’ progress. My analysis of ALLY’s program concerns these unwritten and sometimes unspoken measures of empowerment advocated by the administrators and staff.
Nongovernmental and charity organizations like ALLY have been on the rise in Iran since the 1990s and have been successful in achieving their humanitarian goals. Yet, in several aspects, the laws governing the operation of NGOs and their registration have complicated their activities. For instance, according to Article 26 of Iran’s constitution, NGOs cannot engage in activities that violate “the principles of independence, freedom, national unity, Islamic standards or the basis of the Islamic Republic.” Such restrictions and their ambiguity have allowed the government to restrict and even shut down NGOs for promoting values that are deemed “un-Islamic” or “politically charged” by the state. Thus, it is important to note that ALLY’s secular and liberal feminist teachings and programs were not publicly advertised or articulated. ALLY’s administrators promoted their secular feminist programs, such as their sexuality training, to foreign donors whose support was implicitly contingent on the alignment of ALLY’s values with their own. Yet ALLY’s administrators had to emphasize their vocational training when attempting to build relations with governmental agencies such as Behzisti, the state welfare organization, which often collaborated with ALLY over the years. While ALLY had considerable autonomy in shaping the content of its program, it had maintained that autonomy by keeping a low profile, hiding several aspects from state authorities, and relying only on foreign donations. By examining these political challenges in Chapter 4, I offer further explanation for ALLY’s approach to advocacy, which promoted cultural reform over organized political activism.
The Ethnography of ALLY
I gathered my data in 2014 through in-depth interviews with ALLY’s workers and administrators and eight hundred hours of participant observation of the organization’s two centers, as I daily participated in the routines of meetings, classes, and workshops. I first came across the organization when I stumbled upon one of its online fundraising campaigns. After speaking with Maryam, the founder, and Raha, the program director, about my research plans, I gained their permission to conduct my ethnographic study there. I believe it was the administrators’ desire for improving their program that facilitated my gaining access as a sociologist who could potentially offer valuable feedback. Maryam was particularly interested in instilling a feminist pedagogical philosophy into ALLY’s educational program. During my fieldwork, I shared my observations with the administrators, trained one of the staff members on feminist pedagogy, and recruited the help of my academic colleagues in the United States to develop a workshop on feminist pedagogy for the staff. My contributions, however small, established trust and granted me the continuous support of the organization to conduct my research.
While I interviewed ALLY’s staff and administrators, I did not conduct formal interviews with the clients. This was part of the agreement Raha and I came to after many conversations about clients and the ethics of research with vulnerable populations. Many of the young women, Raha told me, would willingly share their stories of sexual and physical abuse if given the opportunity to speak about themselves. Such retelling of the stories, without the presence of a trauma expert, had proven to retraumatize the young women and worsen their mental health. I agreed with only using the method of participant observation and informal conversations to learn about the young women’s lives and perceptions. While I was initially concerned that using different methods would pose limitations on my study, soon I realized that many of the classes and workshops were designed to engage clients in discussions and dialogues about their life experiences, values, and perspectives. Whether it was a workshop on violence against women, an art therapy class, a workshop on sexuality, or a community development course, clients were encouraged to and did freely share a great deal of information about their personal lives, their daghdaghe (concerns), their experiences of being a woman or an immigrant, their perceptions of inequality and social change, and their thoughts on ALLY. I also gathered data by socializing with the young women in the hallways, participating in their class projects, chatting with them during the breaks, and joining their group conversations when I was invited. While I did not officially conduct interviews, I had ample interactions, conversations, and observations to gain an in-depth understanding of clients’ perceptions on many topics relevant to my research.
I similarly observed ALLY’s workers and administrators during their staff meetings, as they taught classes, and as they interacted with clients. ALLY’s staff were between the ages of twenty-three and sixty years old, college educated, and middle class. In addition to attending meetings, classes, and workshops run by the staff, I shadowed members of the managing team to learn about their daily tasks and was invited by a few teachers to meet with them outside of the organization for a friendly chat. I conducted interviews with sixteen of the employees in various positions at the organization, such as teachers, psychologists, foreign affairs personnel, educational coordinators, social workers, program director, managing directors, and the founder. A more detailed reflection on the challenges of establishing rapport with my participants and ethical dilemmas related to this research can be found in the Appendix.
My research within an organizational setting required that I remain tuned to unspoken tensions or conflicts. Early on in my ethnographic study, I began to see a growing tension between the clients and program personnel as the young women routinely critiqued the staff, their behavior, and their decision-making. It was easy to see how making sense of clients’ constant complaints had become an everyday interpretive task for the staff, who were confused about the reception of their efforts among the impoverished women. It also did not take me long to notice the swelling tension between the staff and administrators, whose varying understandings of help and empowerment had caused irresolvable fractions among them. I witnessed and observed daily encounters shaped by resentment, frustration, guile, and puzzlement while attempting to navigate my way through the ethics of research and the friendships I had come to make at the organization. I soon realized that it was necessary to place at the center of my analysis the daily tensions and conflicts I had come to witness at ALLY. These tensions reflected more than individual disagreements; they reflected the contentious character of feminist activism and class politics in Iran and the conflicting perceptions of justice and empowerment. Examining these tensions and relations of power as the problematic of my study (Smith 2005) required leaving out of my analysis the stories of cooperation and harmony, the stories of many women who left the organization feeling safe, heard, valued, and empowered. It meant dedicating my analysis not to those lives transformed and the lifelong friendships made at ALLY but to the painful process of connecting and transforming.
Keen to conduct a study capable of offering recommendations for feminist initiatives that aim to empower marginalized women, I had to critically investigate power and privilege in this feminist space. Knowing that I had to represent all aspects of the staff’s work—the lifesaving and the problematic—I felt an ethical guilt when faced with the painful task of critiquing people with whom I had built friendships. As I wrote the following chapters on the challenges of the organization and its internal conflicts, my internal dilemmas grew as did my mistrust in the ability of my work to capture the genuine kindness of the staff, who came together daily, despite the unpleasant conflicts and with little reward or compensation, only to support the marginalized women who depended on them. I struggled with the disturbing fear of offering an analysis that presents my research participants in the light of their shortcomings and presents ALLY in the light of its failings. Years after my fieldwork, I still ask myself questions many ethnographers contend with: “Did I ‘thank’ them enough? Have they re-considered our time together? Do they wonder what became of me or of my research? How would they feel now about the ways that I represented them?” (Berbary 2014: 1222). Rather than moving beyond these uncomfortable reflexive moments, I reflect on them regularly—not to selectively omit unpleasant data but to do a kind of responsible research that is committed to social justice and offering answers to the questions my participants grappled with. I moved beyond the doubts and fears as I recalled the self-effacement and humility of my research participants and the unrivaled diligence with which they worked every day for self-improvement. I hope my ethnographic research, following the same ethics, has done what it was set to accomplish: Offer an analysis of what lies beneath the everyday conflicts to discover how to move beyond.