Handbook on Gender and Violence 178811468X, 9781788114684

Citation preview

HANDBOOK ON GENDER AND VIOLENCE

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INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS ON GENDER Series Editor: Sylvia Chant, FRSA, Professor of Development Geography, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK International Handbooks on Gender is an exciting Handbook series under the general editorship and direction of Sylvia Chant. The series comprises high quality, original reference works offering comprehensive overviews of the latest research within key areas of contemporary gender studies. International and comparative in scope, the Handbooks are edited by leading scholars in their respective fields, and comprise specially commissioned contributions from a select cast of authors, bringing together established experts with up-­and-­coming scholars and researchers. Each volume offers a wide-­ranging examination of current issues to produce prestigious and high quality works of lasting significance.   Individual volumes will serve as invaluable sources of reference for students and faculty in gender studies and associated fields, as well as for other actors such as NGOs and policymakers keen to engage with academic discussion on gender. Whether used as an information resource on key topics, a companion text or as a platform for further study, Elgar International Handbooks on Gender will provide a source of definitive scholarly reference.   Titles in the series include: The International Handbook on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism Global and Development Perspectives Edited by Laura Oso and Natalia Ribas-Mateos Handbook on Gender and Health Edited by Jasmine Gideon Handbook on Gender in World Politics Edited by Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage Handbook on Gender and War Edited by Simona Sharoni, Julia Welland, Linda Steiner and Jennifer Pedersen Handbook on Gender and Social Policy Edited by Sheila Shaver Handbook on Gender and Violence Edited by Laura J. Shepherd

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Handbook on Gender and Violence

Edited by

Laura J. Shepherd Professor of International Relations, Department of Government and International Relations, The University of Sydney, Australia

INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS ON GENDER

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

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© The Editor and Contributors Severally 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951080 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781788114691

ISBN 978 1 78811 468 4 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78811 469 1 (eBook)

02

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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This Handbook is dedicated to all affected by violence, by the restrictive configuration of the sex/gender order, and by the often violent efforts to sustain that configuration.

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Contents List of contributors x   1 Gender and violence: tools to think with Laura J. Shepherd

1

PART I  CONCEPTS  2 Gender/s Marysia Zalewski

13

 3 Race Celeste Montoya

29

 4 Intersectionality Lise Rolandsen Agustín and Emanuela Lombardo

43

 5 Sexualities Jamie J. Hagen

61

 6 Masculinity David Duriesmith

77

  7 The body Jessica Auchter

89

  8 The sex of sexual violence Karen Boyle

101

 9 Patriarchy Kaye Quek

115

10 Femicide Consuelo Corradi and Daniela Bandelli

131

11 Security Laura J. Shepherd

146

PART II  REPRESENTATIONS 12 The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem Ben Swanton

160

vii

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viii  Handbook on gender and violence 13 Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches Roxani Krystalli

173

14 Gender, violence, and popular culture Andrea McDonnell

189

15 Gender and violence on film Lee Broughton

202

16 Gender violence online Sandra Yao

217

17 Gender and violence in news media and photography Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison

231

PART III  CONTEXTS 18 Transnational perspectives on gender violence: opportunities and challenges Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson, Amber Lusvardi and Laurel Weldon

249

19 Intimate partner violence Jo Spangaro

265

20 Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda Sara Meger

279

21 Gender, violence and the military Joane Nagel

295

22 Gender and violence in post-­conflict settings Torunn Wimpelmann

308

23 Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’ Paula Meth

320

24 Gender and economic violence Penny Griffin

337

25 Gender, violence and human rights Dianne Otto

357

26 Gender, violence and criminal justice Bianca Fileborn

377

27 Prosecuting sexual and gender-­based violence at the International Criminal Court Dieneke de Vos

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Contents  ­ix 28 Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century Sharon Marcus

414

Index427

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Contributors Jessica Auchter is Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, USA. Her research focuses on visual politics and culture. Her book The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations (Routledge, 2014) examines memorialization and the politics and ethics of being haunted by the dead. Her work appears in Critical Studies on Security, Journal of Global Security Studies, International Affairs, Journal for Cultural Research, Global Discourse, Human Remains and Violence, Review of International Studies, and International Feminist Journal of Politics, among others, and in several edited volumes. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the global politics of dead bodies. Daniela Bandelli is a Lecturer in Sociology at Lumsa University, Italy, and Marie Curie Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas, USA. She studies how social movements and feminism in particular contribute to reinforce and challenge dominant discourses on violence and procreation. She achieved her PhD at the University of Queensland in 2016, and recently published a monograph titled Femicide, Gender and Violence (Palgrave, 2017). Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he directs an interdisciplinary research programme on Visual Politics. For the past two decades he has explored the political role of aesthetics, visuality and emotions. His books include Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, 2009) and, as editor, Visual Global Politics (Routledge, 2018). Karen Boyle is Professor of Feminist Media Studies and Director of Applied Gender Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Her research has long focused on issues around violence, gender and representation, and she is the author of Media and Violence: Gendering the Debate (Sage, 2005) and editor of Everyday Pornography (Routledge, 2010). Her most recent articles have appeared in Feminist Theory, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journalism Studies and Feminist Media Studies, and her most recent book is #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminist Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Karen is a long-­standing member of the Board of the feminist anti-­violence organization the Women’s Support Project. x

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Contributors  ­xi Lee Broughton is a freelance writer, critic, film programmer and lecturer in film and cultural studies. He is the author of The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film (I.B. Tauris, 2016). He is also the editor of Critical Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Reframing Cult Westerns: From The Magnificent Seven to The Hateful Eight (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Lee edits the Current Thinking on the Western blog, and is the convenor of the International Scholars of the Western network. His research interests include Westerns, horror films, exploitation films and cult movies more generally. Consuelo Corradi, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Lumsa University, Italy, where she specializes in cross-­national analysis of policies for the prevention of violence against women, critical feminist theory and femicide. She served as Vice-­President of the European Sociological Association from 2007 to 2009 and member of the Executive Board from 2007 to 2011. She has authored and co-­authored more than 100 publications in scientific journals, including Current Sociology, European Journal of Criminology, International Journal of Public Health, and Human Studies. Her most recent book, edited with Shalva Weil and Marceline Naudi, is Femicide across Europe (Policy Press, 2018). Dieneke de Vos is Integrity Lead with Oxfam Novib, and received her PhD from the European University Institute, Italy, where she researched interactions between the Rome Statute and national criminal accountability processes for sexual and gender-­based violence in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She previously worked with the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, the International Federation for Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations Development Programme, and the United Nations Secretariat. All views expressed are the author’s own. David Duriesmith is a Development Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He researches masculinity, armed conflict and violence prevention. His book Masculinities and New Wars: The Gendered Dynamics of New War was published by Routledge in 2017. David’s current research focuses on the construction of non-­violent masculinities and peace. Bianca Fileborn is currently a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research is broadly concerned with intersections of identity, space/place, culture and sexual violence, and justice responses to sexual violence. centred justice responses to Recent projects include examining victim-­

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xii  Handbook on gender and violence street harassment, and sexual violence at Australian music festivals. Dr Fileborn is the author of Reclaiming the Night-Time Economy: Unwanted Sexual Attention in Pubs and Clubs, and co-­editor of #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Penny Griffin is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney, Australia. She works specifically in the areas of gender and feminist studies, international political economy, international relations, global economic governance, the politics of development, and the politics of visual and popular culture. Her current research examines economic governance, financial crisis and the ‘post-­crisis’ period from a gender perspective. She has published with Routledge (Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why Women Are in Refrigerators and Other Stories, 2015) and Palgrave Macmillan (Gendering the World Bank, 2009; winner of the 2010 BISA International Political Economy Group book prize), and in the journals Politics, Feminist Review, Men and Masculinities, Globalizations, New Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy. Jamie J. Hagen is a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast. She received her PhD in Global Governance and Human Security from the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 2018. Jamie was a visiting scholar at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security (London) for spring 2019. Her research considers the integration of sexual orientation and gender identity into peace and security work, with a specific focus on the Women, Peace and Security architecture. Her work has appeared in International Affairs, Critical Studies on Security and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Jamie is a Member-­At-­ Large for the LGBTQA Caucus of the International Studies Association (ISA). Emma Hutchison is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Queensland. Her research examines emotions and trauma in world politics, particularly in relation to the politics and ethics of community, security, and humanitarianism. Her book Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge University Press, 2016) was awarded the British International Studies Association Susan Strange Book Prize as well as the International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award. Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson is a PhD candidate at Purdue University in Indiana, USA. Her work focuses on the ways that social movements create democratic spaces that advance inclusion, focusing on the women’s march, Gezi Park, and other contemporary social movements. She has

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Contributors  ­xiii presented her work at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA), the American Political Science Association (APSA), and the Western Political Science Association (WPSA). She is committed to public scholarship, serving as the graduate assistant for the Scholars Strategy Network at Purdue, and cycling advocacy with Bicycle Lafayette. Roxani Krystalli is the Program Manager at Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, USA, and a PhD candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy there. Her research focuses on victim-­centred transitional justice and critical humanitarianism, paying particular attention to gender and other dimensions of power. Roxani has spent a decade working on issues of gender and violence in conflict areas and transitional contexts. For her work, she has been recognized with the Presidential Award for Citizenship and Service at Tufts University. She has been a United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Peace Scholar, a recipient of the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, and has also held fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Henry J. Leir Institute for Human Security. Roxani has a BA from Harvard University and an MA from The Fletcher School. Emanuela Lombardo is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Administration of Madrid Complutense University, Spain. She works on gender equality policies (European Union, Spain) and feminist approaches to political analysis. Her latest monographs are Gender and Political Analysis (with Johanna Kantola; Palgrave, 2017) and The Symbolic Representation of Gender (with Petra Meier; Ashgate, 2014). She has edited, with Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo, the 2017 special issue ‘Policymaking from a gender+ equality perspective’ for the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. Amber Lusvardi is a PhD student in political science at Purdue University in Indiana, USA. Her research centres on the intersection of media use and political behaviours, including the causes and consequences of ­partisan selective exposure. She is also interested in the role the media plays in shaping public attitudes towards women in positions of power and women’s activism. Lusvardi has presented her work at APSA, MPSA, and the International Communication Association (ICA). She has been an instructor at Millikin University and Eastern Illinois University, USA. Sharon Marcus is Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York, where she served as Dean of Humanities from 2014 to 2017. She has written three

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xiv  Handbook on gender and violence books: Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999); Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2007); and The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 2019). With Caitlin Zaloom, she is the founding editor of Public Books (www. publicbooks.org). Andrea McDonnell is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Emmanuel College, USA. She is, with Susan Douglas, co-­ author of Celebrity: A History of Fame (New York University Press, 2019) and author of Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines (Polity, 2014). Her research on gender, celebrity, and popular media appears in Body Image, Celebrity Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Psychology of Popular Media Culture. Sara Meger is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Melbourne, where she researches and teaches on issues of gender, armed conflict, and political violence. Her current research is focused on the political economy of armed conflict and the gendered nature and determinants of violence perpetrated therein. Recent articles from this research have been published in International Studies Quarterly, Postcolonial Studies, and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is the author of Rape Loot Pillage: The Political Economy of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2016). Paula Meth is a Reader in Urban Studies and Planning at Sheffield University, UK, and an Associate Fellow of the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University, South Africa. She focuses on social and everyday lives within cities of the global South, with a particular focus on South Africa and India, and with a recent interest in the urban peripheries. The topic of gender, violence and housing has dominated her research, including an interest in changes in housing and cities and how this shapes gender relations. She co-­authored Geographies of Developing Areas (Routledge, 2014). Celeste Montoya is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. Her research primarily focuses on the ways in which gender and race intersect to shape or be shaped by political behaviour and institutions. She is author of From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy and Combating Violence against Women (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-­editor of Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges: Contemporary Social Movements in Europe and the United States (ECPR Press, 2019).

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Contributors  ­xv Joane Nagel is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, USA. She is a political, cultural and environmental sociologist with an interest in the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in everyday life, organizations and national politics. Her publications include: ‘The continuing significance of masculinity’ (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2017); Gender and Climate Change: Impacts, Science, Policy (Routledge, 2016); ‘Plus ça change: reflections on a century of militarizing women’s sexuality’ (European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2014); and Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections and Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford University Press, 2003). Her current research examines the militarization of science in the US. Dianne Otto is Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her research covers a broad field, including: addressing gender (identity), sexuality and race inequalities in the context of international human rights law; the UN Security Council’s peacekeeping work; the technologies of global ‘crisis governance’; threats to economic, social and cultural rights; and the transformative potential of people’s tribunals and other non-­governmental organization (NGO) initiatives. Recent publications include Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge, 2018). Kaye Quek is a Lecturer in Global Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She teaches and researches in the areas of feminist politics and theory, human trafficking, human rights, and violence against women. She is the author of Marriage Trafficking: Women in Forced Wedlock (Routledge, 2018) and has published articles in journals such as Women’s Studies International Forum and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Lise Rolandsen Agustín is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. Her research focuses on gender equality, social movements, intersectionality and gender-­based violence. She is the co-­author (with Anette Borchorst) of Gender Equality, Intersectionality and Diversity in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Sexual Harassment in the Work Place/Seksuel chikane på arbejdspladsen: Faglige, politiske og retlige spor (Aalborg University Press, 2017). Together with Petra Ahrens, she has co-­edited Gendering the European Parliament: Structures, Policies and Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Laura J. Shepherd is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney. She is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and

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xvi  Handbook on gender and violence Security in London, UK. Laura’s research focuses on gender politics, international relations, and critical studies of security and violence. Her primary research focuses on the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. She has written extensively on the formulation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent WPS resolutions. Laura has published many scholarly articles, and is author/editor of ten books, including, most recently, Gender, Peacebuilding and the Politics of Space: Locating Legitimacy (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Handbook on Gender and Security (edited with Caron E. Gentry and Laura Sjoberg; Routledge, 2019). Jo Spangaro is Professor of Social Work at the University of Wollongong in Australia. Her research builds on 20 years as a counsellor, trainer and based policymaker, responding to victims and perpetrators of gender-­ violence. She is internationally recognized for her research on health responses to gender-­based violence, including conflict related sexual violence. She has recently published a book on therapy with perpetrators, mothers and victimized children after parental child sexual assault. Ben Swanton is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia. His doctoral research explores the politics of gender violence prevention policy. Using an international development program as a case study, it examines the tensions between government strategies to implement international agreements and the agendas, practices and visions of gender justice movements. The study illustrates what happens when progressive policy is made. In particular, it explains why change is so difficult to achieve (not only due to backlash and resistance) but because issues are framed in ways that subvert progressive goals. Ben’s research builds on a decade of experience working as a development practitioner for NGOs, research institutes, and the United Nations. Laurel Weldon is Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She recently moved from Purdue University, USA, where she was Distinguished Professor and Director of the Purdue Policy Research Institute. She was founding Director of Purdue’s Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion (2011–2015), and Purdue’s Interim Vice-­Provost for Faculty Affairs (2013–2014). Her work focuses on social movements, institutions and social policy. In particular, she examines the role of social movements in influencing public policy, and is an expert on policies on violence against women. Weldon is the author of more than two dozen articles and book chapters as well as three books: When Protest Makes Policy: How Social Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups (University of Michigan Press, 2011; winner of the Victoria Schuck

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Contributors  ­xvii Award); Protest, Policy and the Problem of Violence Against Women (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002); and The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights Around the World (Cambridge University Press, 2018; co-­authored with Mala Htun). She is also co-­editor of the first Oxford Handbook on Politics and Gender and founding co-­editor of the journal Politics, Groups and Identities. Her work has been funded by the US National Science Foundation as well as the Gates and Mellon Foundations. She is a past President of the Women and Politics Research Section of APSA, past President of the Women’s Caucus for APSA, co-­ Programme Chair for the MPSA Annual Conference (2018), and a past member of the Executive Council for APSA, the national association’s governing body. Torunn Wimpelmann is a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. Her main focus is on gender, legal orders and politics in Afghanistan. She is the author of The Pitfalls of Protection, Gender, Violence and Power in Afghanistan (University of California Press, 2017). She has also published in Central Asian Survey, Women’s Studies International Forum and Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly. Sandra Yao is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her dissertation project studies the gendered dynamics of mobile app gaming through international relations theory and political economy. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges work from games studies and digital humanities into international relations. Her work has been in published in Understanding Popular Culture in a Digital Age, edited by Caitlin Hamilton and Laura J. Shepherd (Routledge, 2016). Marysia Zalewski is Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University, Wales. She has published widely in the areas of critical and feminist theory in global politics. She is currently working on creative writing and knowledge production in international politics, feminism and security in ‘Trump-­time’ (with Anne Sisson Runyan), and sexual violence against men. Her latest book, Sexual Violence against Men in edited with Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prügl and Global Politics (co-­ Maria Stern), was published by Routledge in 2018. She is one of the editors of the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and of the book series Creative Interventions in Global Politics (Rowman & Littlefield).

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1. Gender and violence: tools to think with Laura J. Shepherd

There is so much that could possibly be said about gender and violence. The prospect of producing a comprehensive Handbook engaging with all possible dimensions of gender and violence, thought together (how might we understand ‘gender violence’? is violence gendered? is gender violent?) and separately (what does it mean to associate ‘gender and violence’? what do these concepts mean and how do they function in the world, in our knowledge claims?), is daunting indeed. In fact, the idea of a comprehensive Handbook is an illusion: a venture such as this one can only ever be partial, and, as such, is necessarily limited and exclusionary. It seems important to acknowledge this partiality openly, to explain how and why the decision was made to include certain topics and not others, and to ensure that this volume is positioned as a single intervention into an ongoing space of debate and contestation. That is, in part, the purpose of this chapter. I begin by outlining how I came to research gender and violence, and why I was interested to curate this collection of essays and engagements with these topics. In the second section, I provide an overview of the organization of the Handbook into three sections: concepts, representation and contexts. The chapters in the section on concepts elaborate on the tools we use to think with in our work on gender and violence (not only the concepts of gender and violence but also related concepts like sex, sexualities, patriarchy and security). The section on representation includes chapters on the different ways in which gender and violence are constituted in and through various representational practices, including film, policy and online. Finally, the section on contexts is devoted to the examination of gender and violence in various empirical settings, including different spheres of activity, from economic to juridical. The Handbook concludes by drawing out some thematic connections across the collection and addressing some of the limitations that can be addressed in future research.

RESEARCHING GENDER AND VIOLENCE I am an accidental researcher of gender and violence. I did not intend to write about these things, to spend my academic career trying to understand these concepts separately and together. When I concluded my 1

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2  Handbook on gender and violence undergraduate degree, I ­had – ­consciously or ­otherwise – n ­ ot managed to cultivate a lasting interest in the disciplinary canon of Anthropology (for that was the subject I was supposed to be studying). Instead, I was mostly interested in the feminist theory I had read for a course on feminist Anthropology, which sparked what would ultimately become an abiding interest in the concept of gender and how gender organizes how we are perceived within, and how we encounter, the world. As I embarked upon a Master’s degree in the study of gender and international relations, I learned how to think about world politics using the tools that feminist theory provided. International Relations, as a discipline, is fearful and violent (see Crawford 2000); its scholars are good at many things, but historically its ‘mainstream’ scholars have not been very good at recognizing and taking seriously the operation of gendered power in the world (see Tickner 1997, 2005, 2010; Steans 2003; Zalewski 1993, 1995, 1998). It seemed, as a disciplinary neophyte, that I would struggle for acceptance should I pursue my interest in understanding what work gender is doing in world ­politics – ­this formulation belongs to Marysia Zalewski (see Zalewski 1995, p. 341). I was undeterred, for I could not comprehend how to make sense of war, diplomacy, and political economy without understanding the gendered dynamics of each. As L.H.M. Ling explains: While taking seriously its consequences such as war [. . .] feminist IR disturbs the immutability of the inter-­state system. This leads to feminist unearthing of even more hallowed ground: the state and its sovereignty as institutionalised patriarchy where ‘androcratic’ politics flourish, the State of Nature as an invention of feverish bachelor-­ hood where priorities such as children and toilet-­training do not exist, and military ‘security’ as another struggle for statist Manhood that incurs profound insecurity instead. (Ling 1996, p. 27)

It was this last part that caught my imagination, and formed the foundation of my doctoral research program. So I came to research violence through an interest in security (which is the subject of my own contribution to this Handbook), specifically in the partiality of ‘national security’ and the assumption that a ‘secure state’ is something that is both possible and meaningful. Thinking about security from the perspective of those marginalized from, and actively threatened by, the machinery of many security practices fundamentally changes the conclusions we draw about security. I set out, in my research program, to understand how it became possible that gendered v­ iolence – ­specifically but not exclusively sexualized and gender-­based violence in ­conflict – ­could be articulated as a matter of (inter)national security priority, such that this connection was embedded in the regulatory architecture of the highest collective security body in existence: the UN Security Council. I

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Gender and violence: tools to think with  ­3 wanted to know not so much whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, but how it had been made possible for diverse actors and coalitions of actors to forge those connections across discourses that seemed impossibly ­divergent – d ­ iscourses of bodily integrity and the protection of individuals from harm on one hand, and discourses of territorial integrity and the protection of the state as a functional entity on the other hand. The concepts with which I was c­ oncerned – o ­ f gender, violence, security, and the ­international – e­ merged as of paramount significance in my investigation. I formed an abiding interest in the conceptual apparatus through which we encounter and analyse the world through this research, and this accounts for the focus of Part I of this Handbook, in which various authors offer their own exploration of the concepts that inform research on gender and violence. Both my doctoral research and the majority of the work I have undertaken since that time has focused on representation.1 Initially I explored the representation of gender violence as a matter of international security, and since then I have examined the representational politics of a range of issues relevant to world politics, from peacebuilding to popular culture. No action seems more potent to me than the move to define, to classify, to ­categorize – ­all of which are inherent to the process of representation, to the constitution of cognitive schema and the ways in which we make sense of our worlds. The concepts we use are the tools we think with, and representation is how they are ordered into claims to ‘know’. Thus, I see representational ­practice – t­he rendering of a concept or idea such that it is c­ ommunicable – a­ s the process through which we attach meaning to subjects. It is the process through which those concepts or ideas become meaning-­full, filled with meaning, and this process is subject to endless contestation. Every concept or idea is open to being filled differently, to having different meanings attached with radically different consequences. Which attachments hold, then, and therefore which meanings become stable, is a question of power. The construction of meaning is a site of ­politics – ­to my mind, the site of ­politics – ­because I think nothing can be more fundamental to politics than the conceptual apparatus that structures knowledge in any given society. This gives rise to a desire to understand what David Campbell describes as ‘the manifest political consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another’ (1992, pp.  7–8). Through examining the construction of meaning, by paying close attention to representational practice, we are in fact examining 1   This section draws on material initially prepared for an interview with the editor of Journal of Narrative Politics, which was published in 2016 (see Dauphinee and Shepherd 2016).

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4  Handbook on gender and violence the ­production of possibility: once a particular meaning is attached to ‘women’, for ­example – s­uch as ‘agent of change’ or ‘helpless victim’ – certain policy initiatives become ‘thinkable’, even necessary, while others are excluded. Thus, Part II of the Handbook explores the multiple ways in which gender violence is represented both literally and symbolically across different forms of text. Even the final part of the Handbook was influenced by my experiences of working with and through gender violence as an area of research preoccupation. One of the (entirely justified) criticisms levelled at my doctoral research, when it was eventually published as a book (Shepherd 2008), was that the analysis I presented was somewhat divorced from context. I wrote about the advocacy and mobilization of women’s organizations around the issue that would be captured in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 from a position of distance, two levels of removal from the lived politics of these negotiations: not only did I fail to visit the countries of origin of many of the women and organizations involved to hear directly from them their stories of the resolution, I also did not even interview elites in New York, where the final negotiations took place and where the resolution was adopted in the UN ­architecture – ­the first ever to be adopted under the title of ‘Women and peace and security’. In subsequent projects, I have had a similarly ambivalent relationship with ‘context’. As I wrote in my recent book on UN peacebuilding discourse: There is no doubt another project, the ghost-­twin of this project at hand, for which my own ghost-­twin travels to Burundi, or Liberia, or Guinea-­Bissau and does engage directly with the women about whom the UN writes so copiously. [. . .] But that is a different project. When making the decisions that I did about the project I undertook, I considered a project that investigated implementation, but honestly, I could not find a way to make peace with the idea of traveling to these post-­conflict spaces to interview women whose lives had been ruptured by sometimes decades of war and extract their words like gemstones, to later polish and arrange for publication and professional advancement, not least because I had nothing to offer in return. (Shepherd 2017, p. 4)

In the years since I completed my doctoral research, I have learned to engage with the question of ‘context’ in a different way: the context I am most frequently interested in is the context in which regulation and legislation is designed. It is these representational practices with which I am most often concerned, where I feel that I have something to contribute to the understanding of the many ways in which the concepts gender, violence, and security are represented in policy and normative statements, and thus through those representations construct horizons of possibility around what can and cannot be seen, acted upon, ‘real’. But understanding of other contexts is critical to the wider project of researching gender and

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Gender and violence: tools to think with  ­5 violence. Thus, in the final part of this Handbook, authors offer encounters and engagements that provide an introduction to the study of gender and violence in a wide range of analytical, practical, and geographical contexts.

INTRODUCING THE HANDBOOK In Part I, authors elaborate on the tools we use to think with in our work on gender and violence. The collection opens with an exploration of the concept of gender by Marysia Zalewski, who provides a nuanced overview of some complex debates in feminist research about gender/sex. Zalewski uses an image of a collage made of bullets, depicting a female combatant, as an entry point into a discussion of race, gender, and violence, encouraging us to ‘to keep asking gender as a question’ rather than assuming or attempting to offer definitive answers to the question of gender. In Chapter 3, Celeste Montoya offers deeper and more specific engagement with race as a concept in the context of research on gender and violence. Montoya shows how our understanding of gender and violence is rendered inadequate and partial if we fail to pay attention to the work that race and racialization does in justifying and perpetuating particular forms of violence and domination. Relatedly, Lise Rolandsen Agustín and Emanuela Lombardo expand on some aspects of Montoya’s analysis in their own treatment of the concept of intersectionality in Chapter 4. Their thoughtful elaboration shows ‘the intersection of gender with inequalities of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, and other systems of domination’ in the study of violence. Jamie J. Hagen also uses an intersectional analytic, as she explores in Chapter 5 how sexualities are gendered, and how the policing of sexual boundaries is frequently violent. Hagen provides a rich account of contemporary debates in sexuality studies as they relate to both gender and violence, commenting on four specific issue areas: transnational LGBTQ rights; trans inclusion in sexuality studies; decolonial critiques of the field; and how queer theory challenges key tenets of global politics. Following on from Hagen’s discussion of sexualities, in Chapter 6 David Duriesmith proposes that researchers working on gender and violence need to take seriously the contextual configuration of masculinity. Duriesmith argues ‘that masculinity serves as a cause and multiplier of violence across different scales, sites and forms’ and encourages scholars to investigate ‘the multiple and often contradictory ways in which masculinity both causes violence, and is itself an object of violence’. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 address the body, sex, and patriarchy respectively. In Chapter 7, Jessica Auchter maps out a conceptual encounter with

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6  Handbook on gender and violence the body as a site of governance and violence in world politics. Auchter concludes with an exhortation for scholars to acknowledge their own embodiment and to attempt to reconcile the social scientific insistence on objectivity in knowledge production with a commitment to documenting our own bodies in pain. Karen Boyle turns to the embodied experience of sex in Chapter 8, surveying feminist debates about the sex of sexual violence in an overview of research in this field that begins with Susan Brownmiller’s influential work Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (first published in 1975). Boyle builds on Liz Kelly’s important formulation to develop what she identifies as ‘continuum thinking: the feminist push to see the ways in which different aspects of women’s experiences are linked, without insisting on false equivalences between them’. In Chapter 9, Kaye Quek also draws Brownmiller’s work into conversation with other research to provide a thoughtful account of the concept of patriarchy and how it informs and can be informed by research on gender and violence. Citing, among others, Gwen Hunnicutt and bell hooks, Quek argues that ‘a revised theory of patriarchy that looks at gendered violence not only as male coercion but also in its myriad of forms can be a powerful tool for feminist scholarship on violence and its relationship to gender’. The last two chapters in this opening section are concerned with femicide and the concept of security. In Chapter 10, Consuelo Corradi and Daniela Bandelli engage with the concept of femicide, developed as a specific way of capturing the unlawful killing of women. Their analysis offers four country case s­tudies – M ­ exico, Argentina, Italy, and I­ndia – w ­ here the notion of femicide has spread in association with local cultural and political issues. The authors draw attention to important variation in the way that the concept is used in different contexts, and in the ambiguity of the concept that necessitates careful consideration as we draw the concept into our research frameworks. In Chapter 11, I explore the concept of security, suggesting that whether we think security can be achieved depends a lot on what we think security is. I provide an overview of the different dimensions of security that are particularly pertinent to the consideration of gender and violence, and elaborate on the idea of security providers, linking ideas about gender, violence, and security to the concept of protection. Thus, I explore not only whose security matters but also how it is claimed that security can be achieved. Part II of the book brings together a number of engagements with the question of representation. In Chapter 12, Ben Swanton opens this section with a powerful and provocative analysis of the emergence of gender violence as a policy problem. In this chapter, Swanton argues that much research on gender and violence assumes a particular representation of ‘gender violence’ as a specific form of problem, which then in turn has

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Gender and violence: tools to think with  ­7 profound implications for how such violence might be addressed. Staying with questions about the politics of representation, in Chapter 13 Roxani Krystalli offers a sophisticated account of feminist narrative approaches to the study of violence, asking what happens to our knowledge about gender and violence when we take narratives seriously. Elaborating on the intricate politics and practices of narrative-­based research, Krystalli demonstrates that ‘narratives can be sites of not only power, but also care. That dual attentiveness to care and power, to the possibility of agency alongside the possibility of harm, is itself a key feminist tenet that scholars of violence can carry forward.’ In Chapter 14, Andrea McDonnell provides an analysis of gender, violence, and popular culture. She considers ‘the ways in which popular cultural ­realms – ­advertising, television, and celebrity ­culture – c­ ontribute to our “common sense” understanding of the relationship between gender and violence’. McDonnell treats these three sites as case studies from which she skilfully draws out the implications for research on gender and violence. Turning to a related but different site, Lee Broughton analyses gender and violence in film in Chapter 15. Presenting a wide-­ranging analysis across different genres of film, and weaving in insights from psychoanalysis, Broughton elaborates on the ways in which gender and violence are represented in film, and proposes a potential analytical framework for researchers interested in such texts. In Chapter 16, Sandra Yao offers a different site of analysis again, engaging with gender and violence online. Yao examines the ways in which gendered behaviours and identities are policed and (re)produced online, in often violent ways, and explores the representation of gendered violence in online media such as video games. To conclude this section, in Chapter 17 Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison examine representations of gender and violence in news media, including news photography. Through their detailed and rich analysis, Bleiker and Hutchison show that ‘photographic ­representations – ­and aesthetic practices more ­broadly – a­ re paradoxically both an essential part of gender discrimination and an equally essential part of overcoming them’. The final section of the Handbook is empirically diverse, bringing feminist lenses to bear on different contexts of gender and violence. In Chapter 18, Kaitlin Kelly-­Thompson, Amber Lusvardi and Laurel Weldon provide an overview of research on gender and violence in transnational perspective. They discuss transnational activism on gender violence, and emphasize the possibilities of transnational and, more recently, specifically digital forms of organizing to mobilize against gender violence. The authors adopt an intersectional analytical lens, and caution against the idea that a singular, ‘one size fits all’ solution to such a complex problem is possible, noting ‘the ways that neo-­imperialism, heterosexism, racism

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8  Handbook on gender and violence and sexism are intertwined in shaping violence’. Following on from Kelly-­ Thompson, Lusvardi and Weldon, in Chapter 19 Jo Spangaro offers a detailed examination of one of the specific forms of violence that feminists have mobilized around: intimate partner violence. Spangaro examines both prevalence and impact, and explores the shifts from conceptualizing such violence as ‘domestic’ to its current formulation as ‘intimate partner violence’. In Chapter 20, Sara Meger discusses gender and violence in the context of the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda, the international policy architecture that addresses women’s rights and protection issues in conflict and conflict-­affected settings. Meger elaborates on the ways in which that agenda has produced a narrow focus on women as victims of violence, and argues that ‘the original feminist intentions of the resolution have become increasingly diluted through its institutionalization’. Picking up on the theme of gendered institutions, Joane Nagel provides an engaging analysis of gender, violence and the military in Chapter 21, in which she argues that ‘gender and sexuality play a prominent role in shaping military violence, both in the course of routine military operations and in instances of “extralegal” or illegal military violence’. Nagel’s careful account shows how institutional culture, values, and ideologies are both gendered and violent, and function to (re)produce gender and gendered violence in pervasive and unsettling ways. In the third of three chapters that touch on the themes of militaries and conflict, Torunn Wimpelmann discusses gender, violence, and post-­conflict in Chapter 22. Wimpelmann examines ‘the post-­conflict setting as a particular historical moment shaped by new political openings, emergent and powerful women’s movements, and the influence and resources of international aid agencies’. Highlighting the complexity of engaging with gender and violence in post-­conflict settings, Wimpelmann’s account is both compelling and revealing. Shifting the focus to urban planning and domestic policy, in Chapter 23 Paula Meth explores ‘safe cities’. Moving deftly across scales, Meth brings to the surface debates in critical and feminist urban geography as they intersect with discussions of gender and violence, focussing ­primarily – ­though not ­exclusively – ­on the ways in which women in cities experience and organize against violence. Wide-­ranging in scope, Meth’s analysis shows how ‘city spaces as sites of power are implicated in gender and violence; and processes and outcomes of gendered violence are closely tied to legal, cultural, economic and social relations’. Penny Griffin elaborates on gender and violence in the context of those economic relations that Meth highlights, in her discussion of gender and economic violence in Chapter 24. Griffin provides a detailed overview of current approaches to economy and violence in the practices of the global political economy, and outlines

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Gender and violence: tools to think with  ­9 feminist debates on gender and violence in the global political economy. To explore the conceptual and representational issues raised, Griffin develops an analysis of three themes: violence against women; the violence of ‘development’; and the relationship between economic restructuring and violence. Chapters 25, 26, and 27 are concerned with rights and justice, broadly conceived. Dianne Otto provides a nuanced and detailed examination of gender, violence, and human rights in Chapter 25. Otto presents a comprehensive engagement with a wide range of laws, treaties, and conventions, applying an intersectional lens to the question of human rights and showing how the rallying cry that ‘women’s rights are human rights’ has provided a foundation for activism across a range of rights-­based issues, including the right to live free from homophobic and transphobic violence. In Chapter 26 Bianca Fileborn offers an analysis of gender, violence and the criminal justice system. Fileborn draws attention to ‘gendered patterns in terms of who is able to report to and access the system, in which circumstances, and for certain types of v­ iolence – t­hough these patterns are also inflected with other socio-­structural factors such as class, race and sexuality’. Highlighting the theme of prosecution, in Chapter 27 Dieneke de Vos discusses prosecuting sexual and gender-­based violence at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the body with a mandate under the Rome Statute to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. As de Vos explains, ‘the Statute criminalises not only rape, but includes separate crime categories of sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, gender-­based persecution and “other forms of sexual violence” as war crimes, crimes against humanity and/or, in some circumstances, genocide’. De Vos’s account of prosecuting sexual and gender-­based violence crimes at the ICC brings to light some of the complex and challenging issues surrounding the contemporary emphasis on combating impunity for such crimes, and the ongoing quest for justice for survivors. The final chapter in the Handbook is a bit unusual, in many regards. The other chapters all follow a similar structure: an introduction to the issue; an overview of contemporary debates both in scholarly literature and regarding the manifestation of the issue in practice; and some suggestions for future research for those interested in taking these issues further. Chapter 28 offers us something quite different. As I mentioned in the previous section, my work on gender and violence really began when I was a doctoral student. Some of the most useful ‘tools to think with’ that I found were derived from Sharon Marcus’s 1992 essay ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention’, which was published as part of a collection edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott titled

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10  Handbook on gender and violence Feminists Theorize the Political. Marcus’s original essay articulated a way of thinking about gender and violence that resonated powerfully with my own understanding. In her intricate analysis of violence, Marcus provided a vocabulary to describe, and a viewpoint on, the inevitable imbrication of the physicality of violence with its expression in discourse. When I began the project of putting together this collection, I was determined to feature Marcus’s writing in some way. I was delighted when she agreed to provide a chapter revisiting ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’, and offer some concluding reflections on gender and violence in the twenty-­first century. In some ways an ‘afterword’, in some ways a coda to the chapters that precede it, the concluding chapter reminds me of the work to which my own scholarship in this field is indebted, a­ nd – ­I very much ­hope – ­will inspire more research in years to come. As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, I envision this collection as an intervention in an ongoing set of debates about what it means to research gender and violence, how we might research gender and violence, and what effects our research on gender and violence might have in the world we inhabit. These debates are complex, elliptical, and challenging; insights from many disciplines are brought to bear on our shared ‘object(s) of study’ – not that it makes sense to me to think of gender and violence in such terms. Each chapter is designed as an individual contribution, so you can dip in and out of the volume as you wish: themes emerge and recede as you progress through the volume; but despite the loose ordering outlined above, each chapter very much stands alone. I hope that you find each chapter as interesting and intellectually invigorating as I do, and that you learn new things from your engagement with each contribution, as I have. These essays are intended to open up our thinking, and offer us better tools to think with.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful for the excellent, utterly invaluable, contribution made by Caitlin Hamilton in the final stages of bringing this Handbook to life. I also want to acknowledge the research funding and flexible support, provided by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship award scheme (grant ID: FT170100037) and the University of Sydney, which afforded me the time and resources to curate this collection.

