|
By Patty Pitts
Buydens. Photo: UVic Photo Services When Sarah Buydens started undergraduate studies at UVic, she was certain she wanted to teach biology and chemistry to high school students. But after summer jobs at children’s camps where she was told she was “good with kids,” Buydens switched her studies from science to child and youth care.
“I absolutely loved it,” she recalls. “I realized that I really wanted to work with kids, not teach them. Then I realized that I really wanted to work with their families.”
That led her to pursue graduate studies in educational psychology and leadership studies, where she conducted ground-breaking research on Canadian military women veterans while earning a master’s degree in counseling psychology.
“I loved trauma work. I’m trained as a trauma therapist, and I wanted to work with people who encounter high risk in the workplace,” she says of her choice of a research topic. “I had worked at the Esquimalt Military Family Resource Centre and seen the work that the counselors do there, and that led me to investigate the experiences of women in the military. Surprisingly, there was little existing research about them.”
Buydens added to that with her master’s thesis, The Lived Experience of Women Veterans of the Canadian Forces. Funded by a $10,000 scholarship from the Department of National Defence, Buydens’ research involved extensive interviews with six women between 35 and 60 years of age. All had completed their time in the Canadian Forces in the post-1989 era of full gender integration.
“I was not expecting the results that I received,” says Buydens. “As a civilian woman I was surprised at how rough it was. I was inspired by how they persevered.”
All of her interview subjects reported being ostracized by their male colleagues, being the subject of demeaning gender references and inappropriate sexual attention and seldom being recognized as an individual. While most of the women’s common experiences were negative, all did report developing some supportive relationships among their colleagues.
Buydens will pursue the importance of mentorship among military women in her PhD research, which she’s already started, under the guidance of her master’s supervisor Dr. Tim Black.
“Hopefully future researchers will build on Sarah’s work to construct questionnaires that can be distributed to a much larger number of female vets,” says Black. “The amount and detail of the data that Sarah generated will provide future researchers with multiple directions to pursue in trying to learn more about this unique group of women.”
When she’s not studying, working as a therapist with Victoria’s Men’s Trauma Centre and serving as a volunteer board member, Buydens tends to a large urban garden and a household that includes three dogs and a cat—all adopted from the SPCA.
“One of my friends is married to a military doctor, so I have a really good role model of what a functioning, healthy military family looks like,” says Buydens. “I want to research what works for women and how and why it’s helpful, so that I can develop a program to present to the military to help them improve conditions for its female members.”
|