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Gender and violence: tools to think with  ­11

REFERENCES Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York: Simon & Schuster. Campbell, D. (1992) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crawford, N. (2000) ‘The passion of world politics: propositions on emotion and emotional relationships’, International Security, 24 (2), 116–156. Dauphinee, E. and L.J. Shepherd (2016) ‘Editor’s interview with Laura J. Shepherd’, Journal of Narrative Politics, 2 (2), 105–116. Ling, L.H.M. (1996) ‘Feminist international relations: from critique to reconstruction’, Journal of International Communication, 3 (1), 26–41. Marcus, S. (1992) ‘Fighting bodies, fighting words: a theory and politics of rape prevention’ in J.W. Scott and J. Butler (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge, pp. 385–403. Shepherd, L.J. (2008) Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice, London: Zed Books. Shepherd, L.J. (2017) Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space: Locating Legitimacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steans, J. (2003) ‘Engaging from the margins: feminist encounters with the “mainstream” of international relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5 (3), 428–454. Tickner, J.A. (1997) ‘You just don’t understand: troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists’, International Studies Quarterly, 41 (2), 611–632. Tickner, J.A. (2005) ‘What is your research program? Some feminist answers to international relations methodological questions’, International Studies Quarterly, 49 (1), 1–21. Tickner, J.A. (2010) ‘You may never understand: prospects for feminist futures in international relations’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 32 (1), 9–20. Zalewski, M. (1993) ‘Feminist standpoint theory meets international relations theory: a feminist version of David and Goliath?’, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 17 (2), 13–32. Zalewski, M. (1995) ‘Well, what is the feminist perspective on Bosnia?’, International Affairs, 71 (2), 339–356. Zalewski, M. (1998) ‘Where is woman in international relations? “To return as a woman and be heard” ’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27 (3), 847–867.

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PART I CONCEPTS

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2. Gender/s

Marysia Zalewski

Gender and violence are not simple concepts or sets of practices; they also both defy easy definition. Violence, for example, ‘can be everything and nothing; legitimate or illegitimate; visible or invisible; necessary or useless; senseless and gratuitous or utterly rational and strategic’ (Scheper-­Hughes and Bourgois 2004, p. 2). As for gender, Judith Roof (2016, p. 1) offers this: Genders are neither binary nor essential. Nor are they singular, un-­changing, invariable, inherent or flatly definitive [. . .] Genderings constantly change. Individuals are always more than one gender [. . .] to gender is to signal, mask, obscure, suggest, mislead, misrecognize and simplify the uncontainable and uncategorizable. Gender’s job is to make the subject fit.

Yet alongside these complexities, it is clear that violence and gender have become disturbingly inseparable in many ways, although always also complexly and unevenly. In this chapter I unpack and illustrate some of the connections between gender and violence, though my overt attention will be on the concept of gender. This once radical concept has become very familiar, and, now, arguably, has significant intellectual and institutional currency, certainly in westernized/global Northern contexts. Anyone involved in an organization or institution, locally and internationally, especially if publicly or government funded, will be aware of gender/s’ importance. Popular culture, social media, art and performance all seem saturated with gender in one way or another, not to mention everyday personal lives. Even if the English word itself has no direct translation or institutional currency across the multitudinous parts of the globe, the work of ‘gendering’ seems inescapable. A comfortable and ‘comfort’ word (Zalewski and Runyan 2015) – paradoxical given its alleged inseparability from ­violence – ­it is, however, for critical feminists, critical race theorists, queer theorists and postcolonial scholars better apprehended as an unsettled, troubled and troubling concept, one which continues to perform and induce powerful effects many, even all of which might be regarded as violent. And it is that connection with violence which is of paramount importance for all of us, not least in the context of this book. Though what is the ‘something’ that gender is? Perhaps simply a ‘polite way to talk about the sexes’ as Sally Haslanger suggests, also claiming, 13

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14  Handbook on gender and violence rightly I think, that people are ‘pretty confident about knowing the differences between men and women’ (2000, p. 31). Haslanger (2000, p. 32) also claims that: What began as an effort to note that men and women differ socially as well as anatomically has prompted an explosion of different uses of the term ‘gender’. But not only is it unclear what gender is and how we should go about understanding it, but whether it is anything at all.

This might be perplexing given its ­popularity – ­that gender is not ‘something’ after all. What might this imply for all ‘our’ thinking about the relationship between violence and gender, as well as about the violence that gender is charged with? It is inevitably challenging, really impossible to offer an uncontroversial or inclusive narrative of the emergence of the concept of gender. Yet it is crucial to think about how and why something like ­gender – ­a term, a word, a concept, and one which has been so readily and greedily gathered up by institutions eager to pursue equality and justice agendas and ­practices – ­is so viscerally coupled with violence in ways we might not expect, much less want. And moreover, and especially pertinently, how a concept which is usually credited to the foundational work of feminist scholars and thinkers1 and largely developed in the service of getting rid of particular and unwelcome forms of (gendered) violence, might now be seen as actually producing more (gendered) violence in its wake. The latter is certainly one way to depict the trouble that gender is currently in. And though it is impossible to present an uncontroversial or inclusive narrative of the emergence of the idea of gender, it may be useful to offer a selective feminist portrait of how gender is thought to have e­ merged – s­ pecifically as a way of thinking about the differences between women and ­men – ­and about what these differences are, ‘why’ they are and how they ­matter – i­n the ongoing journey to help us think better about where and how violence does its gendered work, and indeed vice versa.

GENDER: A SELECTIVE FEMINIST PORTRAIT Before gender was understood to be ‘something’, there was sex; at least, this is how one of the most familiar stories about gender proceeds. That sex and gender are coextensive or integrally and inevitably connected 1   Feminist scholars and thinkers always include many more people than those traditionally understood to be theorists (e.g. academics), as ‘everyone has a theory of gender’ (Shepherd 2015, p. 25; see also Zalewski 1996, p. 346).

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Gender/s  ­15 in particular (and ‘normal’) ways has a very long trajectory. ‘It’s a boy/ it’s a girl’ – the interpellative pronouncement on first sight of the genital arrangements of newborn babies stretching back millennia into the present, confirmed (and sealed or so traditionally assumed) the sex and gender of the new child.2 An immense array of historical, religious, medical and scientific work, along with myriad layers of intricate cultural and everyday practices, ensured the solidity of what can be called the biological determinist view of gender (see Fausto-­Sterling 2000, 2012; Hubbard 1990; Tuana 1993). Individuals were ‘sexed’ male or female (first genitally and then, typically, by assumption, genetically and chromosomally), from which gender (and sexuality) were assumed to automatically follow. This binary model has become very familiar. Though this binary model of sex/gender (in that ordering) is indeed very familiar and has a clear canonical and material solidity, a ‘one sex’ model held sway for a considerable time. Imagining a woman as the ‘reverse’ of a man predominated for many centuries (Lacquer 1990); ‘the vagina was considered an inverted penis, the womb an interior scrotum’ (Moi 1999, p. 10). The invention of a multitude of sexed materialities over subsequent ­centuries – ­chromosomes, genes and hormones being especially ­significant – ­further worked to almost indelibly congeal sex/gender in what Janet Halley (2006) shorthands as binary M/F form. And, importantly, a host of causal connections between the physical and behavioural have morphed over time, with social differences between the (two3) sexes being understood to have a sure base in the natural/physiological holding sway for very long periods (Fausto-­Sterling 2000, 2012, 2018). A key influential text in philosophical and scientific western thought confirming this understanding was Geddes and Thomson’s The Evolution of Sex (1889), in which they concluded that ‘it is generally true that the males are more active; the females more passive, conservative, sluggish and stable’, and, moreover, that ‘biological facts’ justified ‘social norms’ (quoted in Moi 1999, p. 18). The sexed expectations (which we would now call gendered) that flowed from this are familiar and have proliferated through the centuries. Conventional examples would place attributes or behaviours such as passivity and being (over)emotional on the ‘feminine’ side of the gender spectrum, with aggressiveness and being (properly) rational on the ‘masculine’ side – ‘a series of oppositions and contrasts’ (Lacquer 1990, p.  5). That men and women differ in significant ways because of biology and physiology (and that this relates to what becomes known as masculinity and femininity) has lodged very well across varied cultural landscapes. Certainly,   Contemporarily referred to as ‘cis gender’.   Always ‘two’ despite all the contrary evidence.

2 3

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16  Handbook on gender and violence there was much confidence in the existence of differences (between the ‘two’ sexes) however much the content and form of those differences change over time, space and culture. And the difference was/is understood to be very deep; as Toril Moi puts it, ‘in the pervasive picture of sex, then, a woman becomes a woman to her finger-­tips: this is biological determinism with a vengeance’ (1999, p. 12).4 This pervasive understanding of sex has nurtured essentialism, biologism and oftentimes an abhorrence of ‘unnatural’ behaviour, or indeed its punishment or ‘correction’. This model has insistently reverberated since. Scattered temporally varied examples might include: advice for menopausal American women in the 1960s to take the drug Premarin to remain ­interesting – ­maintain their ­femininity – ­to their husbands (the drug is still available; see DeLuca 2017); the phenomenon of ‘corrective rape’ for lesbians (Smith 2015); the continuing punishment of sexually abused women for their own attack (Safronova 2018); and the current moral panic around trans people evident in both the US and the UK. The fledging sense that gender and sex might not be so inextricably linked in such ways came partially via the ‘phenomenon’ of ‘transsexuality’ and through psychology. Robert Stoller’s work in the 1960s judged that it became useful, even imperative, to distinguish between sex and gender to ‘explain’ why some people felt they were in the ‘wrong body’ (Stoller 1994). Also in the 1960s, at least in western cultures, the rise in social justice movements calling for equality and rights, including women’s movements, was increasingly vocal and apparent. Important here was the growing field of women’s studies and developments in feminist theorizing, especially in higher education institutions. Positioned, if embryonically and precariously, as an acceptable intellectual arena of enquiry, theorizing sex and gender stepped up a pace on its way to becoming a veritable globalized industry, as it might be perceived contemporarily (Watkins 2008; Zalewski and Runyan 2013). A wide range of key texts, writers, thinking moments and conceptual breakthroughs helping to develop the concept of gender within the archives of feminist theory broadly conceived have been well documented. I highlight a few moments here. It is worth starting with a quote from an early key text (at least as far as the second half of the twentieth century goes in the development of gender theorizing in the Global North): Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, originally published in 1949. Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a ­female – ­this word is sufficient to define her. In the mouth of   A man also by binaried thinking default.

4

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Gender/s  ­17 a man the epithet female has the sound of an insult, yet he is not ashamed of his animal nature; on the contrary, he is proud if someone says of him: ‘He is a male!’ The term ‘female’ is derogatory not because it emphasizes women’s animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex. (de Beauvoir 1952/1974, p. 3)

Contemporary readers may not be comfortable with some of the inflections here; but it might help to reflect on some of the threads of violence in de Beauvoir’s comments, for example her use of the words ‘insult’, ‘derogatory’ and ‘imprisons’. I return to these observations later on. Though perhaps de Beauvoir is more known for a putatively ‘simpler’ statement – ‘one is not born a woman’ (1952/74, p. 301) – at least this is the one that has captured some of the popularized spotlight of theorizing about gender, and certainly hints strongly at a dis-­connection between sex and gender, as well social construction: ‘civilization creates this creature’ (1952/74, p. 301). Even less well known was de Beauvoir’s view that ‘every female human being is not necessarily a woman’ (1952/74, p. xvi), appearing as something of a radical statement for the time,5 not least given its hints toward current controversies, as mentioned above, around trans people. Another writer regularly figuring as important in radically propelling fields of thinking around sex and gender forward is Gayle Rubin, especially her work in the 1970s on the sex/gender system. Rubin (1975) claimed that gender roles and norms imposed on women were arbitrary and usually oppressive, and her ideal was a world without gender (often forgotten as one of the central intentions of much feminist work), not simply a ‘better’ deployment of gender which so much of contemporary gender work appears to embrace, especially in the policy realm. And indeed, notwithstanding Rubin’s radical hope, the 1970s onwards spawned an abundance of work on ‘gender roles’ and ‘learned behaviours’, much of this work clearly not heeding Rubin’s sense that gender was arbitrarily linked to sex(ed) bodies. A profusion of literature across academic disciplines explicating what gender is and what is does (usually to women) proliferated, much of which has undoubtedly informed legal jurisprudence, and local, national and international policies and programmes. The conceptual separation of sex from gender was crucial in this context, along with the concomitant understanding that gender was malleable. The 1990s was a very productive time for the development of theorizing about gender, though arguably in contradictory ways. There was much

5   Also hinting towards the ‘non-­linearity’ of feminist thinking; so much of feminist thought gets ‘placed’ in time temporally imprisoning for contemporary use (see McBean 2016).

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18  Handbook on gender and violence activity on the policy and legislative front, including the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, culminating at the end of the decade with UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and the concomitant Women, Peace and Security agenda (see Shepherd 2017, pp. 72–87). Also in this decade, a major shift in the conventional gender story told through western feminist theory came with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), with the seemingly deeper radical argument, or one more indicative of what might be called a paradigm ­shift – ­namely, that gender pre-­dated sex. Thus the ‘correct ordering’ would be gender/sex, or better, gendersex (see Stern and Zalewski 2009). Thomas Lacquer (1990) was also contemporarily engaged in destabilizing thinking work around gender and sex, claiming that ‘almost everything one wants to say about sex already has in it a claim about gender’. This awarded or revealed a great deal more power and force to the work of gender than previously imagined, and much less agency to those who hope to control it. And many, if not all, people seek to control gender, implicitly and explicitly, through clothing, posture, behaviour, sex, bodies and much more ­besides – ­the list is so long it would fill this whole chapter, book and many more besides. Currently, gender thinking is abundant (one might even say rabid) in popular idiom, institutional literatures and organizational policies (and oftentimes ­lacking – ­explicitly or ­implicitly – ­feminist commitments of any hue), if differentially across the globe and not always explicitly deploying the word ‘gender’. The ostensibly powerful internationalized institution the United Nations is certainly a body with a great deal invested in gender, though in earlier decades gender was most often associated almost entirely with women and girls, arguably illustrating the success of women’s and feminist organizing about gendered violence for many decades. Over the last couple of decades it has been more widely acknowledged that gender includes men/boys,6 and the opportunities and calls for learning ‘better masculinities’ proliferated. The ‘easiness’ around earlier understandings of gender (Scott 2010, p. 6) as ‘learned behaviour’ and the possibilities of being un- or re-­learned has fairly smoothly morphed into policies geared at re-­educating men to enact better masculinities and empowering women to be less vulnerable; these are very familiar tropes in the world of gender ‘sensitive’ policy making, especially in global governance machineries (see Becerra 2018). Much of this work and ensuing policy and legislation is firmly rooted in the idea that gender is separate from sex: the former (gender) clearly judged as learned or cultural, the latter (sex) located somewhere a priori in the ‘natural’ body. This distinction remains institutionally   Which no version of feminist theory would ever deny.

6

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Gender/s  ­19 solid, which inevitably has a significant impact on the ways that gender is imagined to work and the extent of its availability for manipulation. However, this familiar comforting portrait about g­ ender – a­ s clearly separate from and subsequent to (‘bodily’) sex and malleable in desired and controllable w ­ ays – ­sits uneasily alongside contemporary feminist, critical, queer and intersectional scholars for whom the gender picture is not so clear (Butler 2004; Butler and Weed 2011; Zalewski and Runyan 2013; Baaz and Stern 2018; Hill Collins and Bilge 2018). Rather, gender is a messy entanglement of things, ideas, behaviours and identities; and its relationship to ‘biological’ sex and material, performative and epistemological productions of sex, are exceedingly complex, which in part makes it such an intriguing concept. Indeed, for critical scholars it is precisely the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender so interesting (Scott 2010, p.  5). Yet a more simplified and controllable version of gender seems to have been captured by the policy/institutional worlds whose inhabitants oftentimes present collectively as gender experts extraordinaire (Stern and Zalewski 2009). Embedded in all of this is the idea, though perhaps more of a hope, that manipulating gender in desirable ways should be ‘easy’, or at least ‘doable’. Women and girls can be empowered, rendered less vulnerable in their gendered place(s). Men and boys can learn to be less aggressive and acquire more helpful masculinities. Despite the heavy aura of gender(ed) stereotypes here, the narrative is starkly recognizable/familiar. Overall, gender has emerged as something which provides many answers to a host of problems, not least around violence. Taking a cue from some of the extensive archives of feminist work, these are questions like: Why has sexual and ‘domestic’ violence against women (by men) been prolific and simultaneously difficult to ‘see’, until perhaps very recently? Why are more men incarcerated than women across the globe? Why are women poorer and less literate than men, across the globe? Why are (white) men the almost exclusive perpetrators of ‘domestic’ massacres (Gentile 2018)? Gender has become a clear answer to these kinds of questions (and many more), though intriguingly these are largely problems stemming from gender itself. Thus, gender emerges as cause, effect and solution. This is curious, paradoxical even: can something be simultaneously cause, effect and solution? Is gender, given its inevitable complexity and interweaving social constructedness, going to be easily malleable or even malleable at all, at least more than temporarily? There is a clear generic sense that gender can be controlled and contained, and can be made to do what ‘we’ want it to if only we tried hard enough, or indisputably demonstrated women’s undoubted worth and capabilities (though this has surely been demonstrated time and time and time again). But how might one fillet

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20  Handbook on gender and violence out the ‘unacceptable’ parts of gender? Take masculinity as an example: is something like masculine-­coded ‘protective behaviour’ acceptable or not? Should such behaviour be a target for reformation or not? How might we demarcate between radically opposing views on this? As critical scholars insistently claim, gender is not something ‘sited’ in a body, like an organ or a limb that might be ­removed – ­though the metaphor of a cancer is perhaps more uncomfortably appropriate.

UNRAVELLING COMPLEXITY Gender, like violence, is a slippery labyrinthine concept and assemblage of practices, thoughts, actions and behaviours. As soon as we think we have it in our grasp, so to speak, it transpires that we do not. Perhaps disentangling the discursive enmeshment of gender from the material world is a little like trying to extract the ingredients of a cake which has been mixed, baked and served. Perhaps we have got something very wrong about gender. And clearly it’s not that gender doesn’t matter; it does. Not that gender doesn’t hurt; it does. Not that gender isn’t violently woven into the tapestry of global living and dying; it is. Though gender appears erratically as both/either comfortable and easy or a radically destabilizing political concept and, for critical scholars, much more of a question than an answer. Perhaps our questions are not enough, or new questions are necessary. Despite, or because of, the sense of ‘stuckness’ invoked here, it is important to keep asking questions about g­ ender – ­different, perhaps unexpected, questions about gender, though not ones that can (or should) necessarily all be answered, especially in this short chapter. Such questions are more in the service of alerting us to the serious controversies around this concept and the p ­ ower – v­ isible and ­not – ­that it has become steeped in, and the associated and lingering practices of violence that gender encourages, resists, inhabits, shapes, constructs and imagines into being and action. It is, after all, the connections between gender and violence that are the key focus of this book and to which I want to turn, to unfold a little more now. In the spirit of shifting thinking a little (given apparent stuckness and stickiness around gender thinking), I want to introduce and linger on an image, offered here as an intervening ‘thinking moment’. I came across the art work pictured in Figure 2.1 at a workshop on ‘Women and War: An Un-­Silencing’ at the West Wharf Gallery in Cardiff, Wales, arranged by the grassroots cultural organization Gentle/Radical as part of the Festival of Voice. The work was on loan from the artist Rachel Jones to accompany the workshop’s afternoon of talks. Opening with a video message from Cynthia Cockburn on ‘Gender and Peace’, the rest of

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Gender/s  ­21

Source:  Image used with kind permission of the artist.

Figure 2.1  Rachel Jones, bullet collage

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22  Handbook on gender and violence the day featured a wide range of evocative talks, including presentations on Colombia, Palestine and Iraq. All the presentations were compelling, yet my attention was insistently drawn to the art work on show, most especially the one pictured here. Of course, a piece of art is open to interpretation, and this one is no ­different – ­though for me it was saturated with gender, though not just gender (gender is never ‘just’ in many senses) but also with race and violence (gender is also never ‘alone’). Readers of this chapter and book will of course have their own understandings of what it means to say anything is saturated in these ways. But I want to linger on this image for a while given its simultaneously obvious and discreet shout of violence and gender. As I see it, the image shows a black woman holding a very large rifle, possibly an AK47, in an upright position. Her face is turned to ‘look’ right at ‘us’; she exudes something of a ‘soldierness’, something of a ‘warring pose’, certainly a powerful and provocative pose. Perhaps already there is a jarring sense of gender radiating given ‘soldierness’ is still regularly equated with being a man, despite the many women who serve as soldiers formally and informally round the world. This presence is often taken to represent a clear illustration of the successes of gender equality in many nations and regions round the world, even if in practice it transpires as an ongoing test of the limits of women inhabiting ‘men’s roles’. But there is much more gender/ing in this picture: we see that the gun itself is made up of hundreds of empty bullet casings and spent ­cartridges – ­it looks, and is, extremely heavy. In our viewing imaginary we ‘know’ that the gun is not made for, or capable of, ‘real’ shooting, though the killing or maiming may already have been done, or could have been as the materials were all obtained from a military source. Yet captured in this hefty shape, in something of a safe assemblage (a collage) and in the hands of this woman, more and more shapes and shades of gender begin to compete for my attention. Does it implicate the persistence of the masculinist gender of war? Or the idea of wars’ possibilities and necessity? Women soldiers have not dented the vital shaping of wars, or their habitual existence; neither has women’s entry into any of the ranks of military personnel shifted the idea that women remain ‘rapeable’ (Marcus 1992) simply by being women, as one of the speakers at the workshop on women and war reminded us.7 But the woman in the picture is herself also made up of bullets, bullet casings and related paraphernalia. She is hard all over, ­further – ­if ­affectively – ­deflating traditional gender expectations and imaginations. Though perhaps this hints more at the constitution of 7   This comment was made by Dr Jenny Mathers in her discussion of Kirby Dick’s film The Invisible War (2012).

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Gender/s  ­23 her as a subject in and of war, or simply a woman in a militarized w ­ orld –p ­ otentially riddled with bullets in one way or another, metaphorically, materially or psychically. I began to wonder how different it would feel if she were depicted as white, or as a man. The more I thought about the picture and the idea, concept and work of gender in its messy genealogy, its promises, its confusions, its work, its hegemony and the hope imbued in it, the more I found myself ‘bumping up’ against other words, other concepts and ­categories – ­not least race, violence, and time. Perhaps this is how intersectionality feels when trying to think about it. Living it is prodigiously different.

MAKING CONNECTIONS – GENDER/VIOLENCE Much has been written about the connections between gender and violence. Once the idea of gender gained some intellectual, disciplinary and political grounding, the search for causes between the two became paramount. Varying political and social motivations underpinned these pursuits, oftentimes, at least initially, guided by scientific and/or medical investigation. Previously, I briefly gestured toward some of the early explorations around biology and sex/gender: think also of the highly influential work of Cesare Lombroso, a criminologist and physician active in the nineteenth century. His work connecting criminality in men to their biological make-­up and significantly their physical features has virulently rippled through the centuries. Measuring skull size or the ‘asymmetry’ of faces has had cruel and ongoing repercussions, not least for people identified as belonging to ‘not-­central’ ethnicities, or indeed the millions of people who suffered in Nazi death camps. And the twentieth century has produced an abundance of new knowledge about the connections between gender and violence. The promise of not just sure knowledge about what gender is and does, but how it might be possible to ameliorate the violences associated with gender, was paramount. Women’s movements, women’s activism and the growth of feminist theory have been key in this. What a relief it was to be able to authoritatively delink gender from sex and to delink violence from nature or biology. And to p ­ rove – a­ t ­last – t­ hat women do not need or deserve to be the violated sex.8 Or to have such violence meted out to women because of their sex. Or to have that violence painfully disappear into the realms of the unseen, or the acceptable or the righteous (‘she deserved it’). Here there was/is violence at so many   Of course a disputed assertion given what gender can do to men.

8

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24  Handbook on gender and violence levels: physical, phenomenological, psychic, epistemological, emotional and personal. And it is lifelong in its shifting permutations. But to return to Sally Haslanger’s question posed earlier: is gender ‘something’ at all? It certainly seems to have very much become ‘something’, though this seems to be an ‘unfixable’ something, though into which a huge amount of cultural energy is put trying to fix it (Roof 2016, p. 2). And further, for Judith Roof, gender works as ‘a lure that distracts us from the very problem it seems to represent’ (2016, p. 243). What can this mean especially for our curiosities about the connections between gender and violence? I want to circle back to some of the earlier points to which I said I would return. Recall the quote from de Beauvoir and the threads of violence embedded in it: Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a ­female – ­this word is sufficient to define her. In the mouth of a man the epithet female has the sound of an insult, yet he is not ashamed of his animal nature; on the contrary, he is proud if someone says of him: ‘He is a male!’ The term ‘female’ is derogatory not because it emphasizes women’s animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex. (1952/1974, p. 3)

De Beauvoir was surely inferring the constructed character of woman making fascinating use of violating words: insult, derogatory, imprisons. Writing in the late 1940s, and in a particular masculinized philosophical genre, her book both flouted masculine authority, with its bold gendered attention on women, and simultaneously had an aura of masculinized authority given her intellectual and social positioning. The Second Sex is a philosophical tour de force in many ways; but what does de Beauvoir imply with her violent articulations? Do these modulations of violence echo through subsequent d ­ ecades – ­do they feel ‘right’ now? Returning once again to the selective feminist archive, the 1970s and 1980s saw quite virulent work illustrating the harms of gender, especially those done to women. Think of Germaine Greer’s opening assertion in The Female Eunuch: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them’ (1970, p. 249). Or Andrea Dworkin’s comment that ‘male aggression is rapacious [. . .] it spills over, not accidentally but purposefully [. . .] there is war [. . .] war purifies, washed off the female stink’ (1989, p. 51). Or Valerie Solanos, on men: ‘every man, deep down, knows he’s a worthless piece of shit’ (2004, p.  41). Does the hurt and violence of these ‘gender words’ resonate contemporarily? ‘Pussy grabbing’, a ‘blonde moment’, an ‘old bag’, ‘everyday sexism’? Or think of de Beauvoir’s comment about being ‘imprisoned in her sex’: what does she imply is being incarcerated? And how? The answer is ‘women’ of course, and in radically different ways: in a house, in a bed, in a kitchen, in an operating theatre; in a body

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Gender/s  ­25 so often ravaged with gendered expectations that can never be maintained; without sanitary protection, in psychological and emotional turmoil. Can a category do all of this? Men are not exempt here of course. No one is exempt from the work of gender, though the gradations, rewards, pleasures and pains radically vary, which perhaps the performative banality of ‘gender’, at least in its ‘official feminist’ form (Watkins 2018, p. 7), serves to currently mask and suffocate very ­well – ­a violence indeed. In my brief foray above into Butler’s early work on gender, I suggested that the reversal of the conventional ordering of sex/gender into gendersex awarded or revealed a great deal more power and force to the work of gender than previously imagined, and much less agency to those who hope to control it. This is not to reify or ‘anthropomorphize’ gender, but to infer that gender works in ethereal, amorphous, labyrinthine ways. We cannot just capture the bits we do not like and manipulate them in preferred ways. How did gender get to be thought of as almost a body part that could be removed or ‘treated’? Surely the extensive archives of feminist work have shown very well not only how gender infiltrates but also, crucially, how important, even necessary, the work of gender is in supporting and maintaining hegemonic structures, systems and desires. Again invoking de Beauvoir, I raised questions about the contemporary ‘fit’ of her violent presentation of the work of gender: do these modulations of violence echo through subsequent decades; do they feel ‘right’ now? There seem to have been abundant successes around gender, though, ‘in the glib parlance of official feminism, “challenges remain” ’ (Watkins 2018, p.  7). This temporally-­sited hope for the work of feminism around gender is very ­familiar – ­it might be taking too long, but we are on the right road (if very variably around the globe), aren’t we? We might take a brief tour around the contemporary global landscape to peruse the contemporary work and presence of gender: in Canada, the Ontario PC Party has recently passed a resolution to debate whether or not the party should recognize gender identity (Rocca 2018); in Brazil ­ escribed as the ‘Trump’ the newly elected President, Jair ­Bolsonaro – d of Brazil, and an ultra-­right conservative (Sandy 2018) – is vehemently opposed to people who fall outside a very strict and hegemonic gender and race norm; the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has banned the study of gender in the country’s universities, stating that ‘the Government’s standpoint is that people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially-­constructed genders, rather than biological sexes’ (Kent and Tapfumaneyi 2018); and the Trump administration in America is also considering a legal definition of gender as immutable and fixed at birth (Green et al. 2018). Many of these overt restrictions around gender appear to be attacks on the idea

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26  Handbook on gender and violence of ‘gender dysphoria’ and the existence of trans people, and indeed they are at many levels. Yet they are simultaneously attacks on the concept of gender altogether, at least when that concept is in the hands of critical scholars and thinkers and social justice activists. In my opening comments I referred to gender as a ‘once radical concept’, perhaps implying that it may be time to abandon it given its uncontrollable directions and oftentimes unwanted permutations. When Joan Scott first submitted her essay ‘Is Gender a Useful Category of Analysis of Historical Analysis?’ to a journal, the editors asked her to remove the question mark as they were not allowed in titles (Scott 2010). Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed’s discussion of this in their book on Scott’s work (2011) peruses this prohibition, speculating that questions would seem not to be understood as knowledge in that situation, and thus academically unwise. For Scott it was a question she first posed decades earlier, and it remains a question today and, for her, now is not the time to give up on gender; its radical possibilities remain. Though, as Scott astutely reminds us, what also remains crucial is the ability to keep gender open as a question; clearly also as an identity. It will be important to be less sure about what gender is, knowing that gender cannot be grasped, or at least fleetingly and lightly, and always problematically. It is increasingly important to ask why gender is being used in particular ways; and, given the current attacks on gender, it would seem that gender is indeed a very powerful category, a subject of intense ­debate – t­hough perhaps less debate and more dismissal. So we need to keep asking gender as a question, not assuming its content. This, I think, is a hard ask for academics, policy makers and activists who, in varying ways, still document egregious harms associated with gender. But as I write (in 2018), the effervescent interest in gender from authoritarians and conservatives might be indicative of the death rattle of white, colonial patriarchy, or something other. Either way, gender remains a volatile and violent force that deserves our close attention.

REFERENCES Baaz, M. and M. Stern (2018) ‘Curious erasures: the sexual in wartime sexual violence’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20 (3), 295–314. Becerra, G. (2018) ‘Masculine subjectivities in United Nations discourse on gender violence (1970–2015): absent actors, deviant perpetrators, allies and victims’ in M. Zalewski, P. Drumond, E. Prügl and M. Stern (eds) Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 184–197. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, J. and E. Weed (eds) (2011) The Question of Gender, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Gender/s  ­27 de Beauvoir, S. (1952/1974) The Second Sex, New York: Random House. DeLuca, S.R. (2017) The Hormone Myth, Oakland: New Harbinger. Dworkin, A. (1989) Pornography, New York: Plume. Fausto Sterling, A. (2000) Sexing the Body, New York: Basic Books. Fausto Sterling, A. (2012) Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World, London and New York: Routledge. Fausto Sterling, A. (2018) ‘Why sex is not binary’, accessed 17 December 2018 at https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/sex-­biology-­binary.html. Gentile, C. (2018) ‘Pittsburgh shooting suspect appears in court over attack that left 11 dead’, accessed 17 December 2018 at https://www.theguardian.com/us-­news/2018/oct/29/ pittsburgh-­shooting-­suspect-­robert-­bowers-­court. Green, E.L., K. Benner and R. Pear (2018) ‘“Transgender” could be defined out of existence under Trump administration’, accessed 21 December 2018 at https://www.nytimes. com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-­trump-­administration-­sex-­definition.html. Greer, G. (1970) The Female Eunuch, London: McGibbon and Lee. Halley, J. (2006) Split Decisions: Why and How to Take a Break from Feminism, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Haslanger, S. (2000) ‘Gender and race: (what) are they? (What) do we want them to be?’ NOÛS, 34 (1), 31–55. Hill Collins, P. and S. Bilge (2018) Intersectionality, Cambridge: Polity. Hubbard, R. (1990) The Politics of Women’s Biology, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kent, L. and S. Tapfumaneyi (2018) ‘Hungary’s PM bans gender study at colleges saying “people are born either male or female” ’, accessed 21 December 2018 at https://edition. cnn.com/2018/10/19/europe/hungary-­bans-­gender-­study-­at-­colleges-­trnd/index.html. Lacquer, T. (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McBean, S. (2016) Feminism’s Queer Temporalities, London and New York: Routledge. Marcus, S. (1992) ‘Fighting bodies, fighting words: a theory and politics of rape prevention’ in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds) Feminist Theorize the Political, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 385–403. Moi, T. (1999) What Is a Woman?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rocca, R. (2018) ‘Ontario PC Party passes resolution to debate recognition of gender identity’, accessed 17 December 2018 at https://globalnews.ca/news/4673240/ontario-­pc-­ recognize-­gender-­identity/. Roof, J. (2016) What Gender Is, What Gender Does, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rubin, G. (1975) ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex’ in R.R. Reiter (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210. Safronova, V. (2018) ‘Lawyer in rape trial links thong with consent, and Ireland erupts’, accessed 17 December 2018 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/world/europe/ireland-­ underwear-­rape-­case-­protest.html. Sandy, M. (2018) ‘Jair Bolsonaro loves Trump, hates gay people and admires autocrats. He could be Brazil’s next president’, accessed 17 December 2018 at http://time.com/5375731/ jair-­bolsonaro/. Scheper-­Hughes, N. and P. Bourgois (eds) (2004) Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell. Scott, J.W. (2010) ‘Gender: still a useful category of analysis?’ Diogenes, 57 (1), 7–14. Shepherd, L.J. (2015) ‘Sex or gender? Bodies in global politics and why gender matters’ in L.J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matter in Global Politics, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 24–35. Shepherd, L.J. (2017) Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, L. (2015) ‘Corrective rape: the homophobic fallout of post-­apartheid South Africa’,

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28  Handbook on gender and violence accessed 17 December 2018 at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-­life/11608361/ Corrective-­rape-­The-­homophobic-­fallout-­of-­post-­apartheid-­South-­Africa.html. Solanos, V. (2004) SCUM Manifesto, London and New York: Verso. Stern, M. and M. Zalewski (2009) ‘Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarization’, Review of International Studies, 35 (3), 611–630. Stoller, R. (1994) Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity, London: Karnac. Tuana, N. (1993) The Less Noble Sex, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Watkins, S. (2018) ‘Which feminisms?’ New Left Review, 109, 5–76. Zalewski, M. (1996) ‘“All these theories yet the bodies keep piling up”: theory, theorists, theorising’ in S. Smith, K. Booth and M. Zalewski (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 340–353. Zalewski, M. and A.S. Runyan (2013) ‘Taking feminist violence seriously in feminist international relations’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15 (3), 293–313. Zalewski, M. and A.S. Runyan (2015) ‘Unthinking sexual violence in a neoliberal age of spectacular terror’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 8 (3), 1–17.

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3. Race

Celeste Montoya

Female activists and scholars of colour have long emphasized the importance of understanding violence in regard to both gender and race, yet work on violence (both activist and scholarly) tends to focus on one or the other. These single-­axis approaches have made important but limited interventions. Feminist scholars and activists have often focused on establishing the relationship between gender and violence, an approach that has helped to expand what is understood as violence, challenging many normalized manifestations; such work has included recognition of, for example, domestic and sexual violence as violence. It has highlighted the relevance of structural inequalities and asymmetrical power relationships based on gender hierarchies. It has provided remedies rooted in the racism movements empowerment of women and girls. Similarly, anti-­ and critical race scholars have focused on racial oppression and racialized forms of violence. This approach also expands what is understood as violence, challenging normalized manifestations and uncovering the relevance of asymmetrical power relations that serve to excuse and perpetuate some forms of violence and disproportionately punish others. While these focused, single-­axis approaches have been instrumental in highlighting crucial components of oppression, they tend to obscure the experiences of those at the intersection of both racial and gendered oppression. Examining both race and gender simultaneously has important implications for how violence is understood. Such an approach affects how victims and perpetrators of violence are perceived and treated; it informs the steps that are taken to address and combat violence; and it shapes the impact and effectiveness of proposed solutions. Intersectional and post-­colonial feminists have long argued for incorporating a more multifaceted approach to addressing oppression and marginalization. Later in this volume, Lise Rolandsen Agustín and Emanuela Lombardo provide an overview of intersectionality as a means of more fully interrogating and challenging the systems of oppression which constitute and are constituted by violence. Intersectionality explores how ‘race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary mutually exclusive categories but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that shape complex inequalities’ (Collins 2015, p.  2). Violence (including that which is more narrowly characterized as gendered 29

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30  Handbook on gender and violence violence) is shaped by these intersecting forms of oppression, each of which contributes to a more holistic understanding of the problem and is relevant to solutions. While there are many intersections to explore in understanding gendered violence, in this chapter I focus predominantly on one particular intersection, that of race and gender. Such an approach, like taking a single-­axis approach focused on only gender or only race, is partial. Yet it takes an additional step in uncovering the complexities in the relationship between oppression and violence. A race-­gendered approach helps to expand understandings of what are currently understood as raced or gendered forms of violence, how ‘gendered violence’ is raced and how ‘racialized violence’ is gendered, drawing attention to what might be lost within or between these single-­axis approaches. A race-­gendered approach centres the experiences of groups at the intersection of racial and gendered marginalities that might otherwise be neglected; but it also complicates understandings of who is affected by these forms of violence and how. In her influential essay ‘A Black Feminist Reflection on the Antiviolence Movement’, Beth Ritchie discusses the strategic move by feminist activists to emphasize a universal frame of violence against women as a means of building unity and to avoid stereotyping and stigma. She argues that this has instead served to obscure the victimization of women of colour (particularly those in low-­income communities).1 She argues that the ‘every-­woman’ became a white middle-­class woman, while women of colour became invisible at best, or it was assumed that their victimization was characterized as a problem caused by something other than gender violence (Ritchie 2000, p.  1135). These critiques are at the heart of scholarship advocating for intersectional and/or race-­gendered approaches. At the same time, the stereotyping and stigma that activists were concerned with avoiding are very much a real and ongoing part of how violence is understood. Yet the logics of racism, which are intimately intertwined with the logics of misogyny (as well as transphobia and homophobia, also forms of gendered oppression), must be addressed in order to counter them more fully. In this chapter, I look first at how understandings of gender, race and violence have evolved over time. I then focus on challenges that have been posed to single-­axis ­approaches – ­examining how gender violence might be understood as raced and race violence understood as ­gendered – ­as a means of moving towards a more integrated approach. Finally, I show 1   ‘Women of colour’ is a term increasingly used to denote various groups of racialized women. While it is an important means of drawing attention to race-­gendered patterns, it is also important to note that there is also a need to acknowledge the distinct experiences different women of colour have and have had.

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Race  ­31 how constructions of gender violence have been co-­opted or manipulated as a strategy of racialization. Ultimately, I argue that a race-­gendered analysis is a necessary component of understanding and combating gendered violence.

THE (CO-)CONSTRUCTION AND STRUCTURE OF GENDER, RACE, AND VIOLENCE Academic understandings of race and gender have proliferated over time, incorporating perspectives based on more fixed biological understandings to those emphasizing social constructions. This evolution has often occurred in parallel, but separate, sets of debates in the fields of feminist or gender studies and critical race studies. Many feminist scholars have adopted the term ‘gender’ as a means of exploring the varied social meaning attached to, but distinct from, the more biologically driven typology of ‘sex’ (Glenn 1999). According to Glenn, critical race scholars have similarly challenged the ideas of race as rooted in biological markers, instead emphasizing the social arrangements that divide and categorize individuals (often, but not always) by phenotypic markers, such as skin colour. This approach moves away from problematic deterministic understandings of race and gender, shifting to an interrogation of power and practice. Gendering or racialization are thus understood as processes embedded in particular contexts, time and place. Intersectional approaches emphasize how race (or gender) is constructed in relations with other forms of marginalization. For example, Anna Sampaio (2015, p.  8) argues how ‘particular manifestations of racialized marginalization are mediated, altered, negotiated, reconfigured, and informed by intersecting modes of subordination’, in particular gender. Gendering and racialization become processes of othering that work together in shaping motivations, types and responses to violence (Jiwani 2005). The emphasis on construction is sometimes misunderstood as imagined or fictitious, but gender and race have material and structural implications. They are constructed in ways that are then used to organize societies and their spatiality: who is permitted in what spaces; what behaviours are acceptable; and how resources are distributed. Violence is used as a tool in this organizing; but how violence is ultimately understood is itself embedded in constructions of gender and race. James Tyner (2012), using the work of Iris Marion Young and Susan Opotow, argues for the importance of using race and gender to understand the geographies of violence. Young (1990) discusses how many groups (bodies) find themselves socially and spatially excluded such that not every person is necessarily

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32  Handbook on gender and violence included in the scope of justice. These moral exclusions ‘rationalize and exclude harm inflicted on those outside the scope of justice [. . .] viewing them as unworthy of fairness, resources, or sacrifice, and seeing them as expendable, undeserving, exploitable, or irrelevant’ (Opotow 2001, p. 256). Ultimately, as Tyner (2012, p. 11) argues, these moral exclusions can work to legitimize and normalize violence, at least in certain forms or social–spatial configurations. While analyses of race and gender can be used to uncover oppression and violence, sometimes gender or race are themselves concealed or go unnoticed. While gender and race are increasingly recognized and used as analytical and political heuristics, they are not universally recognized as legitimate. Because racial and gendered analyses have been used as a means of critiquing and challenging existing power hierarchies, they are often stigmatized and charged with bias, remaining somewhat at the margins of the academy. This is relevant to the study of and popular understandings of violence. Also, within critical gender and race studies there are debates as to what gender and racial analysis entails, with contemporary gender studies moving beyond the original emphasis on women to look across and beyond the traditional binaries. While critical race studies are often more tailored in their geographic focus, a more global or comparative approach might interrogate the processes of racialization that are a part of ethnic, cultural or religious marginalization. It is important to recognize that while racialization is often an integral part of marginalization and the associated violence, race is not something that is always explicitly addressed. In the context of gender violence, dominant frameworks tend to focus on cultural differences that obscure and feed into processes of racialization (Jiwani 2005). Gender violence is culturalized (and in turn racialized) when it is understood as stemming from a cultural conflict rather than a structural inequality (Razack 1998). It becomes a means of othering groups. While race and gender might each, separately, provide an essential component to understanding violence, together they provide more complete and nuanced insight that is more than just the sum of the two parts. While the intersectional intervention starts with understanding how what is understood as gendered violence is raced and how what is racialized violence is gendered, it also provides a new vantage point that might produce new insights that are obscured by single-­axis approaches. A race-gendered analysis is a vital lens for understanding the motive and modes of violence used to oppress groups and for understanding which patterns of violence (between which perpetrators and which victims) are deemed (il)legitimate or (in)tolerable. Race-­gendered analysis is necessary for denormalizing certain patterns and manifestations of violence and challenging scripts

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Race  ­33 that deem only certain bodies as being worthy of sympathy or protections. It is crucial to determining who is perceived as a threat of certain forms of violence and who is punishable, as well as the form and extent of that punishment. Violence that contradicts classic power structures is much more likely to be deemed illegitimate and worthy of punishment, while violence that upholds power structures is more likely to be overlooked or excused (Montoya 2016, p. 148). For example, across time and place the spectre of racialized men perpetrating violence against white women continuously creates a very different socio-­political effect than that of white men perpetrating violence against racialized women (or even that of white women perpetrating violence against racialized men). While the goal in moving towards a race-­gendered analysis of violence is to see the two as inevitably intertwined, most of the work providing race-­ gendered analysis has focused on making interventions to more single-­axis approaches. In the following sections, I provide an overview of some of these interventions and chart a course for future work.

RACE-­ING GENDERED VIOLENCE Activism and scholarship on gender and violence have traditionally focused on male violence against women. Although contemporary work has expanded this purview to acknowledge other gendered patterns (such as female perpetrators, male victims, violence related to sexuality and gender identity, and so on), the early impetus was to draw attention to patterns of particular forms of violence against women. There are a few important justifications that might be given for this approach. First, while men are not excluded from being victims, violence against women tends to be rooted in broader structures of gendered power. While men are more likely to be victimized by strangers or casual acquaintances (often other men), women are more likely to be victimized by family members or intimate partners. Research indicates that sexual assault and domestic violence are most frequently perpetrated by males against females, a pattern that holds up cross-­nationally (Almosaed 2004; Dobash and Dobash 1998; Merry 2009). It is, however, important to note that men are also victimized in gendered (and raced) ways: examples include male rape in prison; sexualized torture of men in wartime or as a part of hazing in male organizations; and homophobic assaults on gay men (Merry 2009). Secondly, many forms of gender violence are often normalized, and it has often taken mass social mobilization to get governments to address the problem. The framing of gender violence as an issue that transcends all geographical and social borders, and as a human rights violation

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34  Handbook on gender and violence against women, has been an important strategy employed in mobilizing a transnational antiviolence movement and getting the issue on the global agenda (Joachim 1999, 2007; Montoya 2013; Weldon 2006). While early international instruments such as the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW) tended to note the increased vulnerability of certain groups of women (including ‘those belonging to minority groups, indigenous women, refugee women, migrant women’), the predominant emphasis was placed on gender inequality. This limited, single-­axis analysis fails to fully address the complex ways in which these racialized groups experience violence, and how the violence itself is shaped by race-­gendered processes (Montoya 2013; Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2014). While women, in general, due to their subordinated position in societal hierarchies, occupy positions of precarity that may leave them susceptible to violence, that precarity can be exacerbated or mediated by their positionality within racial hierarchies. The tensions surrounding and challenges aimed at universal framings of gender violence have been ongoing. For example, Susan Brownmiller’s influential book, Against Our Will (1975), was one of the first publications to examine the global history of sexual violence. Her characterization of sexual violence as the primary tool by which ‘all men keep all women in a state of fear’ became a predominant radical framing of gender violence. At the same time, scholar-­activists of colour raised concern that emphasizing gender as the primary logic of rape overlooked the relevant racial dimensions (Davis 1985; hooks 1981). For example, Angela Davis (1983, pp. 172–173) argues that rape laws in the United States were created for the protection of men in the upper classes whose daughters and wives might be assaulted; meanwhile, black women who are rape victims are not only ignored, they also sometimes suffer a second assault at the hands of the police. Under slavery, black women were regarded as lascivious, and thus always ­consenting – a­ pernicious construction that continued into the twentieth century (Bourke 2007). This has also been a feature of colonial rule throughout the world. In South Africa, for example, colonized (and racialized) women were viewed as sexually deviant, and thus justifiably conquered and unrapeable, with lasting consequences that extended beyond colonial rule (Coetzee and du Toit 2018, p. 221; Gqola 2015, p. 52). These race-­gendered patterns have persisted, albeit in more insidious ways, shaping how victims and alleged perpetrators are characterized and treated. Racialized and/or marginalized women are less easily identified as ‘ideal’ victims within dominant rape scripts, and are more easily stigmatized as ‘bad’ or ‘undeserving’ victims with low credibility and unworthy of sympathy (Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2014; Randall 2010). Queer people of colour face similar challenges that are also rooted

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Race  ­35 in processes of race-­gendered othering. Race-­gendered processes apply to alleged perpetrators as well. ‘While rapists have seldom been brought to justice, the rape charge has been indiscriminately aimed at Black men, the guilty and innocent alike’ (Davis 1983, p. 172). Racialized men (particularly when accused by white women) are more likely to be tried and prosecuted (Corrigan 2013; Flood 2012). Domestic violence, also referred to as intimate partner abuse, is the other form of violence that is often understood as gendered, and which has been taken up by the feminist movement. Scholars examining the social structural underpinnings of domestic violence in diverse communities have, however, also questioned the primacy of gender as an explanatory model, and emphasized the need to explore other forms of oppression (Sokoloff and Dupont 2005). Such approaches question the prevailing claim that domestic violence is a universal risk to all women equally. Returning to Beth Ritchie’s critique of the antiviolence movement, she argues that poor women of colour are most likely to be in both dangerous intimate relationships and dangerous social positions, and that the avoidance of a race (and class) analysis of violence against women ‘seriously compromises the transgressive and transformative potential’ of such insights (Ritchie 2000, p. 1135). The gendered and racialized aspects of the violence are closely intertwined and not easily disentangled. A political economy framework, which places domestic violence within the context of economic, political and historical conditions, helps elucidate different ways in which racism shapes women of colour’s precarity. Discrimination in education, work and housing renders racialized women more vulnerable to domestic violence (Adelman 2004; Merry 2009). Hillary Potter (2008, p. 8) argues that the stress of being the object of disobliging racial discrimination and residing in distressed neighbourhoods negatively impacts black women (and other women of colour) by adding to other life stressors and causing strain and conflict within intimate relations. This becomes a cycle in which intimate partner abuse then contributes to unemployment, substance abuse, physical disabilities, unwanted pregnancies, AIDS, suicide, homicide, and living conditions (including homelessness). Global studies of violence, looking across countries and cultures, find that manifestations of gender violence are highly variable, influenced by particular kinships structures, gender inequalities, and levels of violence in the wider society (Merry 2009). What might be considered abuse varies in different racial and cultural constructions of gender, family, and relationships (Sokoloff and Dupont 2005). It is not a monolithic phenomenon, and ‘intersectionalities color the meaning and nature of domestic violence, how it is experienced by self and responded to by others, how personal and social consequences are represented, and how and whether escape

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36  Handbook on gender and violence and safety can be obtained’ (Bograd 1999, p. 276). Racialized communities typically receive less effective criminal justice responses to gender violence, often due to racialized constructions that deem them as inherently more violent. For example, Shalhoub-­Kevorkian (2000) finds Israeli police reluctant to help battered Israeli-­Palestinian women, assuming that violence is a part of their ‘culture’. At the same time, such communities often experience disproportionate state violence, often perpetrated by law enforcement and the legal system (Incite! 2006; Merry 2009). Mandatory arrest policies designed to ensure that law enforcement take domestic violence calls seriously can be used against female victims. Racialized female victims are more likely to be arrested when police are called in, and migrant women can be subject to deportation (Coker 2000; Potter 2008). Shelters and services for battered women are rarely designed to address the needs of racialized women (Crenshaw 1997; Montoya 2013). For example, migrant women face the added complications of insecure or undocumented residence status and language barriers, both of which may preclude them from accessing services. For all these reasons, women in racialized communities are more ambivalent and distrustful in seeking help. Furthermore, in seeking help they may be placed in a more precarious position in facing oppression from the institutions that are supposed to help them, or even potential ostracization within their own communities for ‘outing’ the violence and exposing the community to state violence. A race-­gendered analysis of violence that is generally understood as solely gendered elucidates important and often missing components that are crucial to combating such violence. It draws attention to historical and contemporary patterns regarding who is regarded or excluded from being considered a sympathetic victim, and the particular challenges victims face in pursuing help or justice. It provides a more holistic understanding of structural inequalities that need to be addressed in order to better combat gendered violence, and shows what might be neglected or lost with single-­ axis, gender-­only approaches.

GENDERING RACIAL VIOLENCE Just as women have mobilized to get issues of gender discrimination and violence on the international political agenda, marginalized racial and ethnic communities have worked to make visible and combat racism and racial violence, to mixed success. Globally, the human rights regime has a long-­established history of confronting genocide, starting with the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which provides the foundational legal definition. The term ‘genocide’ was created from the Greek

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Race  ­37 word genos, meaning race or tribe, and –cide (killing). Processes of racialization are ultimately at the heart of genocide. Yet, to only focus on race obscures the manner in which gendered violence is utilized as a tool of racial oppression, something that has not always been fully acknowledged. Domestically, anti-­racist movements focus on the particular experiences of marginalized groups, but in a way that often defaults to male experiences and without interrogating the gendered ways in which the associated violence (against women and men) may manifest. Globally, genocide preceded and has secured a more permanent place within the human rights regime than has gendered violence. Yet, gendered violence has been an extremely effective mechanism by which to terrorize and destroy targeted groups. According to the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide includes: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Many of these acts play out in gendered ways, including the disproportional use of sexual assault against women as well as other varied forms of reproductive violence. Sexual violence has been a means of ‘causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the [racialized] group’ (point b of the Genocide Convention listed above). The perpetration of such violence was an integral part of slavery and colonialism, of exerting domination and control; but violence was also wielded as a weapon against racialized groups attempting to secure their freedom. In the post-­Emancipation South in the United States, sexual violence became ‘a weapon of terror’ against African Americans (McGuire 2010). White men abducted and assaulted black women with ‘alarming regularity’: attacking them on the job; attacking them while they were travelling to or from home; raping them as a form of retribution or to enforce rules of hierarchy; sexually humiliating and assaulting them in public spaces (Lerner 1972; McGuire 2010, p. xviii). Sally Merry (2009) similarly discusses the ways in which sexual violence is used against women in lower castes in India as a means of asserting control and reinforcing the hierarchy. Dalit women have been sexually assaulted as a way to inflict ‘lessons’ and crush movement for political empowerment, both in broader patterns of assault and through the targeting of particular victims.

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38  Handbook on gender and violence In ethnic conflict and genocide, such as that in the Balkans and East Africa in the 1990s, sexual assault was used not only as a physical but also as a psychological assault, one often aimed specifically at women in practice, but intended to demoralize enemy communities (Jones 2010). While feminist scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the violence against women in various forms of conflict, including ethnic, they have tended towards a gendered analysis, perhaps assuming but not interrogating the intersecting processes of racialization. Reproductive violence is related to, but also distinct from, sexual ­violence – ­a form of race-­gendered violence that often is missing from accounts of both gender and race violence. A race-­gendered component of the sexual assaults occurring in the above conflicts served also as a form of reproductive violence. A policy of forced impregnation can simultaneously ‘further the destruction of one people and the proliferation of another’ (Fisher 1996, p. 92). Race-­gendered reproductive violence takes many forms, but has been overlooked by both feminist and anti-­racism movements. Such has been the undertaking of the reproductive justice movement. While coined by women of colour in the United States, reproductive justice was conceptualized in relation to the transnational effort to root reproductive rights within a human rights framework. While feminist movements have usually asserted reproductive rights as a women’s rights issue, with an emphasis on birth control and abortion, feminists of colour have called for an expanded conception of reproductive justice that extends the purview to confront the race-­gendered reproductive violence that women of colour have faced in various ways throughout history. The three tenets of the reproductive justice movement include: (1) the right not to have children (with access to safe forms of birth control and abortion); (2) the right to have children (and the choice of conditions under which to have them); and (3) the right to parent those children in safe and healthy environments (Ross and Solinger 2017). Forced or coercive pregnancy is one way in which racial logics are implemented through gendered means. This has happened in a number of ways in very different contexts. One example is within the context of slavery. In the United States, enslaved black men and women were bred to produce stronger and more durable workers (Silliman et al. 2004; Threadcraft 2016). As discussed above, rape and forced pregnancy have also been part of ethnic genocide in which women of an undesirable ethnic group are impregnated by men of the dominant ethnic group, as occurred in the Serbian rape campus during the Balkan wars (Fisher 1996). Extremely restrictive pronatalist policies are often associated with nationalism. While not necessarily associated with sexual assault, they serve as a means of forcing pregnancy with an implied emphasis on the breeding of dominant

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Race  ­39 group children. Distinct, but related to these forms of reproductive violence, are colonial assimilation projects aimed at biological absorption, a process by which ‘through interracial relationships, indigenous people would biologically disappear, or be “bred out” ’ (Elinghaus 2009, p. 60). Such have been aspects of United States and Australian forced assimilation policies. The other side of reproductive violence comes in the form of forced or coercive sterilization. In the United States, forced sterilization has been an egregious form of racism used against black, Latina, and Puerto Rican women (Silliman et al. 2004). Coercive sterilization and the forced removal of children (to be raised elsewhere) have been part of colonial violence against Indigenous women in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond (Pegoraro 2015). They have also been reportedly used against Roma women in several Eastern European countries (Zampas and Lamačková 2011). Women of colour, and black women specifically, have been systematically singled out for longer and more permanent forms of birth control within the United States (Roberts 1997; Solinger 2007). Applying a race-­gendered lens to violence that is understood as racial (or genocidal) makes sure that those at the intersection of race and gender oppression are visible, as are the particular forms of violence they confront. While the gendered aspects of genocide are increasingly acknowledged, there is work to be done on deepening the race-­gendered analysis as well as extending the analysis of what constitutes genocide more broadly, geographically as well as with regard to particular methods, such as reproductive violence. While gendered forms of violence have been used directly as a tool of racial oppression, they have also been used as a justification for racial oppression. Uncovering these problematic constructions, in which the threat of gender violence becomes a tool of racialization, is also an important part of developing a race-­gendered analysis. A particularly potent tool used in the racialization of groups is to characterize the men as threatening (white) femininity. In the 1800s, for example, Ida B. Wells wrote extensively about the lynching of black men under false allegations of raping white women, a trend that Davis (1983) tracks well into the next century. Tropes of violent brown men are also used to justify colonial and neocolonial practices of violence in which white men are understood as ‘saving brown women from brown men’ (see Spivak 1988, p.  93; Hawkesworth 2006). In the post-­9/11 security era, gendered violence and oppression have been deployed as racialized justification for military interventions as well as restrictive immigration practices (Farris 2017; Hawkesworth 2006; Perugini and Gordon 2015). The administration of George W. Bush, using

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40  Handbook on gender and violence language very similar to that employed by feminist movements, spoke of the need to liberate Afghan women from gender oppression. Muslim migrants are portrayed as the ‘barbaric other’ and their masculinity as inherently violence (Weber 2016). Such portrayals are most vivid in the rhetoric of far right parties, but they are also enshrined in shifting patterns of gender violence policy focused on ‘harmful cultural practices’ that treat particular forms of violence as imported anomalies rather than variations of widespread patterns of gendered violence. The culturalization of gender violence discourse serves to racialize groups in a manner that renders them more precarious to violence, gendered and nongendered, state and societal (Dasgupta 1998; Montoya and Agustin 2014). In the United States, Donald Trump utilized these discourses during his election campaign as a means of othering not only Muslims but also Mexican immigrants, whom he depicted as rapists and criminals. Sampaio (2015, p. 8) explores how racialization and gendering processes work in tandem to construct Latina/o immigrants as potential terrorists and to legitimize their terrorization via restrictive state practices. Meghana Nayak (2015) provides a critical examination of the asylum system in the United States, and reveals that the racialization of gender violence founded on dichotomies of the ‘civilized West’ versus the ‘barbaric Other’ have worked to construct a very narrow understanding of who might be ‘worthy’ of protection.

CONCLUSION While understanding violence using a gendered lens and with an attention to gendered oppression remains an important endeavour with much still to learn, it is vital that race be a part of this analysis. Our understanding of ‘gendered violence’ is only partial at best, and potentially harmful at worst, when race is left out of the analysis. A race-­gendered analysis centres those that might otherwise be left out by single-­axis analysis of gender or race, and expands our understanding of how systems of power and oppression are constituted by and constitute violence. Above I have discussed what is to be gained from adding a racial analysis to our understandings of gender violence and a gendered analysis to racial violence. Moving forward, it is important to conceptualize more integrated and thorough approaches to what we understand as violence, how we understand violence, and how we work to combat violence.

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Race  ­41

REFERENCES Adelman, M. (2004) ‘The battering state: towards a political economy of domestic violence’, Journal of Poverty, 8 (3), 55–74. Almosaed, N. (2004) ‘Violence against women: a cross-­cultural perspective’, Journal of Muslim Affairs, 24 (1), 67–88. Bograd, M. (1999) ‘Strengthening domestic violence theories: intersections of race, class, sexual orientation and gender’, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 25 (3), 275–289. Bourke, J. (2007) Rape: Sex, Violence, and History, Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard. Coetzee, A. and L. du Toit (2018) ‘Facing the sexual demon of colonial power: decolonising sexual violence in South Africa’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 25 (2), 214–227. Coker, D. (2000) ‘Shifting power to battered women: law, material resources, and poor women of colour’, UC Davis Law Review, 33, 1009–1055. Collins, P.H. (2015) ‘Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas’, Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20. Corrigan, R. (2013) Up Against a Wall: Rape Reform and the Failure of Success, New York: New York University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1997) ‘Intersectionality and identity politics: learning from violence against women of colour’ in M.L. Shanley and U. Narayan (eds), Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives, College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 178–193. Dasgupta, S.D. (1998) ‘Women’s realities: defining violence against women by immigration, race, and class’ in R.K. Bergen (ed.), Issues in Intimate Violence, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 209–219. Davis, A. (1983) Women, Race, and Class, New York: Random House. Dobash, R.E. and R.P. Dobash (1998) Rethinking Violence against Women, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Elinghaus, K. (2009) ‘Biological absorption and genocide: a comparison of indigenous assimilation policies in the United States and Australia’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 4 (1), 59–79. Farris, S.R. (2017) In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fisher, S.K. (1996) ‘Occupation of the womb: forced impregnation as genocide’, Duke Law Journal, 46, 91–133. Flood, D.R. (2012) Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Glenn, E.N. (1999) ‘The social construction and institutionalization of gender and race: an integrative framework’ in M.M. Ferree, J. Lorber and B.B. Hess (eds) Revisioning Gender, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 3–43. Gqola, P.D. (2015) Rape: A South African Nightmare, Auckland Park: MF Books Joburg. Hawkesworth, M. (2006) Globalization and Feminist Activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women And Feminism, Boston: South End. Incite! Women of Color against Violence (ed.) (2006) Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Jiwani, Y. (2005) ‘Walking a tightrope: the many faces of violence in the lives of racialized immigrant girls and young women’, Violence against Women, 11 (7), 846–875. Joachim, J. (1999) ‘Shaping the human rights agenda: the case of violence against women’ in M.K. Meyer and E. Prugl (eds), Gender Politics in Global Governance, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 142–160. Joachim, J. (2007) Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Jones, A. (2010) ‘Genocide and mass violence’ in L. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 127–147. Lerner, G. (1972) Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, New York: Vintage.

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42  Handbook on gender and violence McGuire, D. (2010) At the End of the Dark Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, New York: Knopf. Merry, S.E. (2009) Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective, Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell. Montoya, C. (2013) From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women, New York: Oxford University Press. Montoya, C. (2016) ‘Exploits and exploitations: a micro and macro analysis of the “DSK affair” ’ in A. Hozic and J. True (eds), Scandalous Economics, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 145–164. Montoya, C. and L. Rolandsen Agustín (2014) ‘The othering of domestic violence: the EU and cultural framings of violence against women’, Social Politics, 20 (4), 534–557. Nayak, M. (2015) Who Is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based Asylum and US Immigration Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Opotow, S. (2001) ‘Reconciliation in time of impunity: challenges of social justice’, Social Justice Research, 14, 149–170. Pegoraro, L. (2015) ‘Second-­rate victims: the forced sterilization of indigenous peoples in the USA and Canada’, Settler Colonial Studies, 5 (2), 161–173. Perugini, N. and N. Gordon (2015) The Human Right to Dominate, New York: Oxford University Press. Potter, H. (2008) Battle Cries: Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse, New York: New York University Press. Randall, M. (2010) ‘Sexual assault law, credibility, and “ideal victims”: consent, resistance, and victim blaming’, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 22 (2), 397–433. Razack, S.H. (1998) Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Richie, B. (2000) ‘A black feminist reflection on the antiviolence movement’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 24 (4), 1133–1137. Roberts, D. (1997) Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, New York: Pantheon. Ross, L.J. and R. Solinger (2017) Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, Oakland: University of California Press. Sampaio, A. (2015) Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants: Race, Gender, and Immigration Policy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Shalhoub-­Kevorkian, N. (2000) ‘The efficacy of Israeli law in preventing violence within Palestinian families living in Israel’, International Review of Victimology, 7 (1–3), 47–66. Silliman, J.M., M.G. Fried, L. Ross and E. Gutierrez (2004) Undivided Rights: Women of Colour Organize for Reproductive Justice, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Sokoloff, N. and I. Dupont (2005) ‘Domestic violence at the intersections of race, class, and gender: challenges and contributions to understanding violence against marginalized women in diverse communities’, Violence against Women, 11 (1), 38–64. Solinger, R. (2007) Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America, New York: New York University Press. Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 66–111. Threadcraft, S. (2016) Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, New York: Oxford University Press. Tyner, J.A. (2012) Space, Place, and Violence: Violence and the Embodied Geographies of Race, Sex, and Gender, New York and London: Routledge. Weber, B. (2016) ‘“We must talk about Cologne”: race, gender, and reconfigurations of “Europe” ’, German Politics and Society, 121 (34), 68–86. Weldon, L. (2006) ‘Inclusion, solidarity, and social movements: the global movement against gender violence’, Politics & Gender, 4 (1), 55–74. Young, Iris (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zampas, C. and A. Lamačková (2011) ‘Forced and coercive sterilization of women in Europe’, International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, 114, 163–166.

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4. Intersectionality

Lise Rolandsen Agustín and Emanuela Lombardo

The concept of intersectionality refers to the intersection of gender with inequalities of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age and other systems of domination. Placing power at the core of its analytical scope, intersectionality addresses fundamental concerns about oppression, privilege, and subordination that have consistently animated the work of feminist ­scholars and activists (Collins and Chepp 2013). Intersectionality has become a central concept in gender studies, and an intersectional approach in gender and politics studies has been employed to expose, analyse, and criticize the hegemonies and marginalizations that the interactions of gender with other inequalities produce, as well as to propose more ­inclusive political, legal, and social practices (Kantola and Lombardo 2017). The ideas on which the concept of intersectionality is based emerged from feminist black, lesbian and postcolonial theories of the 1980s which challenged the hierarchies and marginalization between women that white, heterosexual, middle-­class feminist approaches reproduced in their essentialist understanding of the concept of ‘woman’ as a supposedly universal category (Collins 1990; Collins and Chepp 2013; Combahee River Collective 1977; hooks 1981; Lorde 1984; Mohanty 2003). These reflections were key in provoking a fruitful debate within feminist movements about the existence of differences among women and the need to ‘dismantle’ dynamics of domination that feminism itself was reproducing (Lorde 1984). Patricia Hill Collins (1990) theorized the concept of ‘matrix of domination’ to grasp the idea that inequalities of race, gender, class are not separate but interconnected. These debates inspired the coining of the term ‘intersectionality’ in feminist legal studies by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991). In Crenshaw’s analyses, intersectionality refers to the ways in which the intersection of inequalities of gender, race, and class have consequences for and on individual life opportunities (which she calls ‘structural intersectionality’), and how different political and social movements’ strategies focusing on one inequality are not neutral to other inequalities (which she names ‘political intersectionality’). Both concepts opened the way to further analytical developments in gender studies. 43

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44  Handbook on gender and violence The origin of ‘political intersectionality’ is connected to the policy problem of gender violence. Crenshaw presents an analysis of domestic violence in a US town, showing that the white feminist movement on one side and the black anti-­racist movement on the other were blocking the publication of police data on domestic violence to defend the cause of their own specific group, with the result that the problem of gender violence experienced by African American women at the point of intersection between race, gender and class remained unaddressed. The motivation for blocking these data was that, given the high race segregation of districts in US towns, each group of activists was worried that the publication of such data could create problems for their equality cause: white feminists wanting to send the message that domestic violence is a problem that affects all women and not one group in particular; and male-­dominated anti-­racist movements wanting to protect black men from further stigmatization. The political strategies used by each of these groups of activists were detrimental to African American women experiencing gender violence, whose lives were at the intersection of race, gender and class. The intersection is not a mere juxtaposition of inequalities, but produces a new reality of privileges and marginalizations (Weldon 2008). The intersection is dynamic because, depending on the context, one can be a member of the oppressor and/or the oppressed group (Collins 1990). Debates about intersectionality have further contributed to the theorization of inequalities. They have shown that, while every form of inequality has its own dynamics that policymaking should consider (Verloo 2006), inequalities are so profoundly interconnected that gender equality cannot be achieved as long as other inequalities of class, race, ethnicity or sexuality still exist (Verloo 2018; Walby 2009). Sylvia Walby has argued that gender, class, race and ethnicity are intersecting regimes of inequality that cannot be conflated into each other because each of them is a system with its own dynamics, that is, constituted by the domains of economy, polity, violence and civil society. However, she demonstrates that these inequality regimes are co-­evolving and therefore reciprocally affect each other’s developments. For this reason, Mieke Verloo (2018) suggests that the ‘gender+’ equality project needs to consider these co-­evolving inequality regimes if it wants to achieve equality between women and men. Research has also addressed the institutionalization of intersectionality or how institutions have addressed inequalities and their intersections (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Krizsan et al. 2012). This research was inspired by Ange-­Marie Hancock’s (2007) distinctions between unitary institutional approaches (that address one inequality as the most relevant), multiple approaches (that treat several inequalities as equally relevant), and

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Intersectionality  ­45 intersectional approaches (addressing intersections among inequalities). The type of institutionalization of inequalities that are given a hegemonic role in a specific context matters for the way in which institutions address other inequalities, as Myra Marx Ferree (2009) has illustrated in the case of race in the United States and class in Germany, showing how these historically dominant inequalities in their respective contexts have shaped the institutionalization of gender inequalities. Hancock has also exposed the problems of competition that multiple additive models of inequalities can generate for civil society groups interacting with institutions through the expression of ‘oppression Olympics’ (2007, p. 68), which describes the competition of civil society groups for the title of being the most oppressed to get attention and resources from dominant groups. Instead, policymaking and social movement initiatives that have experimented with intersectional participatory approaches, despite their challenging application, have shown democratization potential for including different voices and demands (Alonso and Arnaut 2017; Cruells and Planas 2013; Cruells and Ruiz 2014; Lombardo and Rolandsen Coll-­ Agustín 2012; Martínez-­Palacios 2016). Intersectionality is important for inclusion and democracy, and the latter emerges from processes of public contestation. It is therefore relevant to think of intersectionality not only in terms of domination but also of empowerment. The work of black feminist thinker Patricia Hill Collins (1990) regarding the development of cultures of resistance within racially oppressed communities already showed that domination comes with resistance. Agency is not only gendered but intersected by gender, class, sexuality and race (Madhok et al. 2013). Addressing gender-­based violence from intersectional approaches that are aware of the dynamics of domination and empowerment helps reveal policymaking discourses and practices of stigmatization and culturalization that disempower women’s agency. The remainder of this chapter is organized into three further sections. The first section addresses intersectionality in policies on gender-­based violence, policies discussing target groups, and policymaking content and process. The second section focuses on challenging debates concerning intersectionality and gender-­ based violence policies, such as those on stigmatization and culturalization. A concluding section summarizes the main trends, and gestures at future lines of research.

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46  Handbook on gender and violence

INTERSECTIONALITY IN POLICIES ON GENDER-­ BASED VIOLENCE: TARGET GROUPS, POLICY CONTENT, AND POLICYMAKING PROCESSES In the field of gender-­based violence research, intersectional perspectives have emphasized characteristics of victims. This goes beyond the mere identification of women as the main group affected by different forms of gender-­based violence in order to address other categories of inequality. Likewise, the literature has addressed policy responses to the problems of gender-­based violence by focusing on the ways in which policies address these intersectional particularities, and thus attend to the needs of the groups of victims (or not) and give adequate access to support services, for example, or in counteracting tendencies towards victims not being met with adequate support from the justice system. Whereas the demand for ‘women’s rights as human rights’ focuses on gender-­based violence as a universal problem, an intersectional perspective suggests combining this with the awareness that women experience violence in different ways, and that policies need to attend to this fact in order to be efficient (Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2013; Nixon and Humphreys 2010; Sokoloff and Dupont 2005). Typically, race and gender have been highlighted as important intersecting categories within the field of gender-­based violence. Sexuality, ethnicity, and age can be added to the list, whereas there has been less focus on class (Hearn et al. 2016; Sokoloff and Dupont 2005). By not recognizing these differences, we ‘risk further excluding vulnerable women’ (Nixon and Humphreys 2010, p. 150). Poverty and lack of resources, for instance, may influence the possibilities of escaping a violent relationship, especially in contexts in which public policies do not support battered women through economic means by taking into account the potential loss of income that occurs when victims leave a violent breadwinner or experience economic hardship of living only with one salary. Floya Anthias notes that class is typically underemphasized in the literature on gender-­based violence, although different forms of violence are: ‘shared by women from working class backgrounds in particular who are most vulnerable to forms of economic exploitation, domestic violence and work in the sex industry or trade’ (2014, p. 166). Age is a factor not only in specific forms of gender-­ based violence, such as dating violence among teens, but also in relation to sexual harassment in the workplace, where young women with a loose or non-­permanent relation to the labour market are especially vulnerable (Borchorst and Rolandsen Agustín 2017). Sexuality also comes to the fore in relation to sexual harassment when homophobia is expressed through the ‘punishment’ of women as well as homosexual men when they are

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Intersectionality  ­47 perceived as not conforming to the dominant way of ‘doing gender’, for instance in male-­dominated workplaces (McLaughlin et al. 2012). The intersection between ethnicity and gender is emphasized in specific forms of violence. A comparative analysis of Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK shows that intersectional approaches to gender-­based violence differ across country contexts. Policies are typically degendered and intersectionality is largely silenced, except for the relation between gender and ethnicity in cases such as female genital mutilation and ‘honour crimes’. However, differences are emphasized in the characterization of hyper-­visibility of gender (Sweden), hyper-­visibility of the gender/ethnicity intersection (the Netherlands), and silencing (UK), respectively (Hearn et al. 2016). Intersectionality also comes to the fore in the ways in which minority women may be discriminated against within their own communities (on the basis of sexism) as well as in the majority society (on the basis of racism) (Kasturirangan et al. 2004). The intersection of gender with ethnicity is also addressed in analyses of migrant women as a vulnerable group because of their possible dependency on a (violent) partner for secure residency or citizenship status: being in a vulnerable situation vis-­ à-vis citizenship rights may pose serious obstacles for the possibilities of escaping the violent relationship without risking the future in the country of residence (see for instance Chiu 2017). Not only international migrants but also internally displaced women are particularly exposed to violence as a consequence of the intersection between gender, age and housing situation. Carmen H. Logie et al. (2017) show how internally displaced young women living in tents in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 were particularly exposed to sexual violence and with few possibilities of efficient help from the authorities. Similar concerns have been raised in relation to refugee camps following the ‘long summer of migration’ in Europe in 2015 (see, for instance, Freedman 2016). In addition, discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity is also found in several studies when looking at the ways in which victims of gender-­based violence, for example rape, are perceived and received by police authorities or the legal system (see for instance Leung 2017). This problem extends beyond the group of migrant women and spans various intersections: The lack of adequate institutional support in the form of social services and public housing as well as the intrusions and coercive controls by the state and its agencies (e.g., welfare) is another level of violence experienced by battered women, which occur in ways that are racialized as well as gendered and classed. (Sokoloff and Dupont 2005, p. 44)

From a policy perspective, research has focused on assessing the quality of public policies, especially by directing attention to the ways in which

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48  Handbook on gender and violence an intersectional approach can potentially improve policy solutions and measures within the field of gender-­based violence. In other words, good intersectional analysis makes policies more inclusive, and therefore better and more efficient in terms of targeting social problems. This concerns the content of the policies, the decision-­making processes through which they are formulated, and the actors engaged in the policy implementation. Hence a series of quality criteria has been developed by researchers, related to the content of the policies. Among these, ‘genderedness’ and structure feature as key organizing concepts, along with intersectionality (Krizsan and Lombardo 2013). ‘Genderedness’ relates to the ways in which a policy explicitly addresses gender and gender equality (as a way to directly target problems of inequality), while the structural dimension refers to the transformative potential of the policy, suggesting that the outcome of the policy implementation should address structural inequalities in order to be efficient in creating social change. In the case of gender-­based violence this means comprehending that the problem is based on ‘systematic male domination over women and historical power inequalities between the sexes’ (Krizsan and Lombardo 2013, p. 83). Assessing intersectionality as a quality criterion for gender equality policies in general and gender-­based violence policies in particular entails attending to the way in which inequalities are referenced in the policy texts. This concerns the explicit mention of inequalities and the question of which inequalities are included in the particular perception of intersecting dynamics addressed in the policy. We refer to this quality criterion as ‘inclusiveness’. However, including a long list of inequalities is not an aim in itself; it may reflect a certain degree of conscious attention given to the diversity of target groups, but it speaks little of the intersectional awareness of policymakers. Based on an empirical analysis of British policies on violence against women, Sofia Strid et al. (2013) argue that inclusion of intersectional wordings or lists of categories does not necessarily equal ‘sensitivity to intersectionality’; what matters is how the policy outcome addresses different groups of women, independent of whether or not they have been explicitly mentioned in the text. Thus, there is an important distinction to be made between (mere) visibility and (actual) inclusion: Visibility in the form of voice in the policymaking processes and mechanisms is more important than merely naming inequality grounds. Naming entails observational statements whereas voice entails substantive recognition of intersectionality, which has the potential to influence policy output. (Strid et al. 2013, pp. 574–575)

Anette Borchorst (2008) has also questioned whether genderedness of policies is necessarily a qualitative criterion, and instead suggests consider-

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Intersectionality  ­49 ing (positive) gendered effects. Her study gives the example of childcare policies, which may or may not mention gender equality as an aim but which may have positive gendered effects. Besides, what is relevant in terms of implementation of gender-­based violence policies from an intersectionality perspective, for example in judicial litigation, is the extent to which the interaction of different inequalities is actually recognized as a basis to give just satisfaction to a discrimination, as the study by La Barbera and Cruells (2019) shows. Their research concerns the Beauty Solomon v. Spain case on gender-­based violence, in which the European Court of Human Rights recognized ‘vulnerability’ due to class, race, and gender inequalities. It is relevant to consider the ways in which the relation between the inequalities is articulated in the policy text, whether as separate, added, or mutually ­constitutive – ­where the latter would represent a truly in-­depth approach to intersectional dynamics. Importantly, a qualitative treatment of intersectionality in policymaking should address not only vulnerability but also privilege as the other side of domination. Thus, it is pertinent to ask about the extent to which policies challenge privilege. Finally, addressing intersectionality carries with it a risk of stigmatization, which a good intersectional policy should avoid (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2012); this is what Verloo (2013, p.  901) labels a ‘reactive’ approach to addressing ‘interference between inequalities’ (see also discussion on stigmatization below). Verloo further distinguishes three forms of demarginalization as an approach: pragmatic (in other words, how to do intersectionality within existing policies); structural (as described above); and procedural. These are explored in the following section. Empirical analyses focusing on policy content show that intersectionality as a policy approach is still ‘embryonic’: it is increasingly present in politics but still not sufficiently developed, thus addressing the categories of inequality separately (rather than treating them as mutually constitutive). This is the case of European Union (EU) policies on gender-­based violence, which furthermore tend to marginalize gender in policies when more inequality categories are brought into the equation. In other words, the criteria of inclusiveness and genderedness may be at odds with each other in empirical findings (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2012). Intersectionality seems to be more present, and better articulated, when policies cut across different legislative fields such as, for example, migration and gender equality. However, this also implies that attention to intersectionality is harder to achieve in single issue areas, which domestic violence is often considered to be in policymaking. The intersectional dynamics of such a policy area are apparently more difficult to perceive to policymakers, and it requires the explicit interconnection of two policy

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50  Handbook on gender and violence fields (and at other times two sections of policymaking institutions) for intersectional concerns to become sufficiently visible. Intersectionality is not considered immediately relevant to domestic violence, except when it is explicitly connected to other legislative fields for instance due to specific events, such as strong migration flows (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2016). As mentioned, the quality of gender equality policies relates both to content and to ­process – f­ or example, the role of actors such as women’s rights advocates in policymaking (Krizsan and Lombardo 2013). Civil society groups capable of voicing the demands of intersectional constituencies, for example groups representing a diversity of inequalities, should be consulted during the policymaking process and included in the implementation phase. Elsewhere we have referred to this as ‘inclusive policy-­making’ (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2012). Such an approach links the empowerment of civil society groups with an ambition to create better-­quality policies: ‘inclusive policy processes and participatory implementation processes, which give political authority to women, not only contribute to better quality of the policy content but also are a quality element per se’ (Krizsan and Lombardo 2013, p. 85). A study on Portuguese practices with participatory measures to include civil society in policymaking, with examples of policies on female genital mutilation, shows how intersectionality in practice enhances the quality of both process (democratization) and content (intersectional and structural). Specifically, an inter-­sectoral working group was set up with civil society representatives, including migrants’ associations. The initiative presented some limitations in terms of underused civil society knowledge, lack of continuity and imbalanced composition of the group, but it also ensured ‘ownership over policies on matters [the associations] work on, and to democratise to some extent policy-­making processes by ensuring that their needs and priorities are covered in policy measures’ (Alonso and Arnaut 2017, p. 177). In a similar vein, an intersectional perspective would also require policymakers to be aware of their own biases and subsequent invisibilities, omissions and/or exclusions; such awareness could be enhanced by introducing ‘intersectionality impact assessment’ as a regular part of the policymaking process (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2012). This would mandate an assessment of the relevance of different inequalities by policy area rather than deciding a priori which inequalities to take into account (Krizsan and Lombardo 2013). However, the aspects of intersectionality as part of the process, as compared to the content, of policies and policymaking have been less researched, and as such remain at a normative level of recommendations rather than actual empirical knowledge, for

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Intersectionality  ­51 instance of obstacles, resistance and pitfalls in such processes. Along with the theoretical discussions, which have proliferated and deepened, there is a need for more focus on how intersectionality works in practice (Strid et al. 2013).

CHALLENGING DEBATES: THE RISK OF STIGMATIZATION AND CULTURALIZATION Integrating an intersectional perspective in policies carries with it a risk of stigmatization: it may be important to highlight the particular vulnerability of specific groups of women on the basis of a sound analysis of their conditions and experiences; but the effect can be a generalization of entire groups that end up stigmatizing them, at times because they resonate with common stereotypes already present in society (Bassel and Emejulu 2017). Policies on gender-­based violence in themselves can also be stigmatic if the labelling of groups as vulnerable is based merely on the tendency to enumerate long lists of inequalities in an effort to respond to demand for attention to diversity without carefully considering the implications of the intersecting relations between different inequalities. Avoiding the risk of stigmatization is not only relevant to policymakers but also to the research community: ‘Studies that compare the behaviors of minority women in abusive relationships to behavioral norms based on the experiences of White women may imply that minority group members are deviant’ (Kasturirangan et al. 2004, p. 327). In a Western context we see an increased tendency towards addressing violence against minority women separate from majority women in a policy development where minority forms of violence are culturalized, whereas majority forms are not: ‘[the] culturalization of violence serves to further marginalize an already vulnerable group. It posits “other” women as perennial victims and men as the “barbaric other” ’ (Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2013, p.  539). This is a form of stigmatization of a particular group. It leads to violence being associated with minority cultures, and ignored or downplayed within the majority culture (de los Reyes 2003; Kantola 2010; Sokoloff and Dupont 2005). This dynamic speaks to processes of stereotyping and othering since minority groups are considered to be homogeneous and are frequently constructed through prejudices based on culture. Within the field of gender-­based violence studies, culturalization is manifested by focusing predominantly or exclusively on specific forms of violence, which are related to specific cultural or ethnic groups on the one hand, and by explaining violence solely with reference to culture and/or ethnicity on the other, thereby ignoring

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52  Handbook on gender and violence ­ nderlying structural gender inequalities based on power asymmetries u (Hearn et al. 2016; Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2013; Roggeband and Verloo 2007; Rolandsen Agustín 2013). Thus, ‘culturalization is a problem when culture becomes the only story, the lack of attention to other problem representations is apparent, and the focus is exclusively on particular groups without offering real solutions to their problems’ (Rolandsen Agustín 2013, p. 155). The normative content of the discussion concerning intersectionality comes to the fore in distinctions between inclusionary and exclusionary forms. Inclusionary intersectionality focuses on the intersection between different inequalities with the aim of making injustices visible and counteracting multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. Exclusionary intersectionality, on the other hand, emphasizes intersecting inequalities with the (implicit or explicit) aim of creating a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by arguing, for instance, that migrant groups are inherently more violent than others. Culturalization is, in this sense, a form of exclusionary intersectionality whereby violent culture is attributed to the ‘other’ (Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2013; Rolandsen Agustín 2013; Siim and Christensen 2010). However, the distinction can be questioned, since only inclusionary intersectionality contains the element of empowerment, which is an integral part of the idea of intersectionality as it was conceptualized in its origins. In other words, the normative element of intersectionality in terms of aiming for justice and equality is lost in exclusionary intersectionality, which may then become counterproductive in the theoretization of inequalities even though empirical cases, for instance in right-­wing politics, do show evidence of other uses of the interrelated dynamics of inequalities. Turning to empirical cases of culturalization and stigmatization, part of the research on intersectionality has focused on the European context. Lépinard (2014) argues that the ways in which immigration, ethnicity, religion and class intersect in the European debate on forms of violence that are ­often – ­but of course not ­exclusively – ­related to Muslim minorities, such as female genital mutilation and forced marriages, have led to the ‘racialization of Muslim religious identities’. Focusing on gender equality policies in the Netherlands, Roggeband and Verloo identify a shift towards an ‘almost exclusive focus on migrant women or women from ethnic minorities’ (2007, p.  272), problematizing Muslim culture in general. Policies have extended the understanding of the problems of migrant women, from individual and socio-­economic causes to cultural causes. The latter is articulated in policies as a culture that is gender unequal and legitimizes violence. Through these policy processes a division between the ‘autochthonous us’ (natives) and the ‘allochthonous them’ (foreigners)

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Intersectionality  ­53 is constructed, where both groups are treated as internally homogeneous and gender equality policies focus primarily on the latter, i.e., Muslim women. As a trait of the culturalization processes, social and economic integration has become dependent on cultural integration, and not the other way around (as used to be the case) (Roggeband and Verloo 2007). At the EU level, a similar division is created between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by attributing specific forms of violence as attributes of minority cultures, on the one hand, and addressing gender-­based violence as an outsider problem by focusing particularly on the situation in non-­EU countries on the other (Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2013). Intersectional analyses of EU gender-­based violence policies give evidence of processes of gendering, degendering, and culturalization. EU gender violence policy focuses on certain categories of inequality, such as gender/ethnicity and gender/­citizenship status, silencing inequalities of class and sexuality that are equally relevant in gender violence policies. Degendering appears in EU policy documents when other inequalities besides gender are discussed (‘the elderly’ and ‘the disabled’, for example, become degendered subjects). Stigmatization is related to culturalization: when policies on gender violence consider violence as specific to some ethnic group, and are therefore framed as cultural, they risk stigmatizing ethnic minority groups, such as migrant Muslim women. However, it is important to bear in mind the role of women’s agency and empowerment; transnational mobilization of the minoritized is relevant to make the diverse claims of women heard in the EU political arena and contribute to policy change (Rolandsen Agustín 2013). Moving beyond Europe, Kasturirangan et al. (2004) study the US context and argue that economic inequalities should not be ignored as an explanation when studying gender-­based violence because it results in overemphasizing the importance of culture in minority communities. In other words, the reason we find higher levels of gender-­based violence in some groups could be explained by economic factors rather than culture. The authors also raise the important question of how we identify and define ‘difference’, and raise a critique regarding the interchangeable use of race, ethnicity and culture. Intersectional approaches to gender-­based violence are by no means arguing that differences among women should be ignored or that policies should not attend to the particular needs and problems of particular groups of women. On the contrary, intersectional approaches precisely aim to uncover and make visible the ways in which intersecting factors such as gender, class and ethnicity influence different experiences with violence. Avoiding the risk of stigmatization through culturalization does not equate to ignoring all forms of violence within minority as well as

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54  Handbook on gender and violence majority groups, with reference to ‘cultural relativism’. The aim should be to strike a balance between recognizing intersectional differences and acknowledging the universality of violence forms as based on structural gender inequalities and power asymmetries (Montoya and Rolandsen Agustín 2013; Sokoloff and Dupont 2005). Sokoloff and Dupont argue that ‘we must address how different communities’ cultural experiences of violence are mediated through structural forms of oppression, such as racism, colonialism, economic exploitation, heterosexism, and the like’ (2005, p. 45). Gender-­based violence should be adequately addressed in all its forms without overemphasizing the role of culture and instead focusing on the root causes, leading to efficient policy responses. In other words, culturalization ‘is not only problematic in the way minority communities are represented, it has also concrete consequences for the kind of policies that are elaborated to address violence in minority communities, which may lead to insufficient measures to address this violence and to support victims’ (Withaeckx 2011). Erica Burman et al. (2004) provide an example of such inefficient measures, and raise the problems inherent in striking the balance between particularities and universality. Analysing policy responses to gender-­ based violence in the UK context, Burman et al. argue that ethnic minority women are caught between discourses that attribute violence to ­culture – ­with the consequence that domestic violence services do not address it because of misunderstood respect for ‘cultural privacy’ – and discourses that characterize entire communities as inherently violent, resulting in minority women rejecting the services. In addition, cultural stereotyping among service providers can lead to the erroneous expectation that violence would be taken care of within the communities and that there would, consequently, not be any need for the service providers to approach the victims. All of these perspectives end up excluding women from service provision: ‘There are key challenges in portraying the needs and positions of the minoritized women in relation to domestic violence provision without reproducing representations of minoritized communities as “deficient” ’ (Burman et al. 2004, p. 335). Kasturirangan et al. (2004) similarly argue that women may reject services either because they risk exclusion from their community or because they do not want to buy into or reinforce prevailing stereotypes regarding the nexus between culture and violence. The conclusion in terms of addressing these problems is to attend to structural inequalities related to gender, race and class and refrain from ‘“culture-­blaming” minoritized cultures’ (Burman et al. 2004, p. 335). The question then is how to apply intersectional approaches to policymaking in ways that challenge processes of stigmatization and reduce the risk of stigmatization as an outcome. According to Verloo (2013),

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Intersectionality  ­55 exposing the ways in which particular people (e.g. Muslim women) are stigmatized in policymaking is one way of doing it. Adopting pragmatic approaches to intersect policies, for instance by crossing existing legislation, is another. As Margaret Satterthwaite (2004) explains, addressing the problems of migrant women workers does not necessarily require the adoption of new intersectional legislation, but rather the pragmatic intersectional use of existing legislation: this means, for example, crossing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) with the Migrant Workers Convention (MWC). Also, mainstreaming equality in all policy processes that fix inequalities can contribute to apply intersectionality in policies. Similarly, Bacchi (2017, p. 34) argues that applying intersectionality in public policies implies observing the interaction between social dynamics such as ‘gendering, racializing, heteronorming, disabling and so on’. Finally, Verloo (2013) proposes participatory democracy mechanisms that give voice to a variety of subjects in policymaking processes, in parallel to what we have labelled inclusive policymaking above. Strid et al. (2013) underline that we must look at the implementation of policies before judging whether or not we can talk about stigmatization; the policy content in itself is not enough to assess it. Kasturirangan et al. (2004) propose that ensuring diverse cultural competences among the staff of service providers and promoting change from within community groups would be ways to attend to intersecting dynamics without falling into the trap of stigmatization. There is a need for ‘culturally specific services’ as well as ‘mainstream services’, which resonates well with the efforts to strike a balance between intersectionality and universality, as explained above (Burman et al. 2004). However, in Burman et al.’s analysis this ‘both/and’ approach relates especially to the dynamic between minority and majority society: Minoritized women may be reluctant to approach culturally specific services either out of fears of compromises of confidentiality, or because those services fail to provide an appropriate context in which to raise the specific and controversial issue of domestic violence. Equally they may be reluctant to approach mainstream domestic violence agencies for fear of encountering racism, or further fuelling racism towards their particular community by their disclosure. (Burman et al. 2004, p. 351)

Thus, addressing intersecting inequalities within the field of gender-­based violence in practice requires complex policy responses, not least in the ways in which policies are implemented in practice.

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56  Handbook on gender and violence

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDAS This chapter has explored the concept of intersectionality in relation to gender-­based violence. Applying an intersectional approach to the study of gender-­based violence policies contributes to expose power dynamics, in particular the domination and subordination that intersecting systems of inequalities produce and their effects on people and policymaking. The chapter has provided an intersectional perspective on the ways in which policymaking treats target groups of gender-­based violence, exposing the lack of attention to perpetrators, the main inequality categories intersected in policymaking, and showing the few works existing on class. It has focused on the quality of policymaking process and content from an intersectional approach, pointing at inclusiveness as a key feature of intersectional policy approaches. It has discussed approaches for applying intersectionality in policymaking that attempt to centre people who experience intersecting inequalities. Related to this, the chapter has addressed challenging debates concerning the risks of stigmatization and culturalization that policy approaches that deal with multiple inequalities are not immune to. Intersectional approaches to the study of gender-­based violence have a number of limitations too. First, they share with other intersectionality studies the methodological challenge and difficulties of operationalization of intersectional approaches (Kantola and Lombardo 2017). For instance, McCall (2005) shows that most methodological approaches to studying intersectionality are ‘intra-­categorical’, which means they address intersections within people of the same social group (for example, Crenshaw’s case of African American women) rather than addressing intersections between different social groups. Weldon (2008) points out that researchers of intersectionality could overlook the autonomous effects of each inequality on the phenomenon studied. Second, political and analytic priorities in intersectionality studies are influenced by the positionality of researchers, and the underrepresentation of women of colour in European intersectionality studies is problematic for the intersectionality project, as Mügge et al. (2018) argue. Related to this point, another limitation is that intersectionality studies are, as mentioned, not immune to the disempowering risks of stigmatization and culturalization: this calls for analysts to apply reflexivity to their own intersecting race, gender, class, sexuality and colonial biases (Bacchi 2009, 2017). Future research agendas for the application of intersectionality within the field of gender-­based violence point to bridging the gap between analyses of policy formulation and policy implementation. Whereas the

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Intersectionality  ­57 focus has been primarily on intersectional studies of policy content and to some extent policymaking ­processes – ­with attention to the inclusion of stakeholders, for ­example – ­less research has been conducted on the application of intersectional approaches in the stages of policy implementation. This concerns, for instance, the ways in which victims are attended to and perceived when denouncing cases of gender-­based violence; whereas we do have some knowledge on biased responses on the ground of gender, for instance within the police and the judiciary system, further knowledge on intersectional dynamics is needed. The same holds true for service providers, whether in the health care system or among other authorities, for example within the field of migration. Further, the primary focus has been on victims in intersectional research on gender-­based violence so far. As mentioned above, there is a lack of attention to perpetrators, for example in relation to intersectional perspectives on masculinities. Finally, recent studies also call for an increased attention to the educational perspective on gender-­based violence by addressing the need for teaching young people about equality, diversity and gender justice in an effort to prevent such violence. These measures likewise require an intersectional approach in order to recognize that violence cannot be understood and prevented without taking into account the ways in which inequalities intersect, on the one hand, and by using the intersectionality framework to ‘empower students as critical thinkers and agents of change’ on the other (McQueeney 2016, p.  1463). Thus, future studies should analyse the application of intersectional approaches in gender-­based violence at the stage of policy implementation as well as developing intersectional educational practices that have the potential to deeply transform existing power inequalities.

REFERENCES Alonso, A. and C. Arnaut (2017) ‘Democratising intersectionality? Participatory structures and equality policies in Portugal’, Investigaciones Feministas, 8 (1), 165–181. Anthias, F. (2014) ‘The intersections of class, gender, sexuality and “race”: the political economy of gendered violence’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 27 (2), 153–171. Bacchi, C. (2009) ‘The issue of intentionality in frame theory: the need for reflexive framing’ in E. Lombardo, P. Meier and M. Verloo (eds), The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking, London: Routledge, pp. 19–35. Bacchi, C. (2017) ‘Policies as gendering practices: re-­viewing categorical distinctions’, Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 38 (1), 20–41. Bassel, L. and A. Emejulu (2017) The Politics of Survival: Minority Women, Activism and Austerity in France and Britain, Bristol: Policy Press. Borchorst, A. (2008) ‘Woman-­friendly policy paradoxes? Childcare policies and gender equality visions in Scandinavia’ in K. Melby, C.C. Wetterberg and A.-B. Ravn (eds)

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58  Handbook on gender and violence Gender Equality and Welfare Politics in Scandinavia: The Limits of Political Ambition?, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 27–42. Borchorst, A. and L. Rolandsen Agustín (2017) Seksuel chikane på arbejdspladsen: Faglige, politiske og retlige spor, Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. Burman, E., S.L. Smailes and K. Chantler (2004) ‘“Culture” as a barrier to service provision and delivery’, Critical Social Policy, 24 (3), 332–357. Chiu, T.Y. (2017) ‘Marriage migration as a multifaceted system: the intersectionality of intimate partner violence in cross-­border marriages’, Violence Against Women, 23 (11), 1293–1313. Combahee River Collective (1977) ‘A black feminist statement’ in B. Guy-­Sheftall (ed.) Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, New York: New Press, pp. 232–240. Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’ in K. Bartlett and R. Kennedy (eds) Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, San Francisco: Westview, pp. 57–80. Cruells, M. and G. Coll-­Planas (2013) ‘Challenging equality policies: the emergence of the LGBT perspective’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20 (2), 122–137. Cruells, M. and S. Ruiz (2014) ‘Political intersectionality within the Spanish Indignados social movement’, Intersectionality and Social Change: Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 37, 3–25. De los Reyes, P. (2003) ‘Patriarkala enklaver eller ingemansland?’, Integrationsverkets skriftserie IV, Integrationsverket. Ferree, M.M. (2009) ‘Inequality, intersectionality and the politics of discourse: framing feminist alliances’ in E. Lombardo, P. Meier and M. Verloo (eds) The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking, London: Routledge, pp. 86–104. Freedman, J. (2016) ‘Sexual and gender-­based violence against refugee women: a hidden aspect of the refugee “crisis” ’, Reproductive Health Matters, 24, 18–26. Hancock, A.M. (2007) ‘When multiplication doesn’t equal quick addition: examining intersectionality as a research paradigm’, Perspectives on Politics, 5 (1), 63–79. Hearn, J., S. Strid, L. Husu and M. Verloo (2016) ‘Interrogating violence against women and state violence policy: gendered intersectionalities and the quality of policy in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK’, Current Sociology, 64 (4), 551–567. Hill Collins, P. (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Boston: Unwin Hyman. Hill Collins, P. and V. Chepp (2013) ‘Intersectionality’ in G. Waylen, K. Celis, J. Kantola and L. Weldon (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57–87. hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, Boston: South End Press. Kantola, J. (2010) Gender and the European Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kantola, J. and E. Lombardo (2017) Gender and Political Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Kantola, J. and K. Nousiainen (2009) ‘Institutionalising intersectionality in Europe: introducing the theme’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (4), 459–477. Kasturirangan, A., S.K. Sandhya and S. Riger (2004) ‘The impact of culture and minority status on women’s experience of domestic violence’, Trauma, Violence and Abuse, 5 (4), 318–332. Krizsan, A. and E. Lombardo (2013) ‘The quality of gender equality policies: a discursive approach’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20 (1), 77–92. Krizsan, A., H. Skjeie and J. Squires (eds) (2012) Institutionalizing Intersectionality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. La Barbera, M. and M. Cruells López (2019) ‘Towards the implementation of intersectionality in the European multilevel legal praxis: B. S. v Spain’, Law and Society Review, 53 (4), DOI:10.1111/lasr.12435.

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Intersectionality  ­59 Lépinard, É. (2014) ‘Impossible intersectionality? French feminists and the struggle for inclusion’, Politics and Gender, 10 (1), 124–130. Leung, L.-C. (2017) ‘Intersectional challenges: marginalization of ethnic minority sexual assault survivors in Hong Kong’, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 32 (2), 217–229. Logie, C.H., C.A. Daniel, U. Ahmed and R. Lash (2017) ‘“Life under the tent is not safe, especially for young women”: understanding intersectional violence among internally displaced youth in Leogane, Haiti’, Global Health Action, 10 (2), 14–22. Lombardo, E. and L. Rolandsen Agustín (2012) ‘Framing gender intersections in the European Union: what implications for the quality of intersectionality in policies?’, Social Politics, 19 (4), 482–512. Lombardo, E. and L. Rolandsen Agustín (2016) ‘Intersectionality in European Union policymaking: the case of gender-­based violence’, Politics, 36, 364–373. Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Madhok, S., A. Phillips and K. Wilson (eds) (2013) Gender, Agency and Coercion, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Martinez-­Palacios, J. (2016) ‘Equality and diversity in democracy: how can we democratize inclusively?’, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 35 (5–6), 350–363. McCall, L. (2005) ‘The complexity of intersectionality’, Signs, 30 (3), 1771–1800. McLaughlin, H., C. Uggen and A. Blackstone (2012) ‘Sexual harassment, workplace authority, and the paradox of power’, American Sociological Review, 77 (4), 625–647. McQueeney, K. (2016) ‘Teaching domestic violence in the new millennium: intersectionality as a framework for social change’, Violence Against Women, 22 (12), 1463–1475. Mohanty, C.T. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Montoya, C. and L. Rolandsen Agustín (2013) ‘The othering of domestic violence: the EU and cultural framings of violence against women’, Social Politics, 20 (4), 534–557. Mügge, L., C. Montoya, A. Emejulu and L. Weldon (2018) Intersectionality and the politics of knowledge production’, European Journal of Politics and Gender, 1 (1–2), 17–36. Nixon, J. and C. Humphreys (2010) ‘Marshalling the evidence’, Social Politics, 17 (2), 137–158. Roggeband, C. and M. Verloo (2007) ‘Dutch women are liberated, migrant women are a problem’, Social Policy and Administration, 41 (3), 271–288. Rolandsen Agustín, L. (2013) Gender Equality, Intersectionality, and Diversity in Europe, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Satterthwaite, M. (2004) ‘Women migrants’ rights under international human rights law’, Feminist Review, 77, 167–171. Siim, B. and A.-D. Christensen (2010) ‘Citizenship and politics of belonging: inclusionary and exclusionary framings of gender and ethnicity’, Kvinder, Køn and Forskning, 19 (2–3), 8–18. Sokoloff, N.J. and I. Dupont (2005) ‘Domestic violence at the intersections of race, class, and gender challenges and contributions to understanding violence against marginalized women in diverse communities’, Violence Against Women, 11 (1), 38–64. Strid, S., S. Walby and J. Armstrong (2013) ‘Intersectionality and multiple inequalities: visibility in British policy on violence against women’, Social Politics, 20 (4), 558–581. Verloo, M. (2006) ‘Multiple inequalities, intersectionality and the European Union’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13 (3), 211–228. Verloo, M. (2013) ‘Intersectional and cross-­movement politics and policies: reflections on current practices and debates’, Signs, 38 (4), 893–915. Verloo, M. (ed.) (2018) Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe, London: Routledge. Walby, S. (2009) Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities, London: Sage. Weldon, L. (2008) ‘Intersectionality’ in G. Goertz and A. Mazur (eds) Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 193–218.

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60  Handbook on gender and violence Withaeckx, S. (2011) ‘(De)culturalising honour-­ related violence in the migration context’. Paper presented at the 2nd European Conference on Politics and Gender, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

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5. Sexualities

Jamie J. Hagen

Sexuality studies scholarship has made significant contributions to how researchers understand violence, along with why gender matters when responding to this violence. Studying sexuality focuses attention on the daily lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals, illuminating how gendered norms about sexuality intersect with the family, law, religion and the state. The tools that sexuality scholars use to interrogate how sex and gender matter to LGBTQ individuals are important in the effort to understand how gendered power is used to regulate everyone. Sexuality is also a useful framework to observe how neoliberal ideas of freedom and progress are imagined and measured by non-­governmental organizations (NGOs), states and individuals. Questions that surface when researching sexuality as it relates to gender and violence include: Which queer and trans bodies are seen to be in need of protecting?1 What does freedom and security look like for LGBTQ individuals? How does cisprivilege limit current work in the NGO sector to analyze and respond to gendered violence?2 How does considering sexuality cause us to reframe what we understand gendered violence to be? Which sexualities are viewed to be deviant and in need of correction, and in which contexts? Here I write about the debates in sexuality studies that center what Paul Amar articulates as ‘security-­sector struggles to discipline dangers and desires’, and with the recognition that sexuality cannot be separated from gender, race and class when it comes to understanding how power and privilege operate (2013, p. 17). This chapter reviews the main threads of sexuality studies scholarship in order to render visible homophobia as a form of violence, explore 1   Trans is a term used to include those who are transgender but also those who prefer the broader category trans. 2   Cisprivilege is the privilege that cisgender people, or people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, experience.

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62  Handbook on gender and violence the intersection of sexuality studies with security studies, and consider how militarized masculinities and essentialized femininities are a part of socially perpetuated gender norms. Following this overview of the current sexuality studies research, the chapter narrows in on four unfolding debates in sexuality studies: debates about transnational LGBTQ rights; debates about trans inclusion in sexuality studies; debates about decolonial critique of the field; and finally debates about how queer theory challenges key tenets of global politics. This chapter makes clear the value of researching questions about sexuality in relation to different forms of gendered violence.

OVERVIEW OF EXISTING WORK There are three central threads of scholarship within the queer turn concerning violence in global politics: recognizing homophobia as a form of violence; interrogating the way that sexualities matter to security studies; and examining how heteronormative assumptions about masculinities and femininities result in gendered violence targeting LGBTQ individuals. To begin, it is important to understand what queer means as well as what LGBTQ means. Queer is used by some people who claim the term as an identity related to a sex or gender category. Queering is also a methodology of asking questions about established norms, with attention to how sexuality and gender matter to power, privilege and hierarchy in politics. Both uses of queer are examined here in relation to the study of violence, sexuality and (in)security. LGBTQ is an abbreviation used to identify members of a community whose identities are non-­normative because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or both. Lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals, for example, are people whose sexuality is not heterosexual because of who they are attracted to; but members of this community may also have non-­normative gender identities, i.e. a transgender lesbian woman. Trans or queer individuals may also be in heterosexual relationships, but because of their gender identities remain a part of the LGBTQ community. Because of these differences, it is important to resist making blanket assumptions about the sexual desires or gender identities of those who identify as members of the LGBTQ community. Queer theory reminds us that there is nothing biological or constant about sexuality. LGBTQ sexualities reveal the instability of the categories of male and female, masculine and feminine. Transgender and intersex individuals, as well as those who identify as gender-­fluid or non-­binary, all challenge ideas about a binary gender ordering. For example, some intersex activists do not believe their bodies need to be ‘corrected’ through

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Sexualities  ­63 invasive, harmful and expensive medical interventions to conform to either a male or female presentation. By complicating these binary categories, LGBTQ sexualities present challenges to political, social and economic orders that insist on two strict categories for sex and gender. Rather than following a gender hierarchy bound by the norms of heterosexism, LGBTQ sexualities exist in a less stable place (Lind and Share 2003; Peterson 1999). There is common ground shared by feminist and LGBTQ approaches in global politics. This includes a commitment to moving away from patriarchal gender hierarchies, challenging hegemonic masculinities and contesting universal claims made by privileged men. Reflecting on this overlap, Manuela Picq and Marcus Thiel write, ‘each seeks to bring sexual difference as fundamental to the understanding of global politics’ (2015, p. 7). Empirically, sexuality studies as a field of research also interrogates how gendered violence specifically targets certain bodies either because of their sexual relationships or because of how individuals are viewed to be failing to fulfill sex and/or gender norms. Recognizing Homophobia as a Form of Violence The concept of sexualities presents a form of organization where certain identities are acceptable, and those bodies who fail to fit into the correct categories are punished. Everyone has a sexuality, but those with LGBTQ identities are considered to be a part of marginalized and minoritized populations. Heterosexuality is a privileged identity. Those whose sexuality does not fit within heterosexual norms, or those who are perceived to live outside the norms of heterosexuality, are subject to gendered violence by those who view this as a failure or threat (HaleyNeslon 2005; Haritaworn et al. 2014; Meyer 2015; Park and Mykhyalysyn 2016; Peterson 1999, pp. 44–45). In some countries this type of targeted violence is recognized as a hate crime, though there is continuing debate about how effective these laws are in stopping homophobic and transphobic violence (Glaad and MAP 2009; Valcore and Dodge 2016). Understanding why this violence against LGBTQ individuals persists, by whom and in what form is at the core of much work in sexuality studies. This violence can come from a variety of places where a person’s sexuality may be managed, including the family, the workplace or the state. This may be based on the way a person dresses, how they speak or who they date. At this time there is a lack of data regarding the forms of transphobic and homophobic violence faced in many communities as this analysis is left out of much of the work to address gender inequalities and insecurities (IACHR 2014). A 2017 World Health Report offered one of

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64  Handbook on gender and violence the first looks at how stigma of this kind matters to understanding genderbased violence, with the authors noting, ‘More and better research on the prevalence and adverse outcomes of violence motivated by perception of sexual orientation and gender identity is needed across many different geographical and cultural settings (especially outside the USA) and different socioeconomic and age groups’ (Blondeel et al., p. 36). Queer and trans people are often targets of violence and surveillance, and perceived as threats because of the way they fail to adhere to a strict gender hierarchy (Amar 2013; Bosia and Weiss 2013; Puar and Rai 2002; Quinan 2017). Gay, queer or trans men who choose to embrace femininity may be punished violently. Women who embrace more masculine traits, manners of dress or behaviors also face the possibility of homophobic violence. Given that women generally already face greater insecurity, the risk of violence is perhaps greatest for lesbian, bisexual and transgender women. For example, bisexual women in the United States face nearly twice as much risk of partner violence (Black et al. 2010; ONS 2018). In many cases the most prevalent form of emotional, physical, verbal and/ or sexual violence LGBTQ people face comes from within the family (UNDP and USAID 2014, p. 37). In a global study on homicide, the home was determined the most likely place for women to be killed by intimate partners or family members, marking lesbian, bisexual and transgender women as doubly susceptible to violence in the home (UNODC 2018, p. 17). Homophobia is also a tool mobilized by state governments. Michael J. Bosia and Meredith L. Weiss call it ‘political homophobia’ when states engage in anti-­LGBT discourses as a form of state-­making in resistance to what are argued to be Western narratives of LGBTQ rights as human rights. The authors contest that ‘political homophobia incites a Western sexual binary, which in turn structures reactive organizing among sexual minorities through identities that draw from the Western binary’ (2013, p. 16). Bosia and Weiss also argue that homophobia is a ‘purposive strategy’ that states sometimes employ (2013, p. 14). In recent years, LGBTQ human rights have become a way that the modernity of some countries is measured. While this can lead to meaningful positive change, in some states such as Colombia there has been a backlash to calls for protecting LGBT human rights (Cobar et al. 2018, p.  26; Hagen 2017). The dismissive label ‘gender ideology’ is sometimes used to tarnish advocacy for protections for LGBTQ individuals or promotion for same-­sex equality using claims that such advocacy is a form of colonialism (Corredor 2019; Grzebalska 2015, p. 92). As Elizabeth S. Corredor explains, ‘The antigender counterframe attempts to position religious and conservative leaders as the true champions of the disenfranchised and as genuine advocates for

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Sexualities  ­65 women’s rights, casting feminism as a form of cultural imperialism and colonization’ (2019, p. 628). This homophobic rhetoric that discriminates against queer bodies and non-­heterosexual relationships is also deeply rooted in misogyny, often targeting those advocating for abortion access as a human right too. The rhetorical call for the return to the ‘traditional family’ is a homophobic way of othering those families that do not follow heterosexual and patriarchal norms. Transnational and regional advocacy for human rights has grown at the United Nations, providing a platform to make universal claims of gay rights as human rights. Campaigns of this nature have focused on inclusion efforts such as working to gain legal rights for same-­sex marriage, the right for same-­sex couples to adopt and the right for LGBTQ troops to enlist in the military. Anti-­discrimination initiatives appeal to a liberal argument that LGBTQ individuals are just like everyone else therefore deserve to enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples or straight individuals. These campaigns call for acceptance and tolerance of LGBTQ people along with narratives of ‘coming out of the closet’. In this vein, campaign work by organizations like the International, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association (ILGA), Human Rights Watch and Outright Action International highlights how same-­sex relationships continue to be criminalized in many countries. Sexual rights organizing also rejects religious and political rhetoric that homosexuality is a sin or crime. SOGI, or ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’, is the abbreviation most commonly used in the global human rights context, and was the framing used in the Yogyakarta Principles. These Principles written in 2017 outline the obligations states have pertaining to ‘the intersection of the developments in international human rights law with the emerging understanding of violations suffered by persons on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity and the recognition of the distinct and intersectional grounds of gender expression and sex characteristics’ (ICJ 2007). These Principles show how SOGI matters to one’s ability to access human rights such as the right to education, the right to seek asylum and the right to form a family, and the specific vulnerabilities LGBTQ individuals face in accessing these rights. Importantly, the document also calls on states to take actions to implement these human rights. Within transnational advocacy for LGBTQ rights, a tension persists between a fight for a globalized conception of rights-­seeking narratives and a localized understanding of queer lives (Currier 2010; Kollmand and Waites 2009; Thoreson 2014). Theoretical debate continues about the best way to promote the sexual rights of minority populations without inscribing Western conceptions of gender norms onto communities in the global South and across Africa (Bhaskaran 2004; Thoreson 2014). Queer and

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66  Handbook on gender and violence trans scholars of color challenge the view that Western-­led LGBTQ advocacy groups are the only people promoting human rights for members of their communities, complicating the misconception that supporting LGBTQ rights as human rights is not indigenous to communities outside the West (Gopinath 2005; Ekine and Abbas 2013; Mohammed et al. 2018; Moussawi 2015). Sexualities and (In)Security When LGBTQ politics is used as a rhetorical tool to mobilize politically, there is an impact on those whose lives are taken up as a sign of deviance or progress. Those perceived to be sexual deviants by the state risk intervention from the state in the name of protection or security. This is the experience of queer and trans sex workers in many countries, who are arrested or forced into even more dangerous conditions when engaging in survival sex in a state that sees sex work as illegal. Gendered violence against marginalized sexualities is especially pronounced for individuals who are already viewed to be deviant and in need of rescue because of their race or class (Amar 2013, p. 41; Puar and Rai 2002, p. 119). This type of violence against genderqueer bodies in war continues to be largely invisible due to cisprivilege in global politics (Shepherd and Sjoberg 2012). In his book Security Archipelago, Paul Amar explores ‘how community groups and community officials who have an alternative view of security, culture and gender become sexualized as dangerous or perverse’ (2013, p. 33). Amar uses the examples of Brazil and Egypt for a bottom-­up case-­study analysis of how campaigns of violence were used to securitize LGBTQ lives in the global South and the queer resistance to this violence. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is another form of this resistance, as the organization was formed in the United States by Black queer women resisting racial profiling by police officers who violently harass, target and kill unarmed Black people viewed to be dangerous. Ethnographic work with vulnerable populations raises its own set of methodological and ethical questions as well. It is important for scholars to be aware of the possible impact on LGBTQ interviewees who speak openly to researchers about their identity or experiences and consider their accountability to this risk. Some critical security scholars have also reflected about what it means to be a queer practitioner conducting research in the field. A researcher who is visibly queer may make those interviewed more comfortable, but it may also raise certain risks for the researcher as a target of violence. To this point, Sandra McEvoy (2015) writes about the possible implications of being an out lesbian while conducting interviews in Northern Ireland, and the role this played in whether

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Sexualities  ­67 or not she was viewed as an outsider because of her sexuality. Sexuality is also a unique aspect of positionality because a researcher may choose to reveal their identity to some and not others, unlike other aspects of one’s identity, such as gender and race. As an example, Cai Wilkinson writes about the power of ‘passing’ for queer people. ‘Being able to pass means being ­regarded – a­ nd ­treated – a­ s respectable and acceptable, as one of us, by others, rather than experiencing the exclusion of being one of them’ (2017, p.  114). Wilkinson writes about the precarious sense of security offered to queers who are able to pass by ‘acting straight’, and the risk of violence to those who are queer and destabilize this straightness. Empirical work regarding the lives of LGBTQ individuals challenges what it means to rely on the state for security in times of peace as well as conflict. Those marginalized because of their SOGI rely on strategies of resilience within communities outside of state protection. Finding financial support through sex work is one example of the type of survival strategy of some members of the LGBTQ community who are rejected by both their family and the state, especially transgender individuals. Mohammad et al. (2018) found that some lesbian women in Nigeria marry into heterosexual relationships as a way to avoid violence or rejection from their family. The incentive to remain secretive about non-­heterosexual identities is especially high for those living in states where homosexual sex acts remain illegal. Underground networks and online communities can provide outlets for those ostracized because of their sexuality. However, changing political leadership may force out LGBT citizens to relocate for security, as Julie Richardson found while in conversation with activists in Istanbul about the dilemma of in/visibility for LGBT individuals. Richardson notes, ‘Security for those who do not conform to gendered national narratives and the gendered social roles they establish and reinforce is fragile at best, particularly in relation to the violation of the norms of masculinity’ (2017, p. 119). Because of the risk of being open about one’s sexuality it can be difficult to assess the number of members of LGBTQ communities in many places. Upholding Heteronormativity through Militarized Masculinities and Essentialized Femininities Sexuality studies challenges gender essentialism while at the same time illuminating ways that seemingly strict gender categories are only maintained through performance and discipline. Aaron Belkin’s work Bring Me Men investigates the way the military disciplines men into a particular form of militarized heterosexual masculinity (2012, pp. 62–65). This strict disciplining is also tied to the colonial project, where feminine and queer

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68  Handbook on gender and violence men face violence or even genocide (Jones 2006; Smith 2011). Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern (2009), investigate reasons that soldiers engage in sexual violence during conflict and how this behavior is about performing masculinity. Relatedly, Laura Sjoberg explores the role of women as wartime rapists and how this challenges some stereotypes about gender and violence (2016, p. 23). Sjoberg writes: The simple conflation of men/masculinity and women/femininity within progressive, feminist readings of gender in global politics can lead to the same result as conservative, patriarchal readings of gender reach when thinking about how women are positioned as relates to sexual violence in war and conflict: That women are its victims, its potential victims, and those people who need to be protected from its (possibly inevitable) attempted perpetration by enemies. (2016, p. 58)

One way to resist these conflations of men/masculinity and women/­ feminity is to focus on the experiences of LGBT perpetrators of violence (Thylin 2018). Some organizations, such as International Alert, have produced reports making specific suggestions about how to take sexualities into account in peacebuilding projects. In a report by Henri Myrttinen and Megan Daigle (2017, p. 11), the authors remind readers that, ‘SGM [sexual and gender minority] persons are not born vulnerable. Rather it is social norms that discriminate against them and place them in positions of vulnerability.’ With this understanding, the authors argue, peacebuilding initiatives can then work to understand any discriminatory social norms impacting LGBTQ individuals and keep these in mind when developing policy (Hilhorst et al. 2017). Feminist scholarship also interrogates how the military works to reify constructed gender norms through essentializing all women as possessing certain innate characteristics. One especially damaging example is the misconception that women are feminine and therefore peace-­loving. This essentialized way of understanding women has resulted in a lack of attention to women’s agency as political actors in conflict. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the role of women in combat including as violent actors in terrorist organizations. Melanie Richter-­Montpetit studies military masculinity using the examples of women torturers, specifically the (cis)women who tortured and raped Muslim male prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Richter-­Montpetit explains, ‘Performing racist, homo-, and transphobic acts of violence on the bodies of Abu Ghraib prisoners reasserted not only the perceived control of the individual militarized Selves of the soldiers, but promised civilizational Whiteness and hence national belonging’ (2016, p. 107). Violence like this is a way to redeem and shore

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Sexualities  ­69 up heteropatriarchal and ‘straight’ sovereign powers. This is similar to the ‘corrective rape’ that some lesbians have endured as a way of correcting what is seen as a failure in femininity and womanhood back to ‘normal’ through a purifying act of heterosexual violence (HaleyNelson 2005).

FOUR KEY DEBATES ABOUT SEXUALITIES The four key debates within sexuality studies related to gender and violence are as follows: 1. the ongoing tension between sexual rights as a liberal politics versus a more radical conception of queer liberation that is not reliant on identity politics; 2. the inclusion of trans studies within sexuality studies; 3. the challenges of interpreting or working to protect sexualities in postcolonial contexts; and 4. how queer, trans and feminist interventions in global studies cause us to rethink how gender matters to understanding violence. In outlining each of these debates I focus on the context of international development and conflict-­ affected environments to provide empirical examples for these theoretical debates. The first key feature of academic debate in sexuality studies pertains to sexual rights, or LGBTQ rights, within the human rights framework. Advocacy for sexual rights presents a tension between those who, on the one hand, argue global visibility is what is necessary to protect populations marginalized because of their sexuality and those on the other hand who view advocacy of this kind as further endangering communities who will inevitably face a backlash when visible. Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons (2016) in their book about what they call the ‘queer wars’ examine how the state works to regulate sexuality, and specifically why homosexuality has gained global visibility while there has also been major polarization around sexual and gender diversity. The authors turn their attention to rhetoric about sexuality being used by ‘authoritarian governments for symbolic purposes’ using the example of the shutting down of pride marches, as was the case in Istanbul in 2015 (2016, p. 13). In their estimation, the focus on ‘LGBT rights’ may be in part to blame for this backlash. They explain, ‘It is difficult to separate the idea of an “LGBT” identity or community from a particular set of individualistic values that are not necessarily shared beyond western liberal societies, and we recognize that the language of activism has helped promote a backlash’ (Altman and

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70  Handbook on gender and violence Symons 2016, p. 107). Recognizing how sexuality continues to be taken up as a threat to religious traditional and national values, the authors argue, ‘The reality of international polarization and the sensitivities about western imperialism in those countries that have only recently escaped colonial domination raise a real question for activists: how best to promote human rights and liberation within a divided world’ (2016, p. 131). Another aspect of the neoliberal engagement with the promotion of the protection and tolerance of gay rights as human rights is branded pinkwashing efforts, or the promotion of LGBTQ human rights to distract from other forms of violence and injustice while continuing to not engage with local LGBTQ activists (Schulman 2011; Stelder 2018). It is important to note that within pinkwashing campaigns there are only certain queer bodies who qualify as a ‘good gay’, while others are marked as bad, dangerous or deviant. The second key feature of academic debate pertaining to sexualities is the role of trans studies as related to the study of sexuality more broadly and what influence this work may have on the future of sexuality studies. Trans studies challenges some of the previous categories used to understand sexualities, by presenting a plurality of ways to think about genders. In a discussion about decolonizing transgender, scholars Mauro Cabral and Eric A. Stanley interrogate why trans bodies always remain outside, or subaltern, to the neoliberal inclusion project. The authors reflect on how trans individuals continue to be excluded from systems of education, employment, housing and health (see Boellstorff et al. 2014, p. 424). When sexuality is regulated by the state this impacts the personal, social and financial aspects of LGBTQ lives, with trans individuals experiencing this in unique ways not often accounted for in sexual politics. This is in part because trans individuals have long been excluded from gay rights organizing, as well as scholarship about sexuality. In some ways, the solutions sought to normalize and include lesbian and gay individuals have had a detrimental impact on trans and queer individuals. Solutions to include lesbian and gay individuals in marriage and the military almost always left trans individuals behind. Paisley Currah (2006) illustrates the degree to which sexuality is legislated through gender makers on everything from passports to school dress codes, and the work transgender activists are doing to challenge this in legal and policy contexts. One example of the securitization of gendered bodies is airport security, where people are screened differently based on whether they are viewed to be a man or a woman. This presents a challenge for anyone whose body does not meet gendered expecations, including trans and gender non-­conforming people. Currah and others argue for a future where ‘gender pluralisms’ could challenge the current legal model that results in violence for trans individuals who do not fit.

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Sexualities  ­71 The third key feature of academic debate is a postcolonial, or decolonial, critique of sexuality studies. Decolonial and indigenous research about sexualities embraces a more fluid understanding of gender which does not always align with a liberal conception of LGBTQ identities. Decolonial scholars are also hesitant to rely on the state for liberation, a state that for so long has committed genocide against indigenous individuals and continues to commit violence against First Nation communities, as is the case in the United States, Australia and Canada. Recognizing how sexualities are regulated requires an intersectional analysis that is time and context specific. Sexuality studies draw attention to the logics behind how differently raced, classed and gendered bodies are stigmatized and even criminalized. This criminalization in many cases is a legacy of a colonial past where only certain forms of sexual practices and relationships were allowed, and those who strayed from this faced punishment by the state. Criminalization for failing or resisting these norms might take the form of anti-­sodomy laws or a limit on the ability to participate as an equal citizen through practices such as marriage, participation in the military or the adoption of children. Violence from the state might also take the form of neglect, as is the case for those who are living with HIV/AIDs who continue to struggle to access affordable medical care. A key component of decolonial queer critique also focuses on a resistance to what Rahul Rao calls ‘homocapitalism’ as it occurs in development initiatives when ‘the figure of the queer has come to be adopted as an object of concern’ (2015, p. 38). Homocapitalism, as Rao explains, is the use of progressive LGBTQ human rights to promote corporate development within neoliberal discourses, ‘making capitalism friendly to queers but also rendering queers safe for capitalism’ (2015, p.  47). This form of development often relies on the continued racist othering of certain queers such as sex workers, who then face violent interventions in the name of protection (Amar 2013, pp. 65–66; Moussawi 2018, pp. 182–183). Specific case studies and country reports reveal that when those who are most at risk guide international activism, they may provide a different vision for liberation than the one defined by the West. Manuela Picq’s research reflecting on queer pride celebrations in the Amazon refutes the argument that LGBTQ rights and pride parades are imperialist or interventionist constructions. Picq’s (2015) work shows that indigenous communities in the Amazon participated in pride parades for their own benefit, with no outside interventions. Marginalized sexualities present uncertainty and ambiguity in a field that has so long relied on a top-­down understanding of how power moves, relying on strict borders and traditional notions of sovereignty. Karma Chávez writes about the activism of groups focused on queer migration

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72  Handbook on gender and violence in the United States. She explains that queer migrants are ‘an inherently coalitional subject’ (2013, p. 9). Traversing borders, queer migrants must navigate different identities depending on their location. Chávez argues not only are queer migrants marginalized because of their sexuality, they are also marginalized because of their immigration status. From an activist perspective, this coalitional position presents an opportunity for collaboration across identities. It is this coalitional activism among queer people of color that Chávez uses as a way to reimagine citizenship and migration. Finally, the fourth key feature of academic debate is how queer, trans and feminist interventions in global studies insist on a reworking of key tenets of the field by asking what Rahul Rao calls ‘queer questions’. Rather than simply adding sexuality as an additional lens when studying violence, a queering of concepts such as migration, space and protection reveals different logics at work. Rao argues that new gender and sexual subjectivities raise new queer questions, stating, ‘This is not to imply that the concerns interpellated by the Woman Questions have passed; rather they can no longer be articulated in the same way in light of these other questions’ (Rao 2014, p. 207). Queer theory informs this questioning by illustrating how resisting a binary conception of gender opens up new ways of knowing and seeing the world. Queer theory as methodology may be used to examine a number of topics that do not necessarily include a focus on the lived experiences of LGBTQ people, such as modernity, sovereignty and borders. Cynthia Weber’s work Queering International Relations investigates how queer subjectivities contribute to understanding a plurality of possibilities in international relations rather than the normalizing regimes generally offered as part of international relations scholarship (2016, p. 3). Weber articulates how a queer theory analysis of perverse bodies being failed and undisciplined also maps on to the perception of states within a global order, with certain states reading as queer or failed, and others reading as straight or modern. Weber illustrates either/or binary logics are at play in unexamined ways in transnational and global scholarship. A ‘queer intellectual curiosity’ allows for an investigation into formations of normal/perverse and the possibility for plural identities rather than simply either/or explanations of violence, gender and security (2016, p. 19).

CONCLUSION Recognizing sexuality as part of a gender or queer theory analysis centers the lived experiences of LGBTQ individuals. This analytical move shifts how violence, peace and security are understood, making clear the damag-

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Sexualities  ­73 ing role of heteronormative masculinities in conflict and other settings. The research about sexuality highlighted in this chapter also shows how homophobia occurs not just in the public but also by the state through institutions such as the military. Ongoing debates in sexuality studies demonstrate that categories of sexuality are not universal but, rather, context specific. Queer and trans scholarship offer different ways of organizing people and envisioning violence and (in)security that rejects assumptions about sex and gender built into the heteropatriarchal political paradigm. Much of the focus on sexualities studies has been on making visible those individuals and communities who continue to be written out or erased from discussions about gender and violence. But queer and trans people are more than the violence they endure. Those studying violence in global politics would benefit from also focusing on how intersectional queer visions for community initiatives for solidarity amid the struggle open up new political possibilities for LGBTQ individuals beyond simply not experiencing violence. Queer and trans activists continue to survive, celebrate and organize even while confronted with violence. Future research about diverse sexualities might be able to move beyond simply justifying the existence of LGBTQ people in the global community to fully appreciating the rich lives, communities, politics and loves of queer and trans people who have always been a part of our communities.

REFERENCES Altman, D. and J. Symons (2016) Queer Wars, Cambridge: Polity Press. Amar, P. (2013) The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baaz, M.E. and M. Stern (2009) ‘Why do soldiers rape? Masculinity, violence, and sexuality in the armed forces in the Congo (DRC)’, International Studies Quarterly, 53 (2), 495–518. Belkin, A. (2012) Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898–2001, London: Hurst. Bhaskaran, S. (2004) Made in India: Decolonizing, Queer Sexualities, Trans/ational Projects, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Black, M.C. et al. (2010) The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report, Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Blondeel, K., S. de Vasconcelos, C. García-­Moreno, R. Stephenson, M. Temmerman and I. Toskin (2018) ‘Violence motivated by perception of sexual orientation and gender identity: a systematic review’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 96 (1), 29–41. Boellstorff, T., M. Cabral, M. Cardenas, T. Cotton, E.A. Stanley, K. Young and A.Z. Aizura (2014) ‘Decolonizing transgender: a roundtable discussion’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1 (3), 419–439. Bosia, M.J. and M.L. Weiss (2013) ‘Political homophobia in comparative perspective’ in M.L. Weiss and M.J. Bosia (eds) Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and Politics of Oppression, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 1–29. Chavez, K.R. (2013) Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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74  Handbook on gender and violence Cobar, J.A., E. Bjerten-­ Gunther and Y. Jung (2018) ‘Assessing gender perspectives in peace processes with application to the cases of Colombia and Mindanao, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Insights on Peace and Security No. 2018/6, accessed at https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2018-­11/sipriinsight1806.pdf. Corredor, E.S. (2019) ‘Unpacking “gender ideology” and the global right’s antigender countermovement’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 44 (3), 613–638. Currah, P. (2006) ‘Gender pluralisms under the transgender umbrella’ in P. Currah, R.M. Juang and S.P. Minter (eds) Transgender Rights, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Currier, A. (2010) ‘Behind the mask: developing LGBTI visibility in Africa’ in A. Lind (ed.) Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance, New York: Routledge, pp. 155–168. Ekine, S. and H. Abbas (eds) (2013) Queer African Reader, Oxford: Pamzuka. Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad) and Movement Advancement Project (MAP) (2009) ‘Talking about inclusive hate crimes laws’, Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and Movement Advancement Project, accessed at https://www.lgbtmap.org/ file/talking-­about-­inclusive-­hate-­crime-­laws.pdf. Gopinath, G. (2005) Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grzebalska, W. (2015) ‘Poland’ in E. Kováts and M. Põim (eds) Gender as Symbolic Glue: The Position and Role of Conservative and Far Right Parties in the Anti-Gender Mobilization in Europe, Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies, pp. 83–100. Hagen, J.J. (2017) ‘Queering women, peace and security in Colombia’, Critical Studies on Security, 8 (1), 125–129. HaleyNelson, C. (2005) ‘Sexualized violence against lesbians’, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 17, 163–180. Haritaworn, J., A. Kundstman and S. Posocco (2014) Queer Necropolitics, New York: Routledge. Hilhorst, D., H. Porter and R. Gordon (2017) ‘Gender, sexuality, and violence in humanitarian crises’, Disasters, 42 (1), S3–16. Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) (2014) ‘An overview of violence against LGBTI persons: a registry documenting acts of violence between January 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014’, Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights ANNEX Press Release 153/14, 17 December, accessed at http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/lgtbi/docs/Annex-­ Registry-­Violence-­LGBTI.pdf. International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) (2007) Yogyakarta Principles: Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, March, accessed 2 December 2018 at https://www.refworld.org/docid/48244e602. html. Jones, A. (2006) ‘Straight as a rule: heteronormativity, gendercide and the noncombatant male’, Men and Masculinities, 8 (4), 451–469. Kollman, K. and M. Waites (2009) ‘The global politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights: an introduction’, Contemporary Politics, 15 (1), 1–17. Lind, A. and J. Share (2003) ‘Queering development: institutionalized heterosexuality in development theory, practice and politics in Latin America’ in K.-K. Bhavnani, J. Foran and P.A. Kurian (eds) Feminist Futures: Re-imagining Women, Culture and Development, New York: Zed Books, pp. 55–73. McEvoy, S. (2015) ‘Queering security studies in Northern Ireland: problem, practice and practitioner’ in M.L. Picq and M. Thiel (eds) Sexualities in World Politics, New York: Routledge, pp. 139–154. Meyer, D. (2015) Violence Against Queer People: Race, Class, Gender, and the Persistence of Anti-LGBT Discrimination, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mohammed, A., C. Nagarajan and R. Aliyu (eds) (2018) She Called Me a Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak, London: Cassava Republic Press. Moussawi, G. (2015) ‘(Un)critically queer organizing: towards a more complex analysis of LGBTQ organizing in Lebanon’, Sexualities, 18 (5–6), 593–617.

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Sexualities  ­75 Moussawi, G. (2018) ‘Queer exceptionalism and exclusion: cosmopolitanism and inequalities in “gay-­friendly” Beirut’, Sociological Review, 66 (1), 174–190. Murray, D.A.B. (ed.) (2009) Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Myrttinen, H. and M. Daigle (2017) ‘When merely existing is a risk: sexual and gender minorities in conflict, displacement and peacebuilding’, International Alert, accessed 10  August 2018 at https://www.international-­ alert.org/sites/default/files/Gender_​ Sexual GenderMinorities_​2017.pdf. Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2018) ‘Women most at risk of experiencing partner abuse in England and Wales years ending in 2015 and 2017’, accessed at https://www.ons. gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/womenmostatriskofex periencingpartnerabuseinenglandandwales/yearsendingmarch2015to2017#characterist ics-­of-­women-­who-­are-­most-­at-­risk-­of-­experiencing-­partner-­abuse. Park, H. and I. Mykhyalysyn (2016) ‘L.G.B.T. people are more likely to be targets of hate crimes than any other minority group’, New York Times, 16 June, accessed at https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/16/us/hate-­crimes-­against-­lgbt.html. Peterson, V.S. (1999) ‘Sexing political identities/nationalism as heterosexism’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1 (1), 34–65. Picq, M.L. (2015) ‘Peripheral prides: Amazon perspectives on LGBT politics’ in M.L. Picq and M. Thiel (eds) Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations, New York: Routledge. Picq, M.L. and M. Thiel (eds) (2015) Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations, New York: Routledge. Puar, J.K. and A. Rai (2002) ‘Monster, terrorist fag: the war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots’, Social Text 72, 20 (3), 117–148. Quinan, C. (2017) ‘Gender (in)securities: surveillance and transgender bodies in a post-­9/11 era of neoliberals’ in M. Leese and S. Wittendorp (eds) Security/Mobility: Politics of Movement, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rao, R. (2014) ‘Queer questions’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16 (2), 199–217. Rao, R. (2015) ‘Global homocapitalism’, Radical Philosophy, 194, 28–49. Richardson, J. (2017) ‘Not seen and not heard: the security dilemma of in/visibility’, Critical Studies on Security, 5 (1), 117–120. Richter-­Montpetit, M. (2016) ‘Militarized masculinities, women torturers and the limits of gender analysis at Abu Ghraib’ in A.T.R. Wibben (ed.) Researching War, New York: Routledge, pp. 92–116. Schulman, S. (2011) ‘Israel and pinkwashing’, New York Times, 22 November, accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-­and-­israels-­use-­of-­gays-­as-­amessaging-­tool.html. Shepherd, L.J. and L. Sjoberg (2012) ‘Trans- bodies in/of war(s): cisprivilege and contemporary security strategy’, Feminist Review, 101, 5–23. Sjoberg, L. (2016) Women as Wartime Rapists: Beyond Sensation and Stereotyping, New York: New York University Press. Smith, A. (2011) ‘Queer Theory and native studies: the heteronormativity of settler colonialism’ in Q.-L. Driskill, C. Finley, B.J. Gilley and S.L. Mordens (eds) Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics and Literature, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 43–65. Stelder, M. (2018) ‘Other scenes of speaking: listening to Palestinian anticolonial-­queer critique’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 47 (3), 45–61. Thoreson, R.R. (2014) Transnational LGBT Activism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thylin, T. (2018) ‘Leaving war and the closet? Exploring the varied experiences of LGBT ex-­combatants in Colombia’, Women, Gender and Research, 2 (3), 97–109. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (2014) Being LGBT in Asia: Cambodia Country

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76  Handbook on gender and violence Report, Bangkok: United Nations Development Programme and United States Agency for International Development. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2018) Global Study on Homicide: Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls, Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Valcore, J.L. and M. Dodge (2016) ‘How hate crime legislation shapes gay and lesbian target groups: an analysis of social construction, law, and policy’, Criminal Justice Policy Review, https://doi.org/10.1177/0887403416651924. Weber, C. (2016) Queer International Relations, New York: Oxford University Press. Wilkinson, C. (2017) ‘“You’re too much”: experiencing the straightness of security’, Critical Studies on Security, 5 (1), 113–116.

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6. Masculinity

David Duriesmith

Masculinity and violence are integrally linked, with popular depictions of masculinity commonly employing violence, or the potential to commit it, as a key signifier of manliness. At the same time as manly violence is celebrated on screen, our cultures struggle with how to deal with the impacts of men’s violence in the home, on the streets, and in warzones across the globe. The link between masculinity and violence has become increasingly visible in popular discussions on ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘hyper masculinity’ (Haider 2016). While discussions around hyper-­masculinity often posit masculinity as a cause of violence, others propose ‘good’ masculinity as the solution to violence and instability. In political life, appeals to strong male leaders are put forward as a potential solution to violence, and the notion of the masculine protector remains salient at all levels of culture (Young 2003). The complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which masculinity is invoked in relation to violence means that teasing out the precise relationship can be difficult. In public discourse, masculinity is commonly invoked as a primordial quality of maleness, a natural predisposition, which makes men prone to violence (Brittan 1989, p. 78). While some academic research has pursued this understanding on evolutionary grounds, more commonly the relationship drawn between masculinity and violence is something less grounded in genetics (Mooney 2000, p. 47). In contrast to biological accounts, others frame masculinity as ideology which condones men’s use of violence to maintain dominance (Morgan 1987; Pleck et al. 1993). Others still frame masculinity as a structure that directs certain men towards violent performances to maintain the prevailing social order (Hearn 1998). Beyond this, others discuss masculinity as identity, where violence derives from men’s attempts to perform particular roles, less constructed by conscious ideology than habituated practice. The boundaries between these different understandings of masculinity are porous, with many accounts employing multiple frames of masculinity simultaneously (the work of R.W. Connell is of particular note in this regard). However, the multiple meanings associated with masculinity often results in those working on masculinity and violence talking past each other. With this in mind, Michael Flood (2002, p. 204) has recorded the ways in which analysis can quickly slip from talking about idealized 77

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78  Handbook on gender and violence representations of men to men’s lived experiences, resulting in generalized claims that don’t carry through to practice. To understand the relationship between masculinity and violence, it is helpful to consider each of these framings of masculinity as entailing profoundly different understandings of what ‘masculinity’ is, what it has to do with men, and how men/masculinity relates to violence. This chapter looks to explore some of these links and to consider how we might better understand the multiple, compounding ways in which masculinity relates to violence. To do this, I begin with a brief overview of work on the link between masculinity and violence. This covers early work on men and aggression and sex-­role theory, as well as more recent work on masculinities and diverse forms of violence. I then interrogate the diverse forms of violence which masculinity produces, from interpersonal violence to cultures of violence and war. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering the relationship between masculinity and non-­violence by reflecting on attempts to transform masculinity away from violence.

BACKGROUND: SURVEYING EXISTING WORK IN THIS AREA It has been widely noted that the most persistent commonality between perpetrators of violence is that they are overwhelming men (True 2012). This is true in relation to wartime violence, public crimes, intimate partner violence, and almost any other form of violence one can measure (Hutchings 2008; Farr et al. 2010; Messerschmidt and Tomsen 2018; Tomsen 1997). Until recently, the prevailing explanation of this commonality was that men were naturally predisposed towards violent action (Goldstein 2001). This form of argumentation tended to draw on biological accounts of ‘male aggression’, which argue that men have evolved to be naturally aggressive in order to protect exclusive mating rights and to protect their offspring.1 These forms of argumentation often drew on the study of animals (particularly chimpanzees) to suggest that men’s domination, and predilection to violence, were inevitable results of our natural history (Miedzian 2002). During the last three decades of the twentieth century, these forms of argumentation faced increasing challenge from those exploring the recent 1   There is a large body of work in this genre: look to Aggression in Man and Animals by Roger Johnson (1972) as an indicative example of this scholarship, and to the volume Male Violence edited by John Archer (1994) as an example of the critical scholarship that resulted in a decline of biological accounts in the social sciences.

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Masculinity  ­79 innovations in ‘sex-­role theory’. Those working on sex-­role theory provocatively suggested that men’s relationship with violence was not an unchangeable result of their biology, but stemmed from the different socialization of men and women (Connell 1985). This approach began to analyse the ways in which society placed expectations on men to respond to challenges with violence, and the effect this had on individuals’ willingness to use violence to resolve their problems. Sex-­role theory placed a significant emphasis on social scripts associated with being male or female as kinds of mental shortcuts that individuals employed to act in a given scenario. Sex-­role theory significantly advanced understandings of gender and violence by decoupling notions of biology and violence and placing a greater emphasis on the social expectations, which are placed on men to act violently in certain situations. Despite the advances that sex-­role theory provided, it was increasingly challenged on grounds that it essentialized gender, that it had weak theorization of structure (in particular relating to class), and t­ hat – ­due to these two ­shortcomings – ­it could not account for the diversity of gender performances that existed in a given space (Connell 1985). The limitations of sex-­role theory were particularly revealed by work on masculinity, which showed that there was no singular set of scripts that structured men’s use of violence. Rather, both within societies and between them, there is a significant diversity of accepted ways for men to perform across the axes of class, age, race and location. Efforts to articulate a more nuanced account of masculinity and violence began to develop fully in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Of particular importance for this work are Jeff Hearn’s The Gender of Oppression (1987)¸ Raewyn Connell’s Gender and Power (1987), and Harry Brod’s edited collection The Making of Masculinities (1987). These argued that it was insufficient to understand the general association between manhood and violence; rather, there was a need for attention to the way in which particular articulations of masculinity solicited particular forms of violence in any given space. This emphasis on multiplicity also led to a profound shift in how the relationship between masculinity and violence was articulated. Drawing on Marxist ideas around structure and hegemony, this new wave of scholarship did not frame masculinity exclusively as an idealized sex role which men attempt to live up to. Rather, they argued that masculinity reflects underlying structural and discursive arrangements. Of particular significance in changing how masculinity and violence was considered was the publication of Masculinities by Connell in 2005, which argued that masculinity be understood as a plural (masculinities). This research suggested that in any given society there are multiple competing understandings of masculinity that are in contention over which should be the most privileged or preferred form, often termed ‘hegemonic

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80  Handbook on gender and violence masculinity’. Connell’s theorizing, which has become the most widely cited in the study of masculinity, also argued that understanding gender as sex roles misunderstood the role of practice, structure and embodiment. Connell (2005, p.  71) defined masculinity as ‘simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practice through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality, and culture’. In this understanding masculinity is not just a set of abstract ideas about what it means to be a man. Instead, it reflects the multiple ways in which individuals contest which performances of gender are privileged, and assert their membership to a particular articulation of gender. While this framing does not suggest that masculinity is singular, it does tend to indicate that masculinities are relatively segmented along hierarchical lines, and that violence is produced both by the ideas associated with different ways of being a man and as a result of contestation over dominance within the gender order. The development of the masculinities framework provided new avenues for exploring the relationship between gender and violence. Framing masculinities as plural has problematized the dominant narrative of a singular harmful form of masculinity as causal in the perpetration of violence. Connell’s (2005) account emphasized the way in which marginalized groups of men contested what it meant to be a man. This includes violent contestations such as seen in biker groups, which Connell described as a form of masculine protest. At the same time, Connell’s work challenges the naturalized link between masculinity and violence, with her work on queer men suggesting that masculine performance itself is not a precondition for violence. Attention to these marginalized, oppressed or subaltern forms of masculinity showed masculinity not only as a cause of violence but also as a subject of it. While initially focused on how stigmatized performances of masculinity were subjected to violence, this quickly evolved to studying the ways in which mainstream forms of masculinity required men to be subjected to violence to ‘prove’ their manliness. Work on masculinity as a cause of self-­oriented violence has been particularly influenced by Don Sabo’s ‘Pigskin, Patriarchy and Pain’ (1989), which demonstrated the ways in which many forms of masculinity require men to undergo tests of their manhood that were violent, painful and ­ hich has productively been explored in relahumiliating. This r­ esearch – w tion to schooling (Plummer 1999), the armed forces (Barry 2010), sport (Renold 1997), and health practices (Sabo and Gordon 1995) – showed the diverse ways in which men internalize a message of ‘no pain, no gain’ in order to assert their manliness. This work has subsequently expanded rapidly in relation to men’s health and the now well-­established evidence that men are reluctant to seek health care, have far higher suicide rates, engage

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Masculinity  ­81 in risky sex practices, and celebrate self-­destructive habits like smoking or excessive drinking. The expansion and development of work on masculinity and violence has now resulted in a range of distinct bodies of work. The next section thus outlines a few key areas in which our understandings of masculinity and violence are being enriched.

INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE The most straightforward way in which masculinity can be seen to cause violence is by justifying or encouraging violent responses on an interpersonal level. This can be seen in men’s far higher propensity to commit violent crimes, to engage in acts of sexual assault, and to undertake risk-­ seeking behaviour (Messerschmidt and Tomsen 2018). This behaviour is justified by the kind of sexed scripts that original sex-­role theory invoked. These scripted, habituated responses cause violence by making it appear natural, justified and inevitable. In many contexts, discourses frame a refusal to use violence as a sign of weakness and femininity (Barry 2010). When looking at masculinity as a cause of violence on this interpersonal level, these scripts can be seen to play out in particular forms of violence that are common in society. The prevalence of intimate partner violence, for example, is difficult to explain without understanding that particular constructs of masculinity legitimize the use of violence against partners who are seen to transgress their gendered duties or expectations. This is not to suggest that a desire to be masculine is the sole cause of violence, as any given instance of violence has a complex mix of psychological, social and circumstantial causal factors. The role of masculinity is difficult to tease out as it can impact in multiple ways at once. This can be seen in the link between alcohol abuse and intimate partner violence, where patriarchal understandings of masculinity are correlated with men’s willingness both to use violence and to abuse alcohol (Capraro 2000; Jewkes 2002). The multiple overlapping links between masculinity and interpersonal violence make charting the relationship difficult to draw out from other components of causation.

CULTURES OF MASCULINITY, CULTURES OF VIOLENCE Beyond the interpersonal level, masculinity is a cause of violence on a group level. Work on militaries, policing, class struggle, criminal organizations, corporate workplaces, and a myriad of other group settings has

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82  Handbook on gender and violence shown that masculinity produces violence (Bird 1996; Francke 1997). In group cultures that are dominated by masculine modes of behaviour and define membership of the group in terms of enacting practices which are read as masculine, masculinity can again become a cause of violence. In particular, homosocial groups such as sports teams, military units and fraternities have cultures that normalize or even demand violence to prove membership to the group (Flood 2008). Masculine homosocial cultures can demand violence collectively as a joint action to show membership, whether this be through hazing, group sexual violence or a willingness to engage in physical violence on behalf of the group (Higate 2012). Beyond cultures that encourage active violence, masculine group cultures also condone or facilitate violence without directly demanding it of all members. In these cases, the role of masculinity is to normalize a set of behaviours associated with being a man that obfuscate violence, downplay its significance or undermine the credibility of victims (Death 2014). Cultures of abuse and exploitation are particularly linked to male-­dominated industries and institutions, which have a strong cultural association with manliness or risk (Wadham 2013). Masculinity in these contexts makes the actions of victims appear irrational or non-­credible, while punishing those who express weakness. Group cultures dominated by masculinity have been particularly harmful in military institutions and churches, where men’s violence has been hidden and protected.

WAR AND COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE Masculinity also causes large-­scale forms of violence like war, terrorism and community conflict. While large-­scale violence is often portrayed as chaotic or uncontrolled, in practice it tends to be structured by norms associated with gender, and particular with masculinity (Goldstein 2001). Far from the portrayal of war as unbridled chaos, war is tightly regulated by social expectations about who should use violence (normally men) and who is an acceptable object of violence (Duriesmith 2017b). The act of war tends to be constructed as a masculine domain, framed as the ultimate proof of manliness. Deep myths exist around the nature of military service as membership in a brotherhood of fighters (Mackenzie 2015). These myths greatly inform social understandings of the purpose of war and its relationship to other gendered categories such as citizenship (Elshtain 1987). The particular form that war takes is directly tied to notions of masculinity. It is these ideas that make certain tactics acceptable and manly while others are framed as excessive or effeminate (Meger 2011). Shifts in the practice of war, such as the emergence of drone warfare, challenge and

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Masculinity  ­83 shift these associations with masculinity. As new tactics emerge masculinities may shift to accommodate them as an acceptable form of armed violence, or demonize them as barbarous and unacceptable (de Volo 2016). In this way, masculinity is a cause of violence in war as it structures the boundaries of acceptable violence and gives meaning to particular forms. As with interpersonal violence, the role of masculinity in causing war and collective violence is also multiple. At the same time as masculinity defines the practice of war, it plays an essential role in recruitment, encouraging men to join the armed forces and accept collective violence under orders (Barry 2010). Masculinity also shapes the perspectives of decision-­makers and elites and analysts who encourage war and collective violence as a reasonable response to collective problems (Tickner 1992). Here masculinity shapes the perceptions of reasonable responses to potential conflict, justifying war and armed violence as natural responses to conflict (Nicholas and Agius 2018). Beyond serving to justify and shape the practice of collective violence, masculinity also serves to shape structural forms of violence and inequality.

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE In addition to facilitating direct physical violence, masculinity can facilitate forms of structural violence and entrenched inequality. Initial theorizing of masculinities put a strong emphasis on structural qualities of gender (Connell 1987). For Connell (2005), a key way to understand masculinity was as a position where the gender order and the effects of gender were largely constituted by the interplay between different structural positions in that order. Masculinity was thus understood to be deeply sedimented arrangements of power that organized labour and habituated practice (Kaufman 1987). According to this view, masculinity is a key cause of structural violence in the form of deprivation, environmental degradation, racism or violent carceral regimes. By organizing labour, acceptable forms of political engagement and the arrangement of social protections, masculinities can provide barriers to the provision of basic humans needs. These forms of violence cause immense harm due to the way in which forms of masculinity structure institutions in society. This can be seen in the way that policing masculinities can be valourized and legitimized while masculinities of racialized minorities are delegitimized (Salter and Tomsen 2011). On a structural level, the arrangement of these masculinities makes the carceral state possible. These structural arrangements of masculinity organize men across age, class, racial and other lines; without these differing masculine roles

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84  Handbook on gender and violence existing simultaneously, forms of structural violence such as policing states would not be possible. Structural violence that is facilitated by masculinities in these ways is not necessarily overt. An example would be the harms caused by neoliberal masculinities: perhaps indirect but violent nonetheless (Hawkes and Gamlin 2018). Such systems are made possible by arrangements of masculinity that encourage men to participate in highly unequal economic systems in order to prove their manhood. The violence these systems produce is directed towards both those performing subordinated masculinities and others excluded from the benefits of these economic arrangements. Examples like this are indicative of how multiple masculinities operate in concert to produce unequal and violent gender orders.

PEACEFUL MASCULINITIES AND IMAGINING ALTERNATIVES While most of this chapter has been occupied by the link between masculinity and violence it is worth considering how masculinity is, or might be, linked to non-­violence. A substantial body of practical work is now being undertaken to change men’s attitudes towards masculinity with the hope of ending violence. By asking men to interrogate and re-­evaluate their relationship with masculinities, these programmes have aimed to challenge the link between being a man and a willingness to use violence (Duriesmith 2017a). Conducting this work has required many actors to explore what it might mean to promote peaceful or non-­violent masculinities. This questioning has resulted in a diverse range of answers for what should be done to change masculinities. The first and most common answer from scholars has been the idea of promoting new, ‘softer’ forms of masculinity that might open up space for change. Within scholarship on militarism, for example, Claire Duncanson (2015) has developed this line of thought, suggesting that, for masculinities to change, new and kinder forms of masculinity need to become dominant. In this regard, Duncanson’s argument aligns well with the practical work that has been advanced by advocates such as Jackson Katz (2006), who works to create forms of masculinity that condition men to protect equality, become active bystanders in situations of violence, and to define their role in relation to positive qualities such as strength and responsibility. The notion of making men active bystanders, meaning that they are willing to speak up or step in when they see problematic behaviour, has been particularly important. The model of change around active bystanders has suggested that men’s peers are best positioned to change each other’s

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Masculinity  ­85 behaviour when misogyny or violence occurs (McMahon and Dick 2011). Though this work has had wide reach in policy work and received significant funding both in national and international contexts, it has also been widely challenged by academic research which argues that it reifies masculinity, has a weak model of change, and little appreciation of gender diversity (Salter 2016; Pease 2015). These critiques have come from two groups of scholars. The first is those who advocate for great complexity in how gender is explored and call for greater clarity in understanding the power of structures. This approach has been supported by those who argue that the study of masculinity and violence has been insufficiently intersectional, failing to appreciate the interaction between gender, race, class, disability, sexuality and other axes of oppression in shaping individual lives (Beasley 2013). Such scholars suggest that masculinities studies has been unduly preoccupied with changing hegemonic masculinity, failing to keep up to date with the most recent developments in feminist scholarship and smuggling in antiquated understandings of gender that essentialize manhood. Second, and coming from a quite different standpoint, others have critiqued the ‘positive masculinities’ approach on the grounds that there is a need to return to an analysis that can re-­centre the dominance of men in society (Hearn 2004). This framing argues that the emphasis on diversity, complexity and nuance has lost sight of men’s material dominance in society, becoming preoccupied with various permutations of masculinity. The suggestion of this perspective is that the desire to search for increasing complexity, nuance and multiplicity might provide greater academic understanding, but it does little to further action against the dominance of patriarchy in society on the whole. This critique therefore argues that promoting kinder, more caring forms of masculinity does little to unmake the dominance of men in general. The tension expressed between these two critiques of ‘positive masculinities’ is also indicative of a core tension in understanding how masculinity causes violence. Much of the earlier research on masculinities that was conducted up until the mid-­1990s emphasized that masculinity was an ideology of dominance and oppression, and that the desire to salvage masculinity, or foster healthy forms of manhood, was akin to trying to shape ‘healthy cancer’ (Stoltenberg 2013). In contrast to this understanding, many recent approaches have emphasized that it is rigid adherence to particular forms of masculinity that produces violence, rather than masculinity on the whole. These contrasting accounts of what a positive, non-­violent or emancipatory form of masculinity might mean are indicative of the challenges faced by those studying its role in causing violence. Each engages with different aspects of how masculinities operate to cause

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86  Handbook on gender and violence violence, and offers solutions to fit that view (creating positive masculinities, fostering gender diversity, disrupting structures of production, unmaking gender binaries, and so on).

CONCLUSION This chapter has endeavoured to cover a few key issues and debates around masculinity as a cause of violence. In presenting this relationship, I have proposed that masculinity serves as a cause and multiplier of violence across different scales, sites and forms. Understanding of this relationship has advanced rapidly, particularly in the past 20 years with the growth of critical studies on men and masculinities as a distinct field. Despite this growth, current scholarship has not reconciled the multiple conflicting ways in which masculinity and violence are appealed to, resulting in a high degree of slippage between different uses of the term ‘masculinity/ies’ in this scholarship. This diversity of usage has been productive in facilitating scholarship from different disciplines, theoretical perspectives and policy agendas. As public attention to the role of masculinities in promoting violence is rising, there is a new imperative to clarify what is meant by masculinity and how this relates to violence. Slippage between different uses of the term can give the concept an ‘everything and nothing’ quality, where it is used to refer to: idealized archetypes that no one fully embodies; normative conceptions about what most men should be like; lived experiences that refuse categorization; and exaggerated popular depictions of manhood. Greater clarity about the ways in which the concept of masculinity is employed enriches the study of mainstream configurations of gender, and it is absolutely essential for understanding the experiences that fall outside of dominant narratives. Having this clarity provides space for exploring the cracks in dominant configurations of gender and exploring the productive inconsistencies that emerge between different aspects (between dominant accounts and lived experience for example). In doing this it is possible to explore the multiple and often contradictory ways in which masculinity both causes violence and is itself an object of violence.

REFERENCES Archer, J. (1994) Male Violence, New York: Routledge. Barry, K. (2010) Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves, Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Beasley, C. (2013) ‘Mind the gap? Masculinity studies and contemporary gender/sexuality thinking’, Australian Feminist Studies, 28 (75), 108–124.

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Masculinity  ­87 Bird, S.R. (1996) ‘Welcome to the men’s club: homosociality and the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity’, Gender and Society, 10 (2), 120–132. Brittan, A. (1989) Masculinity and Power, Oxford: Backwell. Brod, H. (1987) The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, New York: Routledge. Capraro, R. (2000) ‘Why college men drink: alcohol, adventure, and the paradox of masculinity’, Journal of American College Health, 48 (6), 307–315. Connell, R. (1985) ‘Theorising gender’, Sociology, 19 (2), 260–272. Connell, R. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, Cambridge: Polity. Connell, R. (2005) Masculinities (2nd edn), Cambridge: Polity. de Volo, L.B. (2016) ‘Unmanned? Gender recalibrations and the rise of drone warfare’, Politics and Gender, 12 (1), 50–77. Death, J. (2014) ‘Masculinity, sexuality, theology and child sexual abuse by personnel in Christian institutions’, Communities, Children and Families Australia, 8 (2), 63–80. Duncanson, C. (2015) ‘Hegemonic masculinity and the possibility of change in gender relations’, Men and Masculinities, 18 (2), 231–248. Duriesmith, D. (2017a) ‘Engaging men and boys in the Women, Peace and Security agenda: beyond the “good men” industry’, accessed 5 June 2018 at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ wps/2017/12/15/engaging-­m en-­a nd-­b oys-­i n-­t he-­w omen-­p eace-­a nd-­s ecurity-­a genda-­ beyond-­the-­good-­men-­industry-­david-­duriesmith-­112017/. Duriesmith, D. (2017b) Masculinity and New War: The Gendered Dynamics of Contemporary Armed Conflict, New York: Routledge. Elshtain, J.B. (1987) Women and War, New York: Basic Books. Farr, V., H. Myrttinen and A. Schnabel (2010) ‘Sexing the pistol: the gendered impact of prolific small arms’ in V. Farr, H. Myrttinen and A. Schnabel (eds) Sexed Pistols: The Gendered Impacts of Small Arms and Light Weapons, New York: United Nations University Press, pp. 3–18. Flood, M. (2002) ‘Between men and masculinity: an assessment of the term “masculinity” in recent scholarship on men’ in S. Pearce and V. Muller (eds) Manning the Next Millennium: Studies in Masculinities, Bentley, Western Australia: Black Swan Press, pp. 203–213. Flood, M. (2008) ‘Men, sex, and homosociality: how bonds between men shape their sexual relations with women’, Men and Masculinities, 10 (3), 339–359. Francke, L.B. (1997) Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military, New York: Simon and Schuster. Goldstein, J.S. (2001) War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haider, S. (2016) ‘The shooting in Orlando, terrorism or toxic masculinity (or both?)’, Men and Masculinities, 19 (5), 555–565. Hawkes, S. and J. Gamlin (2018) ‘Masculinities on the continuum of structural violence: the case of Mexico’s homicide epidemic’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 25 (1), 50–71. Hearn, J. (1987) The Gender of Oppression: Men, Masculinity and the Critique of Marxism, London: Wheatsheaf. Hearn, J. (1998) The Violences of Men: How Men Talk about and How Agencies Respond to Men’s Violence to Women, London: Sage. Hearn, J. (2004) ‘From hegemonic masculinity to the hegemony of men’, Feminist Theory, 5 (1), 49–72. Higate, P. (2012) ‘Drinking vodka from the “butt crack”: men, masculinity and fratriarchy in the private militarized security company’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14 (1), 450–469. Hutchings, K. (2008) ‘Making sense of masculinity and war’, Men and Masculinities, 10 (4), 389–404. Jewkes, R. (2002) ‘Intimate partner violence: causes and prevention’, The Lancet, 359 (9315), 1423–1429. Johnson, R. (1972) Aggression in Man and Animals, Philadelphia: Saunders.

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88  Handbook on gender and violence Katz, J. (2006) Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Kaufman, M. (1987) ‘The construction of masculinity and the triad of men’s violence’ in M. Kaufman (ed.) Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power and Change, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–29. Mackenzie, M. (2015) Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can’t Fight, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMahon, S. and A. Dick (2011) ‘“Being in a room with like-­minded men”: an exploratory study of men’s participation in a bystander intervention program to prevent intimate partner violence’, Journal of Men’s Studies, 19 (1), 3–18. Meger, S. (2011) ‘Rape in contemporary warfare: the role of globalization in wartime sexual violence’, African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review, 1 (1), 100–132. Messerschmidt, J. and S. Tomsen (2018) ‘Masculinities and crime’ in M. Dragiewicz and W. DeKeseredy (eds) Routledge Handbook on Critical Criminology, New York: Routledge, pp. 83–95. Miedzian, M. (2002) Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence, New York: Lantern Books. Mooney, J. (2000) Gender, Violence and the Social Order, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Morgan, D.H.J. (1987) ‘Masculinity and violence’ in J. Hanmer and M. Maynard (eds) Women, Violence and Social Control, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 180–192. Nicholas, L. and C. Agius (2018) The Persistence of Global Masculinism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pease, B. (2015) ‘Disengaging men from patriarchy: rethinking the man question in masculinities studies’ in M. Flood and R. Howson (eds) Engaging Men in Building Gender Equality, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars: pp. 55–70. Pleck, J.H., F.L. Sonenstein and L.C. Ku (1993) ‘Masculinity ideology: its impact on adolescent males’ heterosexual relationships’, Journal of Social Issues, 49 (3), 11–29. Plummer, D. (1999) One of the Boys: Masculinity, Homophobia, and Modern Manhood, New York: Harrington Park. Renold, E. (1997) ‘“All they’ve got on their brains is football”: sport, masculinity and the gendered practices of playground relations’, Sport, Education and Society, 2 (1), 5–23. Sabo, D. (1989) ‘Pigskin, patriarchy and pain’ in M. Kimmel and M. Messner (eds) Men’s Lives, New York: Macmillan, pp. 184–186. Sabo, D. and D. Gordon (1995) Men’s Health and Illness: Gender, Power, and the Body, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Salter, M. (2016) ‘“Real men don’t hit women”: constructing masculinity in the prevention of violence against women’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 49 (4), 463–479. Salter, M. and S. Tomsen (2011) ‘Violence and carceral masculinities in felony fights’, British Journal of Criminology, 52 (2), 309–323. Stoltenberg, J. (2013) ‘Why talking about “healthy masculinity” is like talking about “healthy cancer” ’, accessed 9 March 2018 at https://www.feministcurrent.com/2013/08/09/ why-­talking-­about-­healthy-­masculinity-­is-­like-­talking-­about-­healthy-­cancer. Tickner, J.A. (1992) Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, New York: Columbia University Press. Tomsen, S. (1997) ‘A top night: social protest, masculinity and the culture of drinking violence’, British Journal of Criminology, 37 (1), 90–102. True, J. (2012) The Political Economy of Violence Against Women, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wadham, B. (2013) ‘Brotherhood: homosociality, totality and military subjectivity’, Australian Feminist Studies, 28 (76), 212–235. Young, I.M. (2003) ‘The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29 (1), 1–25.

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7. The body

Jessica Auchter

As Jindy Pettman argues in relation to the discipline of International Relations, ‘it should be possible to write the body into a discipline that tracks power relations and practices which impact so directly and often so devastatingly on actual bodies’ (1997, p. 105). Laura Shepherd has similarly argued that ‘assumptions about bodies are intrinsically, inherently related to the study and practices of global politics, because global politics is studied and practiced by gendered bodies’ (2010, p. 6). Yet the role of actual bodies is contested within the study of world politics, development, economics, and associated disciplines. Much of the reason for lack of attention to the body is likely attributable to a levels of analysis problem: bodies reside at the individual level of analysis; and for most theoretical paradigms within the study of world politics, the focus is substantively on the national and international level. Yet recent work has drawn more attention to everyday practices, and much of this draws on a feminist canon that has emphasized starting from women’s lives. But there remains a contestation over what the body is, even as there may be agreement that bodies matter. Indeed, while feminist theorists have consistently made the point that particular bodies are left out of political theorizing, and that previous work on human corporeality has focused only on the male body (Grosz 1994), there remains some contestation not only over how to conduct work that would demonstrate that particular bodies matter, but also over what the body itself is. For example, in Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler argues that the body is a signifying practice. The body, then, acquires meaning through gender, rather than gender being inscribed onto already preexisting bodies. Elizabeth Grosz, in Volatile Bodies (1994), also emphasizes that human biology is social. In this sense, Butler and Grosz both suggest starting with gender rather than with the body, because it is the social and cultural processes that give meaning to and structure the biological body itself. Yet others have instead argued that it is women’s bodies that are at the heart of how we should begin to understand violence, advocating that we begin with women, their bodies and the violence enacted on them as a means to understand global gender politics, something like Cynthia Enloe’s injunction in Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1990) that we should begin from women’s lives. 89

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90  Handbook on gender and violence Much of this work seeks to argue that women should be understood as victims of patriarchal practices of violence; Enloe examines a whole host of economic, social, and political practices ranging from domestic servitude to war. Margaret Randall, as another example, states that ‘violence, like all other human interaction, is gendered: women and children are most often its victims, men or male-­controlled states their victimizers’ (2003, p. 1). This perspective also argues that institutions of violence are the institutions of men, and epiphenomenal to their agency. Militarism is equated with patriarchy, and women are the victims of such violence. Jasmin Zine, for example, states, ‘the current rise of militarism is also galvanized by a globalizing patriarchy that purveys a conquest-­driven masculinist stance’ (2006, p.  31). Even work on the war on terror (Hunt and Rygiel 2006) focuses on how women tend to be stripped of their agency, constructed as victims, while American men are depicted as their hyper-­masculine rescuers and native men as cowardly oppressors. This justifies violence in the name of women who end up being prevented from realizing many of their human rights by the violence that is done in their name (Hunt and Rygiel 2006, p. 9). The solution to such violence, then, both narrative and physical, is telling women’s stories. Thus, we begin with two perspectives: one which begins with women and the violence committed against them; and the other which sees the gendering of subjects as itself a kind of insidious discursive violence that imposes regulatory norms and enables other forms of physical violence. It is this distinction which perhaps highlights the dilemma at the heart of this chapter on the body: that there is little agreement on what role the body actually plays in such a discussion. Indeed, among feminists there may be little agreement on what the body is, and thus its politics. This chapter takes this dilemma as a starting point as a means to describe the current state of work on gender and the body in the study of world politics (which I take to include development, security, economics, and so on). The next section lays out a schema for considering existing work, while the following section returns to the debate with which I began this chapter to consider the tensions surrounding the notion of materiality and the body. I conclude by raising some questions about future directions of work in this area.

THE BODY, GENDER, AND VIOLENCE This section highlights the existing work on the body in world politics, focusing specifically on a three-­pointed nexus of concepts as the key way in which the body appears: the body, gender, and violence. This serves to

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The body  ­91 introduce the first of two key debates governing the concept of the body: the body as site of violence. In this section, I illustrate, using existing work, the relationship between these concepts. I first focus on the literature on sexual violence as a means of exploring this nexus, before examining more generally the body as a victim of violence in international politics. One of the key areas in which current research is ongoing is an examination of bodies as victims of violence. Such work often focuses on sexual violence, including rape as a tool of war, but other studies have focused more generally on violence against civilians as a hallmark of modern warfare. Additionally, the emergence of modern suicide terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s has generated a further focus on the embodied nature of violence (on the body as a tool of violence as well as a potential victim of it). Here I briefly examine the literature on sexual violence as a way to draw out one of the main ways women’s bodies are figured in global politics. In the context of sexual violence, key contributions of recent research have been on connections between rape and war and rape and militarized masculinity. For example, rape is often viewed as a byproduct of war, with an assumption that society ‘normally’ acts as a hindrance to men’s natural bestial sexual behavior, one which is removed during conflict (Baaz and Stern 2009). In this context, women’s bodies become viewed as the spoils of war. Indeed, rape is often viewed as a tactic of revenge, or as the reward to which male soldiers are entitled during and after wartime: an expected and inevitable component of war (Card 1996; Vikman 2005; Baaz and Stern 2009). Maria Baaz and Maria Stern distinguish between two kinds of explanation often attributed to rape: the sexual urge explanation and the dominance explanation. In the former, men are not responsible for their urges, which have a biological explanation. When they cannot be satisfied by their own wives or sex workers, they treat civilians caught in the conflict as outlets for their repressed sexual energy. This biological explanation often attributes rape to an excess of testosterone, and some arguments utilize biology to posit all men as potential rapists (Thornhill and Palmer 2000). Indeed, soldiers themselves often justify acts of sexual violence using this same terminology, as delineated in Baaz and Stern’s interviews with soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Their interviews detail how male soldiers in the DRC use the ‘lust’ explanation to justify sexual violence, because of the exceptional nature of war (in other words, they would never have carried out such acts if they were not at war). As Baaz and Stern note, this narrative about rape as a part of war has become so naturalized as to be unproblematized. They also call attention to the way in which current research on rape in conflict focuses on telling women’s stories, on women as victims of war and sexual violence. As a

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92  Handbook on gender and violence result, very little work has been done on understanding the perpetrators of such violence and how they posit their own participation in it. This would go a long way towards rethinking assumptions about naturalized connections between masculinity and violence, particularly sexual violence. That is, if we move beyond the biological argument, it becomes easier to understand the ways in which sexual violence, especially during wartime, is part of a larger story of militarized masculinity (Enloe 1990; Goldstein 2001; Shepherd 2007). In this vein, because the military requires violence to be successful, militaries are in a position to both encourage violence (via specialized training and policymaking) and discourage violence (against civilians and within their own ranks). Some argue that the way in which the military ‘makes a man’ through training for violence and participation in violence is inherently connected to both the use of rape during wartime as a tool of war and to the statistics we currently see about rape within the military. Specifically, if we look at rape during genocide, in Rwanda, perpetrators were frequently intoxicated, which may have hardened their resolve to carry out atrocities (Jones 2002). There is also evidence that Serbian soldiers took stimulants to enable them to commit rape (Price 2001). That is, self-­doubt led to soldiers overcompensating and resulted in them being more violent as a means to assert their masculinity and their loyalty to their in-­group and its ideology (Price 2001; Alison 2007). In this vein, rape can be seen as an instance of this kind of toxic militarized masculinity that is not biologically given; hence the need to assert it and to condition it to occur through group training and through altered states of consciousness from drugs or alcohol. The invocation of women as in need of protection and stereotypically peaceful paradoxically enables a construction of militarized masculinity that actually makes women more vulnerable to sexual violence. Soldier training, for example, is supposed to make men who are willing to carry out violence to protect the women back home; yet in order to concretize these forms of masculinity, femininity must be distanced and degraded. As a result, as Whitworth (2004) has demonstrated, killing ‘femininity within’ becomes necessary in order to enable soldiers to live up to the myths of militarized manhood. Because femininity is so degraded, rape becomes a way to display dominance, and women’s bodies become tools of building masculinity. Indeed, in their study of soldiers in the DRC, Baaz and Stern (2009, p.  497) found that the soldiers ‘explicitly linked their rationale for rape with their inabilities (or “failures”) to inhabit certain idealized notions of heterosexual manhood’. They note that the soldiers themselves attribute their participation in sexual violence to their frustration and anxiety in the context of negotiating expectations of them as soldiers and their direct embodied experiences.

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The body  ­93 Because the military builds men through the construction of military masculinity, one complexity is how to make sense of women’s presence in the military. It is worth quoting at length from Baaz and Stern’s study (2009, p. 505): Constructing the zone of commanding and combat as masculine (and fundamentally heterosexual) required making sense of women’s presence in this space in a manner that did not threaten the main logic upon which this notion of masculinity and male heterosexuality depended. The soldiers therefore recast women soldiers as either ‘masculine,’ or as unworthy, devalued feminine. They accomplished this move in a number of associated ways: denying women soldiers’ femininity, as it is understood in the civilian sphere (e.g., docile, submissive, chaste etc.) and thereby rendering women soldiers ‘men’; casting them as sexualized opportunists, instead of as soldiers (‘they are only hookers looking for clients’).

One of the material outcomes of militarized masculinity can also be rape within the military. Though there has been a lot of focus on rape as a tool of war, most sexual assault happens in peacetime, both inside and outside of the military. In the United States, as of 2018, sexual assault reports within the military had increased for the previous seven years in a row, and fewer soldiers, as a percentage, faced criminal prosecution for sexual assault (Hennigan 2018). Though much of the focus on the body has emphasized its status as a victim of violence, as described above, some recent work has rendered this picture more complex. Lauren Wilcox’s Bodies of Violence (2015), for example, articulates how violence is productive of bodies. Wilcox argues that in international relations, bodies are theorized as living or dying objects only. As a result, violence committed on bodies is perceived as an excess of war or a miscalculation, rather than as a key way that biopower functions. One of Wilcox’s key contributions to this nexus is the theorization of the body as political, as a means to understand violence in world politics and in security practices more specifically. This allows for us to consider how bodies are treated differently as a means to understand the ‘systematic, structural, and disguised forms of violence that sustain constellations of power’ (Heijthuyzen 2017). Wilcox thus advocates for subjects to be understood as embodied, as a way to see how policies produce certain bodies as threats while others are constituted as needing protection. As Wilcox notes, ‘Bodies are not only killed, but are made to be “killable” by practices of international relations’ (2015, p. 193). In this vein, by examining the nexus of violence, the body, and gender, scholars have been able to focus on questions about how the body is mediated in conflict, and particularly what bodies, and what violence enacted on bodies, have been considered worthy topics of investigation. It

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94  Handbook on gender and violence certainly remains the case that, as Wilcox has argued, certain bodies are heavily politicized; yet bodies are also rendered apolitical objects upon which the effects of world politics occur, resulting in the de-­securitization of particular lives and particular bodies. The next section takes up this tension further.

KEY DEBATES: MATERIALITY AND THE BODY This section draws on the previous to illustrate the future of research on gender and the body, much of which centers on the question of the body as material entity or as discursive entity. This debate, highlighted by recent work couched under the framing of new materialism, is where we might expect future research questions to emerge. I first examine the debate over materiality in the context of gender and the body, then focus in on some specific examples of work in this area as a way to frame the discussion and the parameters of the debate. One of the key foundational issues at the outset for scholars is often the well-­worn explanation of the difference between sex and gender. Sex is defined as biologically determined, while gender is ‘a set of socially constructed characteristics describing what men and women ought to be’ (Tickner and Sjoberg 2007, p.  196). For most feminist scholars in these fields of study, the emphasis is on exploring the effects of the gendering of global politics. Still, as a result of this differentiation at the heart of approaches to gender and world politics, most feminist work focuses on the discursive rather than the material. Charlotte Hooper (2001, p.  20), notes that there are three focal points of gender theory: physical embodiment; gendered social processes and institutions; and the gendered construction of language. In the context of physical embodiment, most of the focus on the body has been on reproductive biology or on sexual violence, as noted in the above section, because too much of a focus on the body leads to a focus on biological sex, which has been perceived as a limiting factor in analysis for feminists, who prefer to focus on gender. Exemplary of this tension is Marysia Zalewski’s 1994 ‘The Women/​ “Women” Question in International Relations’, a review of Cynthia Enloe’s book The Morning After (1993), and Christine Sylvester’s Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (1994). Zalewski positions Enloe’s book as an example of feminist standpoint work, in that she starts with where women are and then investigates the politics of construction of masculinity and femininity. Sylvester, on the other hand, does not accept that women exist or that we can unproblematically start analysis from the conditions of women’s lives. She views ‘women’

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The body  ­95 as a constructed category, even as many women want to claim female gender identities as a focus of feminist politics. Sylvester is concerned with essentialisms, so she uses the term ‘women’ to remain cautious about being ontologically assertive and thus essentialist. Zalewski describes one of the central tensions through reviewing these two key texts: feminist standpoint theory is critiqued for potentially reifying the notion that studying women is an area of specialization, rather than something that permeates the central issues of those concerned with world politics. Indeed, Sylvester (1996) worries that focusing on women invokes some knowledge of peace immanent in women’s bodies or their activities of caretaking, which can parody positivist dichotomies even while critiquing them. Yet postmodern feminism is critiqued for being overly focused on gender to the extent of disregarding the injustices and inequalities, thus eliding the feminist content of scholarship as equally a form of activism. This extends beyond the discipline of international relations as well, as scholars from various fields who engage with issues of world politics, economics, and development seek to examine the relationship between sex and gender in considering the materiality of the body. Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Correa, and Susie Jolly take up this issue in their edited volume Development with a Body. They note that, in studying development, the issues that recur that are most substantively connected to poverty and development are sexual health and reproductive rights. They articulate the complexities of studying the body by focusing on how dominant conceptions of sexuality and gender, particularly heteronormativity, ‘explains the silences and resistances observed in the development field in relation to “sex” ’ (Cornwall et al. 2008, p. 2). Though they advocate for bringing the body back into studies of development, they focus more on structures of governance associated with sex and sexuality than on sex and sexuality itself, another example of the way in which the discursive dimensions of gender and the body are often placed at the fore of these discussions. Theorists often draw upon the works of Judith Butler to explain the focus on the discursive or performative rather than on the material. Butler views the subject as constructed by its gender, rather than as a preexisting surface upon which gender is inscribed. The body is itself constructed and acquires meaning by assuming a gender. She goes so far in Gender Trouble as to jettison the body as a productive category in theorizing, arguing that it has been portrayed as the mute facticity upon which gender significations are inscribed (Butler 1990, p. 176). She seeks to suggest that the gendered body as performative means that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. In other words, as Butler notes, the body is not a ‘being’ but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated. The body is simply a signifying

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96  Handbook on gender and violence practice. In Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler further lays out her notion of the body as constructed via her theory of performativity. She notes that performativity is not a single performance, but a reiterative practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names. The regulatory norms of sex work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies, and to materialize the body’s sex and sexual difference in the service of heterosexual norms. Much recent feminist work that examines the body assumes Butler’s notion of the body as performative rather than the body as material thing. Lauren Wilcox’s Bodies of Violence is one example, as discussed earlier in the chapter. Wilcox examines the politics of embodiment, how bodies are not simply natural objects, but are produced through practices of violence. Still, there has been a renewed effort to consider materiality in the study of world politics. Jindy Pettman’s 1997 article is perhaps one of the first to highlight the missing areas related to the body, in the discipline of International Relations in particular (the discipline devoted to the study of the practices of international relations). She notes: While largely disembodied, or in the process of ‘missing’ the body, the discipline [of International Relations] colluded with the displacement of both body and sex onto women. Enlightenment’s man is abstract, individual, centred on the mind, autonomous. Woman, on the other hand, is sexed, and there for (heterosexual) men’s sex and service. Men are subjects, women dependents, a ‘body-­for-­others’. (Pettman 1997, p. 95)

And, even though there has been a recent embodied turn in the study of world politics, drawing on feminist theorizing, this should not be conflated with a materialist approach, since much of this work defines the body in Butlerian terms (as constructed by discourse rather than as given material fact) even as it argues that we should pay more attention to bodies. Much of the focus on materiality of the body may be best viewed through work in feminist studies of International Political Economy (IPE), which has sought to demonstrate how global capitalism and development are not only marked on bodies but also sustained by them, where the body is a form of international currency (Pettman 1997; Smith and Lee 2015). The focus on labor as an international issue allows for an increased focus on the body as well. This is best exemplified by work focused on women’s lives, ranging from farm workers to domestic servants and sex workers. As I have noted in this section, one of the key debates that is productive for thinking about the body in gender and world politics is one focused on materiality. Sometimes this may take the form of the ‘women’/women question, while at other times it may be a function of which lives are taken account of in international politics. Yet at the heart of this debate is a

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The body  ­97 fundamental question of what the body actually is. Jindy Pettman offers a useful reflection on her own navigation of this tension (1997, p. 93): I took on board early second wave feminist distinctions between (biological) sex and (social/cultural) gender, to deny that biology is women’s destiny, to make room for a feminist political project. Seeing gender, along with race and ethnicity, as socially constructed, I tended to assume bodies were simply there: natural, neutral, surfaces on which the social/symbolic was written [. . .] In recent writing for Worlding Women, I was surprised to detect the eruption of ­bodies – ­sexed ­bodies – ­into my text. One reader took the presence of these bodies in my manuscript as emphasizing the physicality of people’s, particularly women’s, experiences of the international.

She focuses on the way in which bodies announced themselves in her work in a way she could not ignore. As this section has illustrated, there seems to be widespread agreement that bodies matter; yet the body remains a site of contestation within the disciplines that engage with practices of world politics, and numerous questions remain. Are bodies simply sites where we can see the workings of global processes (such as international capitalism), or are bodies themselves agents of international politics? In this vein, are bodies material artifacts where practices are inscribed and imprinted, or can they be conceived of in more agentic or emancipatory ways? One of the reasons this is important is that bodies have historically been gendered feminine and relegated to the private realm (while Enlightenment logic presupposed the importance of a masculine notion of reason). While bodies are controlled by their impulses, minds control bodies. Thus, how we understand the body has wider implications for considering larger questions of power, agency, labor, and the effects of transnational processes.

CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to highlight the way in which the body has currently been conceptualized within those disciplines devoted to understanding the practices of world politics. The first main conceptual area of discussion I focused on in the chapter was the idea of violence and the nexus between gender, violence, and the body. Such a focus has emphasized not only the impact of conflict on women’s bodies, but also the violence of militarized masculinity outside of a conflict context, in exemplary cases such as sexual assault during peacetime. The second key area of debate is centered on the materiality of the body and the dynamics of how we understand base concepts such as sex and gender. This is a debate not only about the role of the body, but also even more substantively

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98  Handbook on gender and violence about what the body is and how we should define and understand it in our approaches to world politics. Such a focus raises questions for future research on gender and the body, and I conclude by emphasizing an area of future inquiry implicated by these discussions. The current state of inquiry on gender and the body has the potential to shed light on new approaches to auto-­ethnography in the study of world politics. Feminist s­cholars – n ­ otably within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and d ­ evelopment – h ­ ave for a long time made ethnographic inquiry one of the hallmarks of their approach, because of the emphasis on starting from women’s lives. They take seriously the politics of everyday practices as something that is implicated in the international. As Jindy Pettman (1997, p. 95) notes: The body you are/are in clearly makes an enormous ­difference – ­it places you, or me, on one side or the other of boundaries that mark both power relations and entitlements. It is read to locate us on the inside or the outside of borders that, in international politics, can cost you your life.

Yet although there is room to examine the body of the scholar as well, feminist scholars have continued to point to the way that research on gender and world politics has been marginalized in terms of approaches to the discipline. So much of this is premised on an assumed way of interacting with the subject of one’s scholarship, and this should be problematized. Indeed, in Mark Salter’s critique of Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s discussion of methodology, he emphasizes the importance of corporeal and practical skill. He stresses the importance of being there: ‘our fetish for conferences demonstrates this: we want to be in person, face-­to-­face to exchange ideas, not just read the ideas, and we do this despite the expense and distance of travel and the discomfort of jetlag, foreign food and uncomfortable chairs’ (Salter 2015, p. 972). The recent turn to auto-­ethnography, especially some recent work on the body in pain, offers an example of this type of engagement. Sarah Naumes (2016), for example, writes herself and her own pain into a discussion of wounded soldiers, including her own embodied encounter with childbirth. In this vein, while future research may not resolve the tensions surrounding how the body itself is or should be defined, one way in which social science disciplines can advance beyond a preference for or commitment to disembodied writing is for scholars themselves to consider their own embodiment, in terms of the complex histories of our bodies, how our bodies and positionings drive our research agendas, the spaces we occupy or are restricted from, and the bodily pain and violence we may experience or have experienced.

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The body  ­99

REFERENCES Alison, M. (2007) ‘Wartime sexual violence: women’s human rights and questions of masculinity’, Review of International Studies, 33 (1), 75–90. Baaz, M. and M. Stern (2009) ‘Why do soldiers rape? Masculinity, violence, and sexuality in the armed forces in the Congo (DRC)’, International Studies Quarterly, 53 (2), 495–518. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge. Card, C. (1996) ‘Rape as a weapon of war’, Hypathia, 11 (4), 4–18. Cornwall, A., S. Correa and S. Jolly (eds) (2008) Development with a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights, and Development, London: Zed Books. Enloe, C. (1990) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, C. (1993) The Morning After: Sexual Politics and the End of the Cold War, Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldstein, J. (2001) War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heijthuyzen, M. (2017) ‘Mind the gap: gendering international relations’, Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy blog, 27 September, accessed October 15 at https://centreforfeministfor eignpolicy.org/journal/2017/9/26/gendering-­international-­relations. Hennigan, W.J. (2018) ‘Sexual assault reports in the military rose for the 7th year in a row’, Time, 30 April, accessed October 15 at http://time.com/5260183/military-­sexual-­assault-­ rape-­reports/. Hooper, C. (2001) Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics, New York: Columbia University Press. Hunt, K. and K. Rygiel (eds) (2006) (En)gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, Aldershot: Ashgate. Jones, A. (2002) ‘Gender and genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Genocide Research, 4 (1), 65–94. Naumes, S. (2016) ‘Examining military articulations of pain in a North American context’, paper presented at the International Studies Association Northeast Conference, Baltimore, November 2016. Pettman, J. (1997) ‘Body politics: international sex tourism’, Third World Quarterly 18 (1), 93–108. Price, L. (2001) ‘Finding the man in the soldier-­rapist: some reflections on comprehension and accountability’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 24 (2), 211–227. Randall, M. (2003) When I Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror, and Resistance, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Salter, M. (2015) ‘#sorrynotsorry: a well-­meaning response to PTJ’, Millennium, 43 (3), 970–974. Shepherd, L. (2007) ‘“Victims, perpetrators and actors” revisited: exploring the potential for a feminist reconceptualisation of (international) security and (gender) violence’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9 (1), 239–256. Shepherd, L. (2010) ‘Sex or gender? Bodies in world politics and why gender matters’ in L. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3–16. Smith, N. and D. Lee (2015) ‘Corporeal capitalism: the body in international political economy’, Global Society, 29 (1), 64–69. Sylvester, C. (1994) Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sylvester, C. (1996) ‘The contributions of feminist theory to IR’ in S. Smith (ed.), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 254–278. Thornhill, R. and C.T. Palmer (2000) A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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100  Handbook on gender and violence Tickner, A. and L. Sjoberg (2007) ‘Feminism’ in T. Dunne, M. Kukri and S. Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 195–212. Vikman, E. (2005) ‘Ancient origins: sexual violence in warfare, part I’, Anthropology of Medicine, 12 (1), 2–31. Whitworth, S. (2004) Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Wilcox, L. (2015) Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zalewski, M. (1994) ‘The women/“women” question in international relations’, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 23 (2), 407–423. Zine, J. (2006) ‘Between orientalism and fundamentalism: Muslim women and feminist engagement’ in K. Hunt and K. Rygiel (eds) (En)gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 27–50.

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8.  The sex of sexual violence Karen Boyle

This chapter explains how feminists have sought to understand the sex of sexual violence, particularly rape. These debates are centrally about the nature of heterosex in patriarchy; but they are also inextricably about the nature and structure of feminism itself, from the consciousness-­raising speak-­outs of the Women’s Liberation Movement to the relationship of feminism to the state. Whilst rape is, of course, a material reality, it is also a discourse (Gavey 2005): how we experience rape is at least partly determined by how we are able to understand it. The language of rape (Ehrlich 2001) constructs a field in and through which experiences of ­rape – p ­ articularly but not exclusively the experiences of female victim/ survivors and male ­perpetrators – ­can/not be understood and therefore actioned. Thus, feminist theory and research around rape and sexual violence, although most typically located in the social sciences, do not only reside there, and much important work has come from other disciplinary traditions, particular those that study representation. In the context of this volume, it should go without saying that feminist activism, research and theory have been genuinely ground-­breaking and life-­changing in the ways in which they have documented and challenged rape and other forms of sexual violence. At its best, feminist work has done this in a way which has centred victim/survivors, allowed for varied experiences to be heard and understood, and provided practical support and advocacy. Within feminist debate there is a clear understanding that women’s experiences of sexual violence are both diverse and connected. off violent acts to repeated, routinized Diverse in r­ange – f­rom one-­ instances of sexual violence, assault and harassment across a l­ifetime – ­these are nevertheless connected points on what Liz Kelly (1988) influentially called the ‘continuum of sexual violence’. This continuum both exists within any individual woman’s lifetime and connects different women’s experiences under patriarchy, even as these experiences are differentiated in relation to overarching socio-­political structures (for example, in conditions of war or systems of slavery) as well as through the intersections of gender with other structural forms of oppression such as race, dis/ability, age or sexuality. This is the ground on which this chapter is built; but my focus here is more narrowly to survey feminist debates about the sex of sexual violence. 101

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102  Handbook on gender and violence Although this chapter adopts a structure which is broadly c­ hronological – ­moving from an analysis of rape as violence-­not-­sex originating in the 1970s through to a reconsideration of the sex of sexual violence from the 1980s ­onwards – ­this is by no means a strictly linear movement. I am writing this in 2018, around the first anniversary of the publication of sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Since Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s New York Times article was published in October 2017, barely a day has gone by without a linked media story. ­Feminism – ­or more accurately, a popular understanding of ­feminism – ­is the ground on which much of the coverage of the Weinstein case, and the subsequent explosion of survivor discourse under the banner #MeToo, has been constructed. It therefore provides useful examples, throughout this chapter, for working through some of the tensions in the way that feminists have engaged with questions about the sex of sexual violence.

VIOLENCE, NOT SEX A view still commonly attributed to feminists in popular discourse around rape is that rape is about violence, not sex. This formulation seems to have its origins in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (first published in 1975), o ­ r – ­perhaps more a­ ccurately – ­in the way the arguments of the book were taken up both in feminist campaigning and in popular discourse. Tellingly, in the personal statement that prefaces Against Our Will, Brownmiller positions herself as ‘a woman who changed her mind about rape’ (1986, p. 9). Brownmiller’s trajectory, as sketched in these few pages, is from being a journalist ‘who viewed a rape case with suspicion’, who then listened sceptically to friends’ accounts of rape, before her ‘moment of revelation’ at a public speak-­out on rape (1986, pp. 7–9). This context is important as it highlights the extent to which the violence-­not-­sex analysis is a reactive one, emerging from a context in which rape is not taken seriously, and women’s stories are not heard or believed. Louise ­Armstrong – w ­ hose work on incest I will return to ­shortly –n ­ otes that early second-­wave feminists developed their analysis of men’s violence against women and girls in a context where that violence was variously ‘permitted’ or ‘denied’ (1996, p. 17). So, for instance, at the time Brownmiller’s book was w ­ ritten – a­ nd indeed, into the 1990s in both the US and the ­UK – ­men could not be charged with the rape of women they were married to. The marital rape exemption was based on an historical understanding of women as men’s property, and a man was permitted to do as he liked with his property. This notion of women as chattel has not

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The sex of sexual violence  ­103 entirely gone away; this idea permeates many accounts of violence against women in prostitution where the man’s purchase is deemed to license his actions (or ‘permit’, in Armstrong’s phrase), and the woman’s acceptance of payment is suggested to invalidate the possibility of abuse. The denial of abuse, on the other hand, is the reconstruction of an abuse narrative to mean something else. Armstrong’s example here is Freud’s re-­writing of the evidence of incest presented by his female patients, which he reconstructed as fantasy-­not-­abuse (1996, pp. 16–17). Together, these examples demonstrate that the feminist framing of rape as violence-­not-­sex was (and is) a response to a context in which rape was seen only as sex, based on its meaning for men and ignoring the experiences of the women and children they abused. This context is now typically referred to by feminists as a ‘rape culture’ (Buchwald et al. 1993) and, indeed, this is a term which has gained popular currency in English-­language news media since the early 2010s (Phillips 2017). In her helpful overview of feminist theorizations of rape, Rebecca Whisnant (2017) suggests that feminists moved on from the violence-­not-­ sex position fairly quickly as its limitations became clear. The most significant of these limitations was that emphasizing violence and, relatedly, injury reified popular misconceptions of rape as a rare and extreme crime. This downplayed much of what feminists had learned from the speak-­ outs, both about the everyday, routinized nature of much rape and sexual assault and about women’s strategies for survival. The construction of rape as a crime of violence-­not-­sex was also one that many women struggled to square with their own experiences and, as Catharine MacKinnon (1987, pp. 85–92) argued, downplayed the interconnectedness of violence and (hetero)sex in a patriarchal context. However, Whisnant perhaps understates the extent to which the violence-­not-­sex position influenced the development of service provision for victim/survivors and the wider popular discourse about rape. For example, in her ongoing work on the history of the feminist anti-­violence movement in Scotland, Jenny Wartnaby demonstrates that the emphasis on rape as a crime of violence – not s­ ex – ­permeated materials produced by local rape crisis centres in the early 1980s.1 Partially responding to critiques outlined above, there was a broadening out of violence-­not-­sex to power-­not-­sex in certain contexts. Although there are important distinctions between these positions, for my purposes here it is the fact that they are united in constructing sexual violence as not sex that is most significant. Nor is this an historical curiosity: this formulation is still very much 1   Jenny Wartnaby is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde, and these findings derive from her doctoral research.

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104  Handbook on gender and violence in use in frontline services, often in the context of challenging rape myths. Similarly, the violence (or power), not sex, formulation was in evidence in some feminist responses to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Here, the insistence that this was not about sex was a means of insisting on the seriousness of his actions against a cultural context that had for decades condoned his abuse (as just sex). It was also an understandable response to Weinstein’s own initial statement in relation to the allegations in which he presented himself as a man out of touch with changing sexual mores, attempting to reframe the story as one about sexual morality and conduct, not violence and the abuse of power. One of the enduring legacies of the violence-­not-­sex framing is the emphasis on the trauma of rape and the positioning of women as victims, not survivors. Again, these legacies have played out in responses to the women accusing Weinstein as well as the many millions more who asserted #MeToo in 2017. With a wide range of male behaviour under scrutiny, this has ­been – ­in many ­ways – ­a moment when the feminist analysis of the continuum of men’s violences has been at the forefront, as I discuss in the next section. At the same time, a popular discourse in which ‘real’ rape (Estrich 1987) and sexual assault are always and only devastating (and, so, rare) clashes with the assertion that rape and sexual assault take many forms and are depressingly ­routine – s­ omething feminists have been documenting for decades, but which has taken on a new urgency in light of #MeToo. These tensions have, for instance, played out in the circulation of photographs of Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd with Weinstein after he had allegedly assaulted them. Stereotypical ideas about ‘real’ rape do not map onto these glamorous red carpet photographs, and have been used by Weinstein supporters (and, indeed, by his legal team) to cast doubt on the rape narratives. The logic here seems to be that because the women are pictured smiling with Weinstein at public events, they can’t possibly be ‘real’ victims of sexual abuse at his hands. Their survival in and of itself places their account in doubt, but their continued existence in the glamorous and sexualized realm of Hollywood is even more troubling: because they publicly present themselves in this sexualized context, doubt is cast on their account of violence. Sexualization trumps violence, as feminists working on rape representation in mainstream media have documented for decades (see, for example, Estrich 1987; Benedict 1992; Boyle 2005). It is important to be clear that I in no way want to minimize the trauma, as well as physical or economic harms, that many women experience as a result of rape or other forms of sexual assault. Nor do I want to suggest that there is no longer a need to speak of this trauma in the public sphere. Given the shame which continues to adhere to sexual victimization, speaking out remains important both for (some) individual survivors and for

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The sex of sexual violence  ­105 any feminist understanding o ­ f – a­ nd response ­to – r­ ape and other forms of sexual assault. What I am reacting against here is, instead, a universalizing narrative around rape trauma which is the legacy of the emphasis on violence. If rape is consistently presented as the worst possible thing that could happen to a woman, then women’s survival and ability to speak out is automatically suspect. Moreover, this is simultaneously an individualizing narrative with personal and ­psychological – ­not social, political, ­cultural – ­solutions. This is brilliantly illustrated by Louise Armstrong in her book Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest (1996). Armstrong was among the first women in the US to speak publicly about i­ ncest – ­or, more accurately, to speak and be heard (1996, p. 2) – and her 1978 book Kiss Daddy Goodnight was foundational. In Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics, Armstrong explores how, in the intervening years, the public silence (and silencing) of the issue was transformed into apparently endless noise. ­Incest – p ­ articularly in its most sensational and unusual forms (its most recognizably violent and injurious forms) – ­increasingly came to occupy centre stage in media contexts from talk shows to soap operas. These media treatments, she notes, were not only sensationalist but also, crucially, consistently emphasized personal trauma and enduring psychological impacts. Her argument is that this defused the specifically feminist analysis at the heart of the original speak-­outs on the issue: the understanding that, by sharing experiences, women were forging a structural analysis of their position in a patriarchal society (Armstrong 1996, p.  11). As Armstrong memorably argues, as the issue was more widely taken up, this feminist recognition that the personal is political was lost. No longer part of a wider feminist analysis, the emphasis was simply on the imperative to speak: ‘the personal ­is – ­the public’, as though publicity was the end in itself (1996, p. 3). Subsequently, the emphasis on therapy effected yet another transformation: ‘The personal i­s – t­ he personal’ (1996, p. 38). Armstrong’s work is a salutary reminder of the double-­edged sword of speaking out in a heavily mediated context. Her writing also raises important questions about what gets lost with the emphasis on the sensational and devastating. As feminist research in this area continually emphasizes, there is no one ­way – a­ nd certainly no right ­way – ­to survive rape, and a universalizing narrative can make it more difficult for some women to name their own experiences and so to seek appropriate support and redress (Estrich 1987; Gavey 2005). However, the development of feminist research and theory around men’s violence against women ­has – ­in different ­ways – a­ lso retained the legacy of the violence-­not-­sex position. Although violence and crime are not synonymous, the ‘focus on crime’ – which Liz Kelly (2012, p. xix) identifies in feminist interventions

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106  Handbook on gender and violence from the late 1980s ­onwards – ­can be understood as part of the same reaction against the routine minimization of women’s experiences and the insistence on taking them seriously. For Kelly, one of the consequences of this emphasis has been that ‘research, policy and practice has concentrated on intimate partner violence and, to a lesser extent, sexual assault’ (2012, p. xix), meaning that the ‘everyday, routine intimate intrusions’ which women experience largely slipped from the agenda. And there are other implications antithetical to a feminist politics. Alison Phipps (2014, p. 41), for example, argues that international activism on violence against ­women – ­couched in the language of c­ rime – c­ an be co-­opted in neo-­conservative rhetoric to justify culturally, politically and economically imperialist projects. In a similar vein, Kristin Bumiller (2008) explores the ways in which feminist anti-­violence movements have become publicly and politically associated with crime control, something that has racialized implications, particularly in a US context. Arguing that rape is violence-­not-­sex has ­been – ­and ­is – ­an important strategy for insisting on the (criminal) significance of rape and the necessity of focusing on women’s experiences of what men experience as sex in contexts where rape is permitted and/or denied. It remains the case that when something is seen as ‘sex’ it is very difficult to at the same time insist that it is also violence: sex makes violence invisible as such. In my own research, the clearest examples I have found of this are in the way the porn industry talks about the abuse of female performers. The industry is more than willing to acknowledge that its production practices are abusive. However, by framing these narratives as s­ex – a­ nd as sex to which the women ­consent – a­ ny harm is rendered invisible; harm becomes, instead, part of the sexual appeal of porn itself (Boyle 2011). Nonetheless, as I have demonstrated in this section, the legacy of the violence-­not-­sex approach has been to leave marginalized many women’s experiences of rape which do ­not – o ­ r do not s­ traightforwardly – f­it this model, and to emphasize crime and state responses. In the next section, I explore how and why feminists put sex back into sexual violence.

THE VIOLENCE OF (HETERO)SEX If one of the reasons for feminist framing of rape as violence not sex was to overturn the dominant understanding of rape as experienced by men (in other words, as sex), then it may seem counterintuitive that the sex of sexual violence was to become so central to feminist approaches from the 1980s onwards. Catharine M ­ acKinnon – ­one of the key theorists of the sex of ­rape – ­clarifies the feminist rationale for this shift perfectly,

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The sex of sexual violence  ­107 however. MacKinnon argues that by seeing rape as violence-­ not-­ sex ‘we fail to criticize what has been made of sex, what has been done to us through sex, because we leave the line between rape and intercourse, sexual harassment and sex roles, pornography and eroticism right where it is’ (1987, pp. 86–87). For MacKinnon, it is important for feminists to understand the sex of sexual violence because sexual violence is a large part of what (hetero)sex means – to women as well as to ­men – ­in a patriarchal context. Part of the evidence that MacKinnon and others have drawn on in developing these arguments is the testimonies of victim/survivors who have experienced the violence done to them as sexual, with sometimes enduring implications for the ways in which they experience sex. However, this argument does not solely hinge on victim/survivor experience. Rather, it asks us to consider how heterosex is made meaningful in the context of unequal gender relations in patriarchal contexts. This means understanding certain commonalities between ‘what has been made of’ consensual heterosex and sexual violence, as well as considering the ways in which socio-­cultural understandings of heterosex and gender roles more broadly provide the ground on which sexual violence occurs. In exploring these arguments in this section, I will draw upon Liz Kelly’s work on the continuum of sexual violence (1988) and, in considering the broader contexts in which we all make sense of sexual violence, gesture towards her later work (2005), which explores the conducive context contemporary societies provide for sexual violence. First, however, a caveat: it is not only women who are victim/survivors of sexual violence; nor is it the case that sexual assault is exclusive to heterosexual contexts. Measuring sexual violence incidence and prevalence is notoriously fraught, but a consistent pattern which does emerge across time and place is that sexual violence is disproportionately experienced by women and perpetrated by men (Walby et al. 2017). A feminist analysis is first and foremost about seeing these as gendered patterns: to paraphrase MacKinnon, sexual violence exists because of what has been made of gender. As R.W. Connell argues: Most men do not attack or harass women; but those who do are unlikely to think themselves deviant. On the contrary they usually feel they are entirely justified, that they are exercising a right. They are authorized by an ideology of supremacy. (1995, p. 83)

In other words, violence against women is entirely compatible with how masculinity, and heterosexual masculinity specifically, is personally, politically, culturally and socially enacted. Although Brownmiller is often credited with advocating the violence-­not-­sex position, her ­understanding of rape as linked to gendered power relations is consistent with this

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108  Handbook on gender and violence approach. For Brownmiller, after all, rape is ‘nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’ (1986, p. 15). In this context, it is not only men who experience sexual violence as sexual: women too have come to understand an inextricable link between (hetero)sex and violence. Here I want to turn to Liz Kelly’s influential work on women’s experiences of sexual violence in which she argues that the pervasive nature of men’s sexual violence means that women make sense of individual actions in relation to a continuum of related experiences across a lifetime. For Kelly, the continuum can allow us to identify a ‘basic common character that underlies many different events’ and/ or ‘a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another and cannot be readily distinguished’ (1988, p.  76). Importantly, Kelly’s research points to the way that experiences that the women in her study did not necessarily define as sexual violence were essential elements of this continuum, shaping how they did understand more readily recognizable acts of sexual violence. Kelly’s work decentres legalistic definitions to instead emphasize women’s understandings of their experiences, including the ways in which women make sense of sexual violence in relation to their experiences and expectations of gender and (hetero)sexuality. This can mean understanding rape on a continuum with other sexual experiences: a continuum of choice and coercion. This understanding of the continuum has, for instance, underpinned work on forced marriage by Sundari Anitha and Aisha Gill. They refer to consent and coercion in relation to marriage as ‘two ends of a continuum, between which lie degrees of socio-­cultural expectation, control, persuasion, pressure, threat and force’ (Anitha and Gill 2009, p. 165). As with the research which led Kelly to propose the continuum (1988), Anitha and Gill are able to highlight important connections between women’s ­ f constraints on marital c­ onsent – ­and criminal, everyday ­experiences – o violent acts against them. They are concerned with dismantling binary ways of thinking which have disadvantaged women (not least in the legal system) when their experiences have occupied a ‘grey area’ in-­between coercion and consent. How feminists name and conceptualize experiences that fall in these ‘grey areas’ remains a live question. If an act fits a legal definition of rape, for instance, to what extent is it helpful for feminists to insist on using the language of rape even if women themselves do not think of it in that way? Many feminist theorists now use a range of terms which are more organic to women’s lived experiences. For instance, in her book Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (2005), in which she draws on a number of studies with women about their experiences of sexual violence and

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The sex of sexual violence  ­109 of sex, Nicole Gavey deploys a range of different terms to capture the complexities in the ways women narrate these experiences. These terms include: forced sex, unwanted sex, coerced sex, unjust sex, obligatory sex and sort-­of-­rape. This is not to say these experiences are not also rape; but to recognize that conceptualizing them only through a criminal lens does not necessarily do justice to women’s experiences, particularly when these involve known men. Fiona Vera-­Gray’s recent work on street harassment is similarly concerned with ‘the project of defining the world from women’s phenomenological position’ (2016, p.  2). Vera-­Gray is interested in women’s daily ­experiences – ­precisely the kind of experiences the emphasis on violence and crime can ­obscure – ­and this leads her to reconceptualize street harassment as intrusion and, specifically, men’s intrusion. It may seem surprising that by centring women’s daily, lived experiences Vera-­Gray chooses a language that centres men’s behaviour. However, Vera-­Gray notes that in a context where women learn to see themselves as sexual objects, intrusions such as catcalling may at times be experienced as wanted or desired: this does not, she argues, mean that they cannot also have negative impacts. She argues, ‘in practicing intrusion [men] are unaware of whether particular practices are wanted by individual women’ (2016, p. 7). In other words, she focuses on the sense of (sexual) entitlement underpinning men’s behaviour in contexts where consent is never sought, and on the routine adjustments women make to their own behaviour to manage, ameliorate and avoid these behaviours. It is important to note here that in Kelly’s original conceptualization of the continuum she is clear that placing women’s experiences on a continuum is not intended to establish a hierarchy of seriousness or injury (with the exception of sexual murder). Echoing Vera-­Gray’s work, popular discussions around the #MeToo movement have similarly demonstrated that sexual harassment does not need to involve physical violence or sexual assault for it to have both material and psychological impacts. Speaking on the BBC panel show Have I Got News For You (3 November 2017), comedian Jo Brand captured this point beautifully in her response to a male panellist’s dismissive comment that emerging abuse allegations in the Westminster Parliament were not ‘high-­level crimes’: I know it’s not high level, but it doesn’t have to be high level for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the House of Commons. And actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up. And that wears you down.

#MeToo has been highly effective in bringing to the fore exactly these kinds of experiences and the ongoing work this requires from women to

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110  Handbook on gender and violence continually make judgements about safety and risk in public and private interactions. #WhyIDidntReport, a hashtag which emerged in response to Donald Trump’s dismissal of sexual assault allegations against his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, has further extended this conversation. The #WhyIDidntReport responses have, amongst other things, pointed to the myriad ways in which women internalize men’s sexual entitlement to their bodies and accept responsibility for men’s sexual arousal. This equation of women with sex makes speaking out about sexual violence doubly hazardous for women as it simultaneously, and at times contradictorily, positions us as victims and as sexual temptresses, bearing the responsibility (and, so, shame and guilt) for sex, but none of the desire. In this context, it should not be surprising that many women marginalize the public significance of the sexual assaults they experience (for example, by not reporting) whilst internalizing the impacts of these assaults. These accounts also provide compelling evidence that just because something is experienced or recognized by victim/survivors to be sexual, does not mean it is necessarily experienced as pleasurable. Women have a lot of sex they do not want and do not enjoy, and do so for a variety of reasons ranging from explicit force to gendered expectations of appropriate behaviour: this is the continuum of choice and coercion. It is equally important to note that Kelly’s continuum is about establishing connections, not about stating equivalence. Some of the popular backlash against #MeToo has distorted this aspect of the argument to suggest that feminists are incapable of telling the difference between ­unwanted – ­or ­intrusive – s­ exual touching and rape. In a longer discussion of the use of the continuum in feminist theory (Boyle 2019), I have argued that this is why it is important to think of continuums in the plural. So, for instance, the continuum of choice and coercion in heterosexual interactions which Anitha and Gill refer to above may intersect with but is not identical to a continuum of sexual violence which brings together women’s experiences of non-­consensual activity. What I refer to as ‘continuum thinking’ in feminist theory should be precisely about establishing connections that allow us to see broader patterns: it is not about suggesting that different experiences on the continuum are equivalent. This approach allows us to see the contexts in which (hetero)sex and violence are interrelated, without conflating one with the other. Thus we don’t have to replace violence-­ not-­sex with sex-­is-­violence: we can rather understand the violence that is made of sex as different points on a continuum which opens up a critique of heterosex in patriarchy without insisting that heterosex is always and only violence. Continuum thinking, then, is about seeing connections (not equiva-

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The sex of sexual violence  ­111 lences), and it should also be distinguished from analogous thinking. Ironically, as MacKinnon was so influential in putting the sex back into sexual violence in feminist theory, some of her subsequent work has sought to make more analogous connections. She has, for instance, argued for conceptualizing rape as torture (1993), and she is not alone in this approach, with other feminist scholars making compelling connections between global terrorism and domestic abuse (see, for example, Pain 2012, 2014). However, situating rape and domestic ­abuse – ­most commonly experienced by women in ­private – ­in relation to hostage-­taking, torture and terrorism runs the risk that women’s experiences of male violence can only be recognized analogously when they can be related to experiences of violence in which victims are not, typically, targeted because of their gender. As Clare McGlynn (2008) notes in relation to MacKinnon’s rape-­as-­torture argument, there is also a danger that using such extreme analogies disguises or minimizes experiences of male violence, which do not cause explicit or long-­term injury or fear. This can also make women more reluctant to name or report their own experiences if these did not also involve explicit physical violence or injury (Gavey 2005): precisely the problem that feminist critics have observed with the violence-­not-­sex position. There is an additional paradox inherent in this analogous thinking in that it risks making men’s violence against women most visible when its gendered dimension is denied and when it looks most like men’s own experiences of extreme violence (also Nayak and Suchland 2006, p. 472; Cameron 2018). Finally, it is also significant to note that Kelly always envisaged continuum thinking as applicable to men’s behaviour as well as female experience, to allow us to explore and expose the interrelationships between what is constructed as ‘normal’ and ‘aberrant’ for men (Kelly 1988, p. 75), as also suggested in the quotation from R.W. Connell at the beginning of this section. I have already noted how, in his initial response to sexual assault allegations, Harvey Weinstein drew on precisely this notion of a continuum of more or less acceptable behaviour to claim that he misunderstood where to draw the line. This allowed him to suggest that his crime was one of sexual misreading rather than criminal violence. This has been a fairly common response from high-­profile men accused of sexual harassment and assault (and their defenders) in this period: to refute the abusive nature of their behaviour by insisting that it was simply the norm in a particular time period, work context or social group. And, on this point, there is a certain agreement between feminists and sexual violence apologists. What Weinstein and feminist theorists arguably share is an understanding that his behaviour was not inappropriate according to patriarchal logic, but rather an expression of what men are promised, what they are

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112  Handbook on gender and violence continually told about their position in the sexual order. Of course, where Weinstein and feminist theorists differ is in what responsibility we think individual men should bear for this. That rape is a system which benefits all ­men – a­ s Brownmiller ­argued – ­does not mean that individual men are not responsible for their own behaviours within the wider conducive context provided by rape culture.

CONCLUSION As this chapter has demonstrated, how we think about the sex and the violence of sexual violence remain vexed questions for feminism. However, that there are different approaches to these questions does not mean that we cannot extract some broad principles. First, feminist activism, research and thinking around sexual violence and rape has always aimed to transform women’s lives, and this means that it must respond to the wider contexts in which sexual violence and rape are (mis)understood. The violence-­not-­sex (or, relatedly, power-­not-­ sex) position which originated in feminist thinking has fulfilled a particular function in contexts where to acknowledge the sexual has, in common practice, meant a simultaneous denial of the violence. That this position has never entirely gone away, despite well-­documented limitations, should not be surprising as the sex-­not-­violence frame it was reacting against has also persisted. However, the sex of sexual violence has long been a feminist concern: how rape and sexual assault are experienced and understood are contingent on ‘what has been made of sex’, to use MacKinnon’s helpful formulation. A second principle of feminist work in this area can therefore be identified as a recognition that sexual assault is never experienced in a vacuum. A third principle that follows from this is that the contexts which are most salient to understanding specific instances of rape and sexual assault will vary. This is enshrined in what I have, following Kelly, called continuum thinking: the feminist push to see the ways in which different aspects of women’s experiences are linked, without insisting on false equivalences between them. Finally, the arguments outlined in this chapter point to the need for ongoing action on multiple fronts. Justice for women within the criminal courts remains important, but an exclusive focus on the criminal justice system or other forms of legal or institutional redress does not allow us to see the whole picture of rape and sexual assault. One size does not fit all, but what should remain consistent across feminist approaches is an understanding of how rape and sexual assault function within a gendered

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The sex of sexual violence  ­113 social order. If the meaning of rape and sexual assault is indivisible from ‘what has been made of’ heterosex, it is equally bound up in ‘what has been made of’ gender. This must also be accompanied by a commitment to recognizing the diversity of women’s experiences even as we acknowledge their common characteristics, and a determination to both support victim/ survivors and challenge perpetrators.

REFERENCES Anitha, S. and A. Gill (2009) ‘Coercion, consent and the forced marriage debate in the UK’, Feminist Legal Studies, 17 (2), 165–184. Armstrong, L. (1978) Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speak Out on Incest, New York: Pocket Books. Armstrong, L. (1996) Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest, London: The Women’s Press. Benedict, H. (1992) Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Cover Sex Crimes, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyle, K. (2005) Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Boyle, K. (2011) ‘Producing abuse: selling the harms of pornography’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 34 (6), 593–602. Boyle, K. (2019) ‘What’s in a name? Theorising the inter-­relationships of gender and violence’, Feminist Theory, 20 (1), 19–36. Brownmiller, S. (1975/1986) Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, London: Pelican. Buchwald, E., P.R. Fletcher and M. Roth (eds) (1993) Transforming a Rape Culture, Minneapolis: Milkweed. Bumiller, K. (2008) In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cameron, D. (2018) ‘Is “terrorism” the Right Word?’ Language: A Feminist Guide blog, 1 May, accessed 25 September 2018 at https://debuk.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/is-­terror ism-­the-­right-­word/. Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity. Ehrlich, S. (2001) Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent, London: Routledge. Estrich, S. (1987) Real Rape, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gavey, N. (2005) Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape, London and New York: Routledge. Kantor, J. and M. Twohey (2017) ‘Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades’, New York Times, 5 October, accessed 25 September 2018 at https://www. nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-­weinstein-­harassment-­allegations.html. Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence, Cambridge: Polity. Kelly, L. (2005) Fertile Fields: Trafficking in Persons in Central Asia, Vienna: International Organization for Migration. Kelly, L. (2012) ‘Standing the test of time? Reflections on the concept of the continuum of sexual violence’, in J.M. Brown and S.L. Walklate (eds) Handbook on Sexual Violence, London: Routledge, pp. xvii–xxvi. MacKinnon, C. (1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, C. (1993) ‘On torture: a feminist perspective on human rights’ in K.E. Mahoney and P. Mahoney (eds) Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Challenge, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 21–31. McGlynn, C. (2008) ‘Rape as “torture”? Catharine MacKinnon and questions of feminist strategy’, Feminist Legal Studies, 16 (1), 71–85.

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114  Handbook on gender and violence Nayak, M. and J. Suchland (2006) ‘Gender violence and hegemonic projects’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8 (4), 467–485. Pain, R. (2012) ‘Everyday terrorism: how fear works in domestic abuse’, Scottish Women’s Aid report, accessed 1 May 2017 at http://www.scottishwomensaid.org.uk/node/145. Pain, R. (2014) ‘Everyday terrorism: connecting domestic violence and global terrorism’, Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 531–550. Phillips, N.D. (2017) Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Phipps, A. (2014) The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age. Cambridge: Polity. Vera-­Gray, F. (2016) Men’s Intrusion, Women’s Embodiment: A Critical Analysis of Street Harassment. London and New York: Routledge. Walby, S., J. Towers, S. Balderston, C. Corradi, B. Francis, M. Heiskanen, K. Helweg-­ Larsen, L. Mergaert, P. Olive, E. Palmer, H. Stöckl and S. Strid (2017) The Concept and Measurement of Violence Against Women and Men, Bristol: Policy Press. Whisnant, R. (2017) ‘Feminist perspectives on rape’ in E.N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 1 August 2018 at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2017/entries/feminism-­rape/.

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9. Patriarchy Kaye Quek

Whether advanced as a key analytical tool or the focus of substantial critique, the concept of patriarchy has formed a critical and remarkably constant feature of academic work on gender and violence. The origins of scholarly use of the term lie in the women’s liberation movements that developed in the global North in the 1960s and 1970s. In the feminist theorizing that emerged from this time, ‘patriarchy’ became a crucial framework for explaining women’s inequality to men at a systemic level, wherein gendered ­violence – ­specifically, male violence against ­women – ­was increasingly identified as both the product of a patriarchal social order and fundamental to its maintenance. From its beginnings in the social movement politics of the 1960s, the concept has been subjected to significant academic examination, while at the same time engendering a great deal of criticism. Particularly during the mid-­1980s to the early 2000s, the notion of patriarchy was deemed by many scholars to be too fraught with difficulty to be useful to analysis, and for a period of time critiques of the concept appeared to be far more common and influential than works advocating its uses. Critics have argued, most especially, that discussions linking ‘patriarchy’ to the issue of gendered violence are problematic because they tend to engage in totalizing, essentializing and ahistorical discourses. The result is analyses that fail to account for specificities of culture and context, the differences between and among men as a group (as well as those amongst women as a group), and the role of individual agency in recreating and resisting gendered violence. Despite these concerns, however, ­patriarchy – a­ nd associated ideas of male dominance and female s­ ubordination – ­continues to be employed by those working in the field of gender and violence, often with considered efforts to address earlier shortcomings. The growing body of recent theoretical and empirical research that draws on the notion of patriarchy to explain and describe a wide range of gendered forms of ­violence – ­including but also extending beyond male violence against ­women – ­points to the ongoing viability and relevance of the term. This chapter examines the origins of ‘patriarchy’ in academic work on violence and gender, focusing in particular on second-­wave feminist analyses that conceptualize practices of sexual violence, such as rape, as critical to the continuation of patriarchy as a socio-­political system. It also considers major critiques 115

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116  Handbook on gender and violence levelled at scholarly use of the term, as well as efforts to revive ‘patriarchy’ as a conceptual means to understand and explain various acts of gendered harm. Although debate continues as to precisely how patriarchy is manifest and perpetuated in acts of gender-­based force and coercion, it can be seen that, as a framework for analysis, ‘patriarchy’ continues to shape much contemporary scholarship on violence and gender.

EARLY ACCOUNTS OF ‘PATRIARCHY’ AND ITS LINKS TO GENDERED VIOLENCE While in literal terms ‘patriarchy’ means ‘rule of the father’ or other male head, feminist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century extended the concept to refer to, and describe, the social and political system of male domination and female subordination. That is to say, in feminist scholarship from the 1960s onwards, patriarchy became synonymous with a system of power in which male privilege and superiority over women are manifest, institutionalized, and self-­reproducing across a society as a whole. The development of feminist theorizing about patriarchy revolutionized the way in which many activists and academics alike understood women’s social, political and economic inequality to men. The concept redefined what might otherwise be seen as mundane, individualized and disparate instances of women’s oppression as in fact systemic and as critical to reinforcing the lesser status and power experienced by women, as a group. Patriarchy was seen to be operating alongside other large-­scale systems of oppression such as capitalism and racism, although the emphasis of feminist analyses and understanding of the relationship between these systems varied depending on the theoretical background and assumptions of the scholar. For radical feminist theorists, patriarchy and female subordination were seen as the more primary forms of oppression, preceding, for instance, inequalities based on race or class. In contrast, socialist or materialist feminists, coming from a Marxist tradition, tended to theorize patriarchy as a by-­product of the capitalist system, which relies on and exploits women’s unpaid labour in the family and at home. Even with their differing emphases, however, for feminist scholars adopting and employing the notion of patriarchy as an analytic tool, the framework provided a new strategic model and language for explaining the conditions of women’s inequality. It formed what Maria Mies (1986, p. 37) describes as a ‘struggle concept’, offering ‘a term by which the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women, could be expressed as well as their systemic character’.

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Patriarchy  ­117 Early feminist theorizing about patriarchy recognized gendered ­violence – ­conceived and defined principally as male violence against w ­ omen – ­as important to the maintenance of a patriarchal society. Kate Millett’s 1969 work Sexual Politics, which is often regarded as the first scholarly feminist account of patriarchal power, is a prime example. In the text, Millett identifies ‘force’ as one aspect of patriarchal control over women, which functions in tandem with and underpins major social institutions crucial to the system of male dominance such as the family, the state, ideology and culture. In offering a preliminary theory of patriarchy (Millett 2000 [1969], p. 24), she acknowledges that force is not something that one might immediately associate with patriarchal power, since ‘so perfect is [patriarchy’s] system of socialization [. . .] that it scarcely seems to require violent implementation’ (2000 [1969], p. 43). Yet Millett’s analysis clearly identifies male violence as one of the platforms on which the broader structure of patriarchy rests. She argues, ‘control in patriarchal society would be imperfect, even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon, both in emergencies and as an ever-­present instrument of intimidation’ (2000 [1969], p. 43). The continued existence and threat of violence, and the fact that this violence is gendered (most often involving male perpetrators and female victims) is highly significant, Millett explains. It not only differently influences the social reality and lived experiences of women and men, bearing ‘the most far-­reaching effects on the social and psychological behavior of both sexes’ (2000 [1969], p. 44), but also suggests that the very system of male dominance could not exist without the potentiality, if not actuality, of male force. Other works that offer initial theorizations of patriarchy from the era similarly acknowledge the role of gender-­based violence in upholding an overarching system of male power. Writing in the early 1970s, for instance, theorists such as Juliet Mitchell (1971) and Sheila Rowbotham (1973) both identify the physical coercion of women, or the threat thereof, as elements present in a patriarchal society. The emphasis of their analyses, however, is on locating sources of male dominance in socio-­economic structures such as the family and in its associated ideologies and practices, with the specific problem of male violence against women (and other subordinates) comprising more of a secondary concern (see Edwards 1987). This was to change significantly in the body of feminist theorizing on patriarchy, most often associated with radical feminist thought, that emerged soon after and would continue to develop into the 1980s, in which the phenomenon of gendered violence often formed the very basis of feminist analyses of systems of male power.

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118  Handbook on gender and violence

VIOLENCE UNDER PATRIARCHY AND THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF WOMEN As feminist theorizing on patriarchy continued to evolve and expand, so too did the significance of gender-­based force and coercion in the analyses of many works. Indeed, one of the major conceptual insights to emerge from second-­wave feminist thought was the understanding of male violence against women as an institutional rather than individual problem, and thus as forming a fundamental s­tructure – ­if not the ­fundamental ­structure – o ­ f patriarchal power. This latter perspective became especially prevalent in the writing of radical feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, many of whom began to focus their theorizing of patriarchy principally on male physical and sexual violence against women, conceptualizing such phenomena as a form of male social control of women. Developments in feminist theory on rape at the time illustrate the central place that gender-­based violence came to hold in many second-­wave conceptions of patriarchy. Through the process of consciousness-­raising, where women came together to discuss and analyse their shared experiences of male oppression, feminist scholars and activists developed a perspective on rape that understood the act as inherently political and sustaining of a system of male dominance. The work of theorists such as Susan Brownmiller (1975), Susan Griffin (1977) and Diana Russell (1975) exemplifies the feminist reconceptualization of rape as patriarchal practice. Rape, it was explained, as a gendered occurrence in which most perpetrators are men and most victims are women, not only harms individual women who are subjected to the crime but also functions to restrict the autonomy and maintain the subordinate status of women as a social group. It does so through the social meanings or messages it conveys about women and to women, as a whole. In one sense, rape reinforces the lesser power, value and position of women in the hierarchy between the sexes by confirming that women exist to be (sexually) used and dominated by men. It further serves patriarchal interests by rendering women compliant via fear. That is, the threat of rape operates to encourage women to regulate their behaviour to prevent being raped, in line with patriarchal dictates that suggest that this is something women can control. Women’s lives and opportunities are therefore diminished by the practice of rape, even if they have not directly experienced male sexual violence, due to the restrictions it places on women’s freedom of action and movement, and from the expenditure of time and energy it requires of women to alter their behaviour (regarding, for instance, what clothes they wear and the places they go) in an effort to avoid being raped.

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Patriarchy  ­119 The construction of ‘good’ or appropriate female behaviour (or femininity) under patriarchy is significant to the feminist conceptualization of rape as patriarchal practice that developed during this period. As scholars such as Russell observe, in patriarchal societies women’s decisions and behaviours are subject to unwritten rules that construct ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women and femininities. ‘Good’ women are those who are deemed virtuous and worthy of (supposed) protection from rape through relationships with individual men (such as husbands, boyfriends, and so on). ‘Bad’ women, in contrast, are those who get raped, having eschewed offers of (supposed) male protection or having engaged in ‘rape-­inviting’ or unworthy conduct (for example, via dress, social interaction, physical location, and so on). The patriarchal construction of acceptable and unacceptable female behaviour in relation to rape works to reinforce the broader system of male dominance on multiple levels. On the one hand, it serves to exact women’s acquiescence to patriarchal demands and expectations about appropriate womanhood and femininity, which construct women and the female body as passive, weak and dependent on a male protector. This construction itself, however, is reliant on a myth, given that, as Russell (1975, p. 35) explains, ‘[g]ood girls get raped, too’, and when they do, it is most often by those they trust (for example, husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and so on). Furthermore, the good girl/bad girl dichotomy under patriarchy positions women as responsible for being raped no matter the circumstances, thereby obscuring and disguising the enactment and reproduction of male dominance through rape. Under such a system, the benefit to men as a social group exists whether or not individual men themselves are rapists. Those who are not rapists gain from the compliance and dependency on men that the practice compels of women, as well as from the competitive advantage obtained from not having to engage in rape-­avoiding behaviours (or at least not to the same extent) that women are coerced to undertake. In view of such considerations, Brownmiller famously argued that: ‘Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’ (1975, p. 15; original emphasis). The social control of women by men via rape was thus identified as a key underwriting structure of patriarchal domination. The feminist reconceptualization of rape as an instrument of patriarchal power soon led to an analysis of sexual violence, more generally, as integral to the maintenance and expression of the overall system of patriarchy. Many scholars began to use the term ‘sexual violence’ to refer to both physical and sexual abuse committed by men against women (see, for example, Kelly 1987) in recognition of the fact that, for many victims, the two are often not easily distinguishable (for example, a victim is often

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120  Handbook on gender and violence beaten and raped in one incident), and to acknowledge the gendered nature of such abuse (namely that it is violence most often enacted by one sex against ­another – ­that is, by men against women). From the period of the late 1970s, rape thus came to be theorized as but one (albeit critical) element of a broader culture in which sexual violence structures and shapes the very experience and reality of being a woman under patriarchy. The concept of sexual violence itself was redefined to include more ‘benign’ forms of male behaviour experienced by women as abuse (such as flashing and workplace sexual harassment) in addition to more obviously violent practices such as battery and rape, with the notion of a ‘continuum’ being employed by a growing number of theorists to capture the range of abuses encountered by women in the context of patriarchal societies (see, for example, Kelly 1988). The feminist understanding of the relationship between gendered violence and the perpetuation of patriarchy was thereby expanded to more fully account for the scope of male abuse to which women are exposed and subjected with impunity and ubiquitously in patriarchal contexts, across both the private and public spheres. As with rape, this range or continuum of violence was theorized as critical to the production and reproduction of the system of male dominance, through its effect of controlling and regulating women’s behaviour and in the limiting of their freedoms. The supposedly less harmful nature of some of these practices, however, was seen to highlight the particularly complex and sophisticated workings of patriarchy itself, and the especially insidious way in which such ‘lesser’ forms of violence nonetheless operate to underscore patriarchal power. In both extreme and apparently ‘less’ extreme cases of male violence, the threat, almost inasmuch as the act itself, was recognized as critical. Jalna Hanmer (1978, p. 229), for example, made the point that: The fact that many husbands do not beat their wives, and many men do not attack women on the streets [. . .] is not proof that wife-­beating and other assaults are irregular, unsystematic practices [. . .] but merely that it is not necessary to do so in order to maintain the privileges of the superior group.

The significance of sexual violence to the continuation and consolidation of male dominance was in this way identified as being located in both the pervasive and covert manner in which it serves to condition and restrict women’s lives, to the benefit of men. In later years, the radical feminist analysis of sexual violence as a method of male social control of women, and therefore critical to patriarchy, was further extended to theorize sexuality itself, and specifically heterosexuality, as politically constructed and a key site of patriarchal authority. This line of thinking drew on two main ideas: firstly, that (hetero)sexual

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Patriarchy  ­121 practice and expressions thereof under patriarchy are socially constructed, and moreover enacted so as to reflect the dynamic of male dominance and female subordination; and, secondly, that heterosexuality in the context of patriarchy operates as an institution and is effectively ‘compulsory’ (see, for example, MacKinnon 1982; Rich 1980). Male aggression and dominance, and female passivity and objectification, are therefore naturalized and sexualized via the institution of heterosexuality, to which there is no socially acceptable alternative, especially for women (for example, lesbianism, asexuality, and so on). In other words, and perhaps expressed more controversially, ordinary heterosexual practice is seen to rest on and reproduce male power and coercion. The eroticization of the ­dominance/submission model evident in normative heterosexual practice and promoted through social institutions such as pornography was held to reflect the sexual or gender-­based violence at the heart of heterosexuality. With these concerns in mind, many feminist s­ cholars – r­ adical as well as socialist/materialist (see Edwards 1987) – came to identify the arena of sexuality as a system of power through which male control of women is promoted and frequently realized. Subsequent works therefore sought to include major structures of heterosexuality, such as marriage and the family, in their theorizing of patriarchy, and, in doing so, highlighted the critical importance of male violence against women to its existence and continuation.

THE PATRIARCHAL STATE AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN An additional, important insight to emerge from the second-­wave understanding of sexual violence as pivotal to the maintenance of patriarchal power was the analysis of the state as complicit in upholding male violence against women, and therefore as an instrument of patriarchy itself. Having identified gender-­based violence as a critical platform through which male dominance is enacted and perpetuated, feminist scholars began to turn their attention to structures enabling such violence to occur, theorizing the state as a key institution. The role of the state in serving patriarchal interests via the protection of gender-­based force and coercion was evidenced by theorists in numerous contexts: from the criminal justice system’s unjust treatment of women in cases of wife battery and rape, divorce, sexual assault and workplace sexual harassment, to the response of authorities such as the police and the broader welfare state in situations of sexual violence (Hanmer 1978; MacKinnon 1987). Its failure to either prevent male harm to women or to offer suitable recourse and support

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122  Handbook on gender and violence when such abuse occurred formed the basis of feminist analyses of its patriarchal roots. Far from assisting women subjected to male violence, the many branches of government more often returned women to the very men who had enacted violence against them. In the context of an emerging ‘feminist theory of the state’ more g­ enerally – a­ nd analyses that identified major state structures such as the law as being written from a male perspective and therefore reflecting male concerns (MacKinnon 1987, 1989; Pateman 1988) – the issue of sexual violence provided a focal point for understanding how the state itself operated in the interests of patriarchy. The intersection of gender-­based violence and the vast inadequacy of state responses underscored the importance of sexual violence to the existence and continuation of the broader system of patriarchy, and the extensive measures in place in order to uphold it.

CHALLENGING ‘PATRIARCHY’ IN ACADEMIC WORK ON GENDER AND VIOLENCE The idea that patriarchy is based primarily on male violence against women has undergone significant academic examination, revision and, more often than not, critique since its emergence in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, for a period of time throughout the mid-­1980s to the early 2000s, the term was subject to such a degree of criticism that it was largely abandoned in feminist scholarship as a means of explaining and describing practices of gendered violence (see Pilcher and Whelehan 2004). The waning popularity of the concept coincided with the rise of feminist postmodernism in academia, which, in some instances, contested the very idea that ‘women’ and ‘men’ exist as discrete social groups, in turn invalidating patriarchy as an explanatory tool in accounting for women’s experiences of male violence. Much criticism lay in the notion that radical feminist use of the term, in particular, relied on unsubstantiated generalizations, and, as a consequence, that its claims about the relationship between women’s subordination and male force were homogenizing, ahistorical and, at times, biologically essentialist. For some scholars, these concerns nullified any potential utility of the concept in relation to analyses of gender-­based force and coercion. Others, however, adopted the view that as a conceptual framework, patriarchy could be reformulated to address the deficiencies of earlier iterations and be employed as a way to understand specific situations of gendered violence. The most significant and consistent critique made of the feminist conceptualization of patriarchy is the idea that it engages a series of false universalisms in its account of the relationship between violence and

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Patriarchy  ­123 gender. Several early scholarly critiques of ‘patriarchy’ observed, for example, the tendency for the concept to be employed as a static descriptor that did not allow for variations in culture or context. Writing in the late 1970s, Veronica Beechey questioned whether the radical feminist analysis of sexual domination as the primary instrument of patriarchal power was transferable across different settings. She cautioned, in response to the radical feminist approach, that it is ‘wrong to assume that domination assumes the same form in all social formations and in all kinds of social institutions in a society’ (Beechey 1979, p.  80). Beechey also raised the idea that the feminist analysis of patriarchy as dependent on male violence relied on a biological essentialism or ‘reductionism’, in which ‘it is assumed that men have an innate biological urge to subordinate women’ (1979, p.  70; also see Edwards 1987, p.  19). On these grounds, she suggested that it may be better to retire the concept of patriarchy in feminist theory altogether. Deniz Kandiyoti, writing in a slightly later period, draws similar conclusions about the capacity for feminist use of the notion of patriarchy to result in over-­generalizations about the status and power of women and men, not only in relation to one another but also across historical and cultural contexts. For Kandiyoti (1988, pp. 274–275), feminist theory on patriarchy (up until the late 1980s) is flawed by virtue of the fact that it ‘often evokes an overly monolithic conception of male dominance, which is treated at a level of abstraction that obfuscates rather than reveals the intimate inner workings of culturally and historically distinct arrangements between the genders’. Among feminist scholars who express criticism of ‘patriarchy’, there are thus numerous scenarios in which the theory of patriarchal power and its relationship to male violence claims more than it clarifies. According to this critique, women’s experiences of patriarchy are held to be universal and ahistorical when, in fact, they might better be described as representing the experiences of white, middle-­class women at a particular point in time, and even therein there exists variation that is not recognized in predominant accounts of the concept. Men too are presented as a homogenous, power-­seeking group, with little acknowledgement or analysis of the differences that can be found between individual men (for instance, due to differences in class, ethnicity, nationality, culture, etc.) and the way that this may affect the relationship between gender and violence. Critics further point out that the feminist conceptualization of patriarchy that identifies male violence against women as critical to its maintenance is limited in its conception of gendered violence in that it only looks at gender as relations between men and women and, in doing so, presents all men as oppressive of all women. The theory therefore neglects the real power that some women hold over other women and other men, as well as the capacity

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124  Handbook on gender and violence for individual women and men to resist gendered norms in relation to violence. Women, it is claimed, are represented solely as victims of patriarchal power and coercion, with inadequate recognition of the ways that they exercise agency to challenge and change their circumstances. The focus on only male/female relations also means that there is little in the feminist analysis of patriarchy that explains how gender operates as a paradigm informing violence beyond male violence against women; that is, how gender serves to shape and influence practices of male violence enacted against other men, for example, and even violence committed by women. Of the various criticisms made of the feminist use of ‘patriarchy’, the charge of biological essentialism is perhaps the most difficult to sustain. This is especially the case when one takes into consideration the efforts of many feminist scholars to explicitly theorize and understand the very system of patriarchy as a social construction, as well as its associated practices and gender norms. Millett’s initial theorizing of patriarchy is a case in point. In Sexual Politics, she clearly attributes differences in normative behaviour for women and men to processes of ‘socialization’, arguing that ‘patriarchy’s biological foundations appear to be so very insecure’ (Millett 2000 [1969], p. 31). Although the language used by a few scholars in their work on patriarchy is suggestive of an essentialist approach, the majority understand the social and political system of male dominance as one that can be studied, analysed and subsequently dismantled, rather than as biologically predetermined (Wilson 2000). Indeed, the dismantling of patriarchy in all of its various forms is the aim of a great number of feminist scholars working in the area of gender and violence. The problem of over-­generalizations and use of totalizing discourse identified as common to second-­wave accounts of patriarchal power is one that several later works have sought to overcome in making a case for retaining the concept of patriarchy. The research of Sylvia Walby is instructive in this respect. In her book Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), Walby puts forward an account of male power that attempts to address earlier shortcomings of feminist theorizing on patriarchy, particularly with regard to the charges of ahistoricism and homogenization. Her analysis, instead, is one that explicitly recognizes changes in the manifestation of patriarchy over time. She therefore asserts that, over the course of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom, patriarchy has shifted from being predominantly ‘private’ in nature to become increasingly more ‘public’. In other words, she contends that women’s oppression by men is no longer primarily evinced in the private sphere of the home and domestic life, but has also come to take form in public sphere situations, such as in paid work, from which women had previously been excluded. The inequality that women encounter in such public contexts means that, no longer

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Patriarchy  ­125 restricted to the domestic sphere, they now have ‘the whole of society in which to roam and be exploited’ (Walby 1990, p. 201). Walby’s analysis also raises, and seeks to deal with, another major point of contention in feminist debates on patriarchy, which is the extent to which male force and violence against women are central to its continuation. Where radical feminist scholars, especially, have argued that male physical and sexual coercion against women exists as the primary mechanism of patriarchal authority, others have maintained that this is either mistaken or represents an overly reductive approach. During the 1960s and 1970s, feminists from a more Marxist position asserted, for instance, that the root of women’s oppression was instead to be found in gendered structures and practices derived from capitalism, such as the sexual division of labour and the unpaid productive and reproductive work of the home (e.g. Eisenstein 1979). For Walby, male violence operates as an important institution of the patriarchal system; however, it is only one of six major structures (alongside paid work, household work, culture, sexuality and the state) identified as together comprising the basis of patriarchal power. In other words, gendered violence is recognized as being crucial, but not the principal cause or instrument of patriarchy. Valerie Bryson (2003, p. 194), in her critical assessment of the concept of patriarchy, arrives at a similar conclusion, arguing that: To see [male violence] as the sole or prime cause of patriarchy is [. . .] to be guilty of crude reductionism and an over-­general and ahistorical approach which obscures changes in the nature of patriarchy and the ways in which it interacts with other forms of oppression.

She thus advocates, much like Walby, that the study of patriarchy should focus on the connections between its different elements, rather than on individual parts. An additional point of debate relates to the question of whether gendered violence is a cause of patriarchy or merely a consequence of patriarchal power. In an important article asserting the value of ‘patriarchy’ as a theoretical tool for understanding male violence against women, Gwen Hunnicutt (2009, p.  561) argues against the radical feminist analysis of physical and sexual violence as an instrument used by men to uphold the broader system of patriarchal authority. According to Hunnicutt, there is a difference between male violence forming a product of patriarchal societies and it being employed as a conscious tool by men to oppress women, as suggested by scholars such as Brownmiller (1975, p. 15). In her analysis, the fact that women are oppressed ­ideologically – ­or ‘enslaved by ideas that cast their subordination as normal, ensuring quiescence’ (Hunnicutt 2009, p.  561) – means that direct physical violence is not

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126  Handbook on gender and violence necessary to patriarchy’s survival, though it may exist as a repercussion of such a system. A point left largely unexamined by Hunnicutt’s discussion, however, is the extent to which the threat of male violence operates as a mechanism of male dominance, and thus as a structure on which systems of patriarchy rely. To the extent that indirect violence (i.e. the threat of violence) operates to significantly shape gender norms as well as the lived experiences of women, male coercion of ­women – ­in both its direct and indirect ­forms – ­can be seen as integral to the existence and maintenance of patriarchal societies. The question also remains as to whether men need to consciously use violence as a method of controlling women in order for such violence to qualify as a tool of patriarchal power. In this respect, the effect may be more important than the intent. Men may not consciously seek to oppress women as a social group through isolated acts of violence, but the consequences of these acts go beyond the particular individuals involved to both create and reproduce patriarchal authority. As such, male violence against women forms far more than merely a consequence of a patriarchal system, and, instead, is instrumental to its continuation.

REVIVING AND REVISING ‘PATRIARCHY’ AS A CONCEPTUAL TOOL IN ANALYSES OF GENDERED VIOLENCE Where ‘patriarchy’ had once been on the verge of disuse in much feminist scholarship, it now enjoys something of a revival in a great deal of contemporary work on gender and ­violence – ­with a considerable amount of attention given to addressing the more significant critiques levelled at earlier conceptualizations of the term. Writing in the early 2000s, Bryson notes the trend towards re-­engaging the concept in ways that recognize the historical and cultural specificities of manifestations of patriarchal power and, at the same time, the implicit acceptance by many theorists of several of the major insights identified about patriarchy during the second wave of feminism in the global North. She observes: Some writers have developed increasingly sophisticated approaches, which attempt to analyse changes in the nature of patriarchy over time and the way in which it interacts with other forms of oppression. While important theoretical differences remain [. . .] many of the claims that seemed so startling thirty years ago are now quite widely accepted by writers and activists who would never accept a ‘radical feminist’ label. (Bryson 2003, p. 202)

In contemporary scholarship, the re-­emergence of patriarchy as a conceptual tool for analysis in the theorizing of gender-­based violence is evident

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Patriarchy  ­127 in both theoretical and empirical strands of research. Its ongoing use by scholars is suggestive of the way in which it remains an important touchstone for academic thinking and inquiry about violence against women and, more recently, other forms of gendered coercion, despite having been subject to extensive criticism over a period of time. In terms of theoretical approaches, Hunnicutt’s work, which seeks to ‘resurrect’ patriarchy as a tool for analysis (2009, p. 553), is of particular significance. For Hunnicutt (2009, p.  554), the concept remains profoundly useful to feminist theory on violence against women because of its capacity to ‘[evoke] images of gender hierarchies, dominance, and power arrangements’. Her analysis seeks to add important layers of complexity to the analysis of male violence against women as a product of patriarchal authority by attending specifically to the major criticisms of the term made from the mid-­1980s onwards. She thus advocates conceptualizing patriarchy in terms of its ‘varieties’, or the range of manifestations that systems of male dominance encompass across cultures and contexts. Furthermore, Hunnicutt’s approach seeks to understand power itself in terms of multiple ‘terrains’, rather than solely as a relation between women and men. Such a framework, she asserts, allows for the theorization of how power (and disempowerment) related to gender intersects with other hierarchical structures (such as race and class) to inform practices of violence against women. Different women are then able to be recognized as more vulnerable to male violence, and in different ways to others, under patriarchy, just as the status of men in relation to one another is rendered visible and far from uniform across patriarchal contexts, again creating variation in the way violence against women is enacted and manifest. Finally, she argues that conceptualizing patriarchy in such a way that accounts for the diversity of power relations with which it interacts enables scholars to explain gendered violence in its multitude of forms. Hunnicutt draws on the example of violence committed by women against their male partners, for instance, which, she contends, ‘can be linked to systems of domination, submission, resistance’. Intimate partner violence enacted by women against men may thus ‘have just as much to do with patriarchy [as male violence against women] because these acts tend to be self-­defensive’ (Hunnicutt 2009, p. 566). In other words, the issue of violence committed by women against men makes little analytical sense without considering the context of patriarchy in which it occurs. Hunnicutt’s analysis, to a degree, echoes bell hooks’ argument that the term ‘patriarchal violence’ is in many ways preferable to the more commonly used ‘domestic violence’ because ‘it continually reminds the listener that violence in the home is connected [. . .] to male domination’ (hooks 2000, p. 60). As both Hunnicutt and hooks contend, a revised theory of

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128  Handbook on gender and violence patriarchy that looks at gendered violence not only as male coercion but also in its myriad of forms can be a powerful tool for feminist scholarship on violence and its relationship to gender. It is this latter point that many empirical studies on gender-­ based violence appear to have taken up in drawing on patriarchy as an explanatory concept. Lyn Mikel Brown and colleagues, for example, employ the notion of patriarchy in their examination of violence committed by female high school students in the United States. The authors take issue with the gender-­neutral bullying prevention response adopted by many schools as a way to deal with such violence, which they argue ignores structural and psychological inequalities to effectively ‘[deny] the reality that living in a patriarchy matters’ (Brown et al. 2007, p. 1268). Soma Chaudhuri et al. (2014) also draw on patriarchy as an analytic framework in their research on South Asian women’s experiences of wife abuse following marriage migration to the US. ‘Patriarchy’ is conceived in culturally specific terms, as their analysis seeks to understand how patriarchal family norms from the women’s home countries influence their vulnerability, or otherwise, to abuse. In further examples, academics have used the concept to examine and explain issues ranging from women’s suicide in Fiji (Adinkrah 2001), to the reproduction of patriarchal power via the state and its policies on domestic violence in Mexico (Frias 2010), to discourses surrounding domestic violence amongst male perpetrators in Australia (Bettman 2013). Far from being an abandoned concept, the feminist understanding of patriarchy continues to enrich scholarly analyses of the relationship between violence and gender, with a particular emphasis in much contemporary work on the specific cultural and historical forms that male domination takes.

CONCLUSION The notion of patriarchy has enjoyed something of a chequered history in academic work on gender and violence. A product of second-­wave feminism, the concept was powerfully employed by feminist scholars, most especially radical feminists, as a way of explaining the phenomenon of male physical and sexual violence against women, which was theorized as a form of male social control and thus as integral to the maintenance of patriarchal authority. Throughout the mid-­1980s to the early 2000s, the term experienced a significant decline in its use and standing in academic circles, having been strongly criticized for failing to adequately capture the complexity of issues involved in practices of gendered violence. Yet even during this period, ‘patriarchy’ remained an important point of reference

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Patriarchy  ­129 for academic theorizing in the field, maintaining a presence in research as a way to analyse (or not to analyse) intersections of violence and gender. More recently, the concept has been employed by numerous scholars to examine specific manifestations of gendered violence and the way in which these interact with systems of male dominance. The contemporary re-­emergence of ‘patriarchy’ in much scholarship underlines the ongoing, critical importance of the term to academic work on violence and gender.

REFERENCES Adinkrah, M. (2001) ‘Patriarchal family ideology and female homicide victimization in Fiji’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 32 (2), 283–301. Beechey, V. (1979) ‘On patriarchy’, Feminist Review, 3, 66–82. Bettman, C. (2013) ‘Patriarchy: the predominant discourse and fount of domestic violence’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 30 (1), 15–28. Brown, L.M., L.M. Chesney and N. Stein (2007) ‘Toward a gendered theory of teen violence and victimisation’, Violence Against Women, 13 (12), 1249–1273. Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, London: Secker & Warburg. Bryson, V. (2003) Feminist Political Theory: An Introduction (2nd edn), Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chaudhuri, S., M. Morash and J. Yingling (2014) ‘Marriage migration, patriarchal bargains, and wife abuse: a study of South Asian women’, Violence Against Women, 20 (2), 141–161. Edwards, A. (1987) ‘Male violence in feminist theory: an analysis of the changing conceptions of sex/gender violence and male dominance’ in J. Hanmer and M. Maynard (eds) Women, Violence and Social Control, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13–29. Eisenstein, Z. (ed.) (1979) Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Frias, S.M. (2010) ‘Resisting patriarchy within the state: advocacy and family violence in Mexico’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 33 (6), 542–551. Griffin, S. (1977) ‘Rape: the all-­American crime’ in M. Vetterling-­Braggin, F.A. Elliston and J. English (eds) Feminism and Philosophy, Totowa, NJ: Littlefield Adams, pp. 313–332. Hanmer, J. (1978) ‘Violence and the social control of women’ in G. Littlejohn, B. Smart, J. Wakeford and N. Yuval-­Davis (eds) Power and the State, London: Croom Helm, pp. 217–238. hooks, b. (2000) Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Hunnicutt, G. (2009) ‘Varieties of patriarchy and violence against women: resurrecting “patriarchy” as a theoretical tool’, Violence Against Women, 15 (5), 553–573. Kandiyoti, D. (1988) ‘Bargaining with patriarchy’, Gender and Society, 2 (3), 274–290. Kelly, L. (1987) ‘The continuum of sexual violence’, in J. Hanmer and M. Maynard (eds) Women, Violence and Social Control, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 46–60. Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence, Cambridge: Polity. MacKinnon, C.A. (1982) ‘Feminism, Marxism, method, and the state: an agenda for theory’, Signs, 7 (3), 515–544. MacKinnon, C.A. (1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, C.A. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mies, M. (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London and New York: Zed Books. Millett, K. (2000 [1969]) Sexual Politics, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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130  Handbook on gender and violence Mitchell, J. (1971) Woman’s Estate, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity. Pilcher, J. and I. Whelehan (2004) Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies, London: Sage. Rich, A. (1980) ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’, Signs, 5 (4), 631–660. Rowbotham, S. (1973) Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Russell, D.E.H. (1975) The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective, New York: Stein & Day. Walby, S. (1990) Theorising Patriarchy, Oxford: Blackwell. Wilson, A. (2000) ‘Patriarchy: feminist theory’ in C. Kramarae and D. Spender (eds) Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge, New York: Routledge, pp. 1493–1497.

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10. Femicide

Consuelo Corradi and Daniela Bandelli*

In recent years, the notion of ‘femicide’ has gained prominence and also significance. The word first gained traction in 1976, with the purpose of raising awareness about crimes against women because the violent death of women was a specific form of crime in itself, and should not be confused with the gender-­neutral term ‘homicide’ (Corradi et al. 2016). At that time, the word was used by feminist militants, namely women actively engaged in fighting for women’s rights, not by researchers. It had a specific political purpose in that it intended to produce changes in a social order which was blind to those deaths. As developed in joint efforts by Diana Russell, Jill Radford and Roberta Harmes, the notion of femicide sought to illuminate a form of patriarchal power within the social system (Radford and Russell 1992; Russell and Harmes 2001). More recently, the notion of femicide has been widely employed by researchers in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and criminology. It has also made its way into the official documents of the United Nations (UN) and policymaking institutions. The purpose of this chapter is to critically review the particular meanings that femicide has acquired when applied in different contexts. The first section presents and compares definitions of femicide. The second section lays out four country case s­tudies – M ­ exico, Argentina, Italy and I­ndia – ­where the notion of femicide has spread in association with local cultural and political issues and activists’ involvement. In the final section we analyse differences and similarities of the national cases, and develop some recommendations for the application of the concept in empirical research.

*  Consuelo Corradi authored the first section and the Argentina case. She is grateful to Francesca Belotti for providing information and insightful comments on that case. Daniela Bandelli authored the India and Italy cases. The remaining parts of this chapter are the joint effort of the two authors.

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DEFINITIONS Femicide is defined by the United Nations Economic and Social Council as ‘the killing of women and girls because of their gender’. Several forms of femicide are listed in the UN’s definition (ECOSOC 2013, p. 2): (1) the murder of women as a result of intimate partner violence; (2) the torture and misogynist slaying of women; (3) killing of women and girls in the name of ‘honour’; (4) targeted killing of women and girls in the context of armed conflict; (5) dowry-­related killings of women; (6) the killing of women and girls because of their sexual orientation and gender identity; (7) the killing of aboriginal and indigenous women and girls because of their gender; (8) female infanticide and gender-­based sex selection foeticide; (9) deaths related to genital mutilation; (10) accusations of witchcraft; and (11) other femicides connected with gangs, organized crime, drug dealers, human trafficking and the proliferation of small arms.

The UN definition groups disparate types of woman killing (not only perpetrated by men), unifying them by gender. Further, the specific term ‘femicide’ problematizes these killings as different from homicide: when a girl or woman is killed, different specific social circumstances are at play from those that surround the killing of a man. Multiple definitions of femicide circulate today in official reports, scientific literature and media language. The most common is ‘the intentional killing of women and girls because of their gender’ (Weil 2018, p. 1), which resonates with Russell and colleagues’ original proposals. At first glance, this definition serves its purpose well. It has three basic c­ omponents – a­ killed person, an intention to kill and a human offender; it further aligns the phenomenon of femicide with the larger context of homicide studies (Smit et al. 2013). The first ­component – k ­ illing (or more precisely ‘intentional killing’) – indicates that murder is non-­accidental and is committed by a human offender whose intention is to wilfully and unlawfully take the life of the victim. The second component – ‘women and girls’ – identifies the victim’s gender and, at the same time, categorizes femicide as a special case of murder. ‘Because she is a woman’ identifies murderous motivation and is the theoretical starting point for explaining why the victim died. We can find the above definition in international reports (Šimonović 2016, § 25; EIGE 2017) as well as scientific literature (Frye et al. 2005; Dixon et al. 2008; Dawson 2016). On closer scrutiny, the victim’s sex, as motive to commit murder, covers three general cases: prenatal sex selection, when foetuses are aborted to avoid female babies being born, as is the case in India and China (Nie 2011); serial killing of women; and murder by strangers in the context of misogynist culture. In all of these cases victims are killed not as indi-

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Femicide  ­133 viduals (my daughter, my wife, my female former partner, my friend), but because they belong to a gender that is despised by the perpetrator, either because women are seen as a burden to their families or because they are considered weak, vulnerable and objects of violence and lust that can be abused with impunity. In these three general cases the motive ‘because she is a woman’ represents the underlying social phenomenon across diverse cultural contexts. However, there is a fourth general case of femicide: when women are killed because there is a strong and unique relationship with the perpetrator, who is a man in most of the ­cases – ­he is a partner, former partner or husband of the victim, and she is a particular woman and not just any woman. To improve conceptual clarity, criminology, epidemiology and public health research prefers using the term ‘female intimate partner homicide’ or ‘intimate partner femicide’ when analysing the fourth above-­mentioned case, thus limiting data collection to victims who are killed by men who have or have had an intimate relation with the victim. While this approach is theoretically more accurate because it clearly identifies the victim–­ perpetrator relationship as the research focus, information on murder by relatives (such as brother, father or son), acquaintances or strangers is lost. Social phenomena such as so-­called ‘honour crimes’ – where a girl or young woman is killed by a family member because her behaviour does not conform to supposed norms, or the murder of an elderly woman by a ­relative – ­are not considered under this rubric. Scholars also use the concept of femicide in cases where female victims are killed either by male or female perpetrators, occurring in a domestic setting between partners (intimate femicide), as well as in public (see Dixon et al. 2008; Glass et al. 2004; Muftić and Baumann 2012; Sela-­Shayovitz 2011). The term is also used when murder is followed by the perpetrator’s suicide (Richards et al. 2014). This suggests that the concept of femicide does not necessarily imply syndication of the cultural motivations of the murder (sexism, gender inequality, patriarchal power over women, and so on); it may simply address the sex of the murdered victim.

GLOBALIZATION AND CONTEXTUALIZATION OF FEMICIDE Femicide is a conceptual category within the broader discourse on violence against women (VAW) that, since the 1980s, has been established globally across networks of scholars, activists and institutions to describe numerous forms of abuse and sufferance of women as part of a world-­wide social issue rooted in universal gender inequality and patriarchy. Under this

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134  Handbook on gender and violence approach, femicide is recognized as a global issue, affecting women across the world in any society and culture. However, like other global ­discourses – ­such as human rights, empowerment, environmentalism, or grand narratives such as inequality and ­secularization – ­femicide too undergoes a process of recontextualization in use. The very broad conceptual category takes up different meanings in different local contexts. Here, we introduce briefly four examples of femicide in Mexico, Italy, Argentina and India. The Case of Mexico In the mid-­1990s, shortly after the publication of Radford and Russell’s influential edited collection Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, the concept of femicide was popularized in Mexico by activists who sought to draw national and international attention to the mass murder of hundreds of working girls and women in the towns of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, which lie at the border between Mexico and the USA. Women working as a low-­paid labour force in local factories were harassed, abducted, kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed; their bodies disappeared or were found in the desert (Amnesty International 2003; Monárrez Fragoso 2008; Corona and Domínguez 2010). These mass murders occurred in a context characterized by a very high incidence of homicide, narco-­traffic, poverty, marginality, misogyny and sexist culture (González Rodríguez 2012; Jeffries 2013). Activists quickly took up the concept of femicide to designate these incidents and funnelled it first to the local media, and later to the Chihuahua state and Mexican federal government (Wright 2011). Activists acknowledge that using this new feminist concept was instrumental in raising awareness, as it had the capacity to condense into a single term the misogynist motivation of violence, the vulnerability of women and girls, and the imbalance of power between men and women in Mexican society (Monárrez Fragoso 2002). Marcela Lagarde, a leading Mexican feminist, deliberately transformed Russell’s original ‘femicide’ to the Spanish feminicidio. She wanted a slightly different notion, ‘to name the ensemble of violations of women’s human rights, which contain the crimes against and the disappearances of women’, whereas femicidio is meant as homicide of women (Lagarde 2010, p. xv). Both Lagarde and Monárrez Fragoso insisted on a non-­literal translation; but, beyond the heated debate on the term’s rendition, the underlying social phenomenon is the pervasiveness of murder as a form of structural violence that manifests in the systematic killing of women. Whereas femicide refers to gender-­motivated killing of women, feminicidio encompasses a broader array of political and institutional causes, including institutional impunity and connivance between criminality and

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Femicide  ­135 public authorities. By the turn of the millennium, local civic organizations, feminist activists and international non-­governmental organizations (INGOs) had succeeded in giving a platform to academic analysis and political mobilization against femicide in Mexico; this energy then spread to other Latin American countries. The discussion of the Algodonero case at the Inter-­American Court of Human Rights since 2002, recognition of the word feminicidio by the Mexican Academy of Language and the organization of major international conferences sponsored by the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) all assisted in raising international awareness of the problem. By the late 2000s, the concept of femicide was well known in feminist academic and policymaking circles worldwide. The Case of Italy In Italy, the term ‘femicide’ is used to highlight the gendered dimension of murders with female victims. In 2007, the blockbuster movie Bordertown contributed to give visibility to the phenomenon. In 2008, the lawyer and activist Barbara Spinelli published the first book in Italian that was dedicated to the Latin American theoretical framework on crimes against women. The Italian neologism femminicidio was introduced as a translation of the Spanish term and used in campaigns on VAW. In 2011, Spinelli and a coalition of NGOs launched a Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) shadow report which brought the neologism to the attention of Italian decision makers. The following year, a women’s network called SNOQ launched a campaign asking men to stop being complicit in femicide; and another feminist coalition, led by historical women’s group the UDI, launched the campaign ‘No More’, urging the Italian Prime Minister to ratify the Istanbul Convention on VAW. In a nutshell, feminists pushed for the adoption of the term ‘femicide’ because it gave visibility to the structural dimension of the murder of women by men as a social phenomenon rooted in patriarchal culture and sexist society. By 2013 femminicidio had achieved massive popularity in the Italian media and institutional discourse. It developed into media hype of an alleged epidemic of men killing their wives, partners and former partners (Bandelli and Porcelli 2016) and established a major narrative of fear and crime in television news (Osservatorio Europeo sulla Sicurezza 2013). Interestingly, this media hype developed in the years 2012–2013, a period during which the absolute number of murdered women was stable (Corradi 2014, pp. 160–161). Bandelli (2017) argues that the large diffusion of the term in the wider public sphere outside feminist discourse can be explained by looking at the

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136  Handbook on gender and violence political context in Italy at that time: political parties running for the 2013 national elections found in the concept of femicide a discursive opportunity for pledging to eradicate, through laws, policies and funds, what was described as an emergency, a social plague and a massacre. A search conducted through the database Factiva shows that in 2011 the word femminicidio appeared in only 51 news items, while in 2012 the number had increased to 751 and in 2013 it rocketed to 4986 (Bandelli and Porcelli 2016). A recent study on the incidence of femicide shows that in Italy in 2004–2010 the number of women murdered by their partners was 2.49 per million, actually lower than Spain (3.14) and Portugal (5.30) (Lameiras Fernandez et al. 2018). By drawing on the theoretical position that VAW is rooted in gender inequality and sexist culture, and by tapping into the rhetoric of progress and civilization, an electoral campaign message regarding the fight against femicide was developed; there was a parallel increase in the quota of female candidates and Members of Parliament and a boost to fostering cultural change through programmes aimed at deconstructing gender stereotypes established since childhood. In the Italian media, femminicidio can be read as a contemporary form of moral panic, which in sociology is studied as a battle over signification, in which different claim-­makers (including social movements, the media and the state) engage for changing and repositioning categories of social problems and beliefs (Cohen 2011; Hall et al. 1978). It entails overexposure and distortion of an existing social phenomenon, which is redefined under a new label and through the identification of a category of victims and a category of ‘devils’ threatening the social order. As moral panics delimit the field of knowledge and ‘lay down the rules for the ways in which the problem can be talked about’ (Critcher 2003, p. 168), the narrative of femminicidio marked a dramatic shift in the public imaginary and political discourse of VAW. First of all, while previous media narratives of VAW pointed at immigrant men as the principal threat to women’s safety, the femminicidio narrative redefined VAW as a structural problem of the Italian patriarchal heterosexual family (Giomi and Tonello 2013). Secondly, it conveyed the assumption that primary causes of male violence are cultural (male domination and sexist representation of women), while psychological and relational dynamics as well as biographical details of aggressor and victim are distanced from public eyes. Thirdly, although Italian activists explicitly acknowledge Radford and Russell’s theoretical origin of the term as well as the Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua cases in Mexico, the Italian usage has been reconfigured to incorporate femicides in marriage and romantic relationships, to the extent that today the ­neologism – ­which in its popularized version is understood as the ‘male murder of a woman because she is a woman’ – is actually used as a synonym of intimate partner femicide.

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Femicide  ­137 The Case of Argentina Since 2014, Argentinian feminist groups had started to raise awareness about femicide, which they defined as the intentional killing of women because they are women. The NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less) movement, which succeed in organizing the largest feminist street and digital mass protest in the history of the country (Laudano 2017, p.  1), was sparked on 11 May 2015 by a tweet from a well-­known journalist who issued a call to action when 14-­year-­old Chiara Paez was killed. Chiara had been missing for four days before her body was found buried in her boyfriend’s backyard. The post-­mortem revealed that she had been brutally beaten to death and that she was pregnant. The murder was not an isolated incident. In one of the estimates available, Argentina had one of the highest rates of femicide in Latin America in 2016, with an incidence of 1.25 per 100,000 women (Rosales Matienzo 2018). The crime of homicide for gender-­related reasons was introduced into the country’s penal code in 2012, bringing it into line with 15 other Latin American countries (Cepal 2015). The sheer macho cruelty of Chiara Paez’s murder was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. The NiUnaMenos hashtag gained so much traction that a Facebook page was opened by feminist activists, and it was immediately joined by other journalists, activists, artists and prominent women in Argentinian society. Both the hashtag and the Facebook page proved so successful that a national protest was quickly organized and took place on 3 June 2015, attracting more than 200,000 protesters on the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, and another 200,000 in sister marches occurring simultaneously in 239 cities around the country (Laudano 2017, p. 1). Other organizations, such as universities and labour unions, also joined and provided economic resources to the marches (Pates et al. 2017). The movement quickly spread across Latin America, and similar marches also took place in Chile, Honduras, Mexico and Uruguay. In 2016, while the Argentinian movement was having its annual meeting in the city of Rosario, news of the rape, impalement and murder of 16-­year-­old Lucia Perez produced a call for a women’s general labour strike to evoke femicide as the most brutal form of VAW. The hashtag Nosotrasparamos (We are on strike) was voiced on the web and subsequently used, on 8 March 2017 and again on 8 March 2018, to call for a women’s general labour strike, framing femicide in the larger context of macho culture, underpaid work, depreciation of domestic labour and capitalist exploitation of women migrants. The movement enhanced trending VAW topics towards politics. Immediately after the 2015 march, Justice Elena Highton, Vice-­President and the only female member of Argentina’s Supreme Court, announced

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138  Handbook on gender and violence that the court would establish a database on femicide across the country so that data would be more readily available to understand and prevent the phenomenon. The first law enacted in the country to explicitly combat and prevent VAW was approved in 1994; in 2009, the Parliament passed a comprehensive law which included an extensive notion and typology of VAW, but the progressive legislation was unsuccessful in controlling femicide. The most important goal of the movement was to put pressure on the government to increase special training for police and other public servants, and to raise awareness in educational programmes. During the campaign for general elections in 2015, the NiUnaMenos movement asked candidates to endorse five strategic points, all aimed at improving policies to reduce VAW. Social media played a major role in the development of the movement. Three successful slogans – Ni Una Menos, Vivas Nos Queremos (We want us alive) and El Feminismo Lo Hizo (Feminism did it) – increased visibility, sending the key messages ‘viral’, and were an aid to street mobilization. The first and second slogans had originated decades earlier, in the context of the Ciudad Juarez femicides, but they were reappropriated by the Argentinian feminist voices and circulated to the international Spanish-­ speaking world (Laudano 2017, p. 8). The Case of India The term femicide in Indian scholarship and women’s activism predominantly refers to two common traditional practices of lethal discrimination against women and girls: female foeticide or infanticide, and dowry deaths. These phenomena are tightly linked. Other forms of lethal VAW in India can be categorized broadly in three more forms of femicide: intimate partner femicide (which in part correlates with dowry deaths); honour killings (for example, for marriages outside caste and religion); and femicide committed by strangers for prostitution, trafficking, rape and accusation of witchcraft (Weil and Vom Berg Mitra 2016). The majority of domestic femicides and suicides are related to dowry demands, while intimate partner femicides related to other causes (suspicion of extra-­marital affair, disapproval of dress style and independence, and so on) do not receive as much attention as dowry deaths (Sabri et al. 2015). Dowry is a traditional social practice through which a bride brings into the in-­law family a certain number of ‘gifts’. Despite the 1961 India Dowry Prohibition Act, this social practice is still widely used in a number of places, including in modern India where the more traditional jewellery dowry has been replaced by cash and consumer items (Banerjee 2014). The original functions of dowry were to enable hypergamy (marriage

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Femicide  ­139 with a man belonging to a higher class or caste), to transfer wealth from father to daughter, and to increase the social status of families. It has, however, transformed into a ‘groom price’: it may work as a mechanism of extortion; and it can be a major factor in domestic violence, femicide and suicide of women when the groom’s family is dissatisfied with the value of the dowry (Banerjee 2014). Bride burning, drowning, poisoning and even suicide by self-­immolation (when committed by brides who are harassed by dowry demands from relatives) can be classified as dowry-­ related femicide (Banerjee 2014). Also, the social practice of dowry consolidates a widespread son-­preference ideology and consideration of daughters as financial burdens. These are major cultural factors of female infanticide and sex-­selection abortions, which have been referred to since the 1970s as forms of ­femicide – f­ emale foetuses and newborns were ‘deselected’ due to ‘the sheer fact they were female and nothing more’ (Eklund and Purewal 2017, p. 36). Femicide indicates that social devaluation and discrimination of women is at the basis of their ‘elimination’, which has been realized through a long history of infanticide and deliberate neglect of female newborns’ health care and nutrition, as well as dowry marriage and honour-­related killing. Selective abortion has spread since the 1980s when amniocentesis, initially offered for the detection of foetal abnormalities, became widely accessible to both rural and urban populations and was advertised by clinics as a tool for sex determination (Luthra 1994). Additionally, in contemporary India with the advent of medically-­assisted procreation, sex pre-­selection techniques are used to conceive sons (Patel 2010). Although prenatal sex determination and disclosure of foetal sex was forbidden by law in 1994, roughly a million female foetuses are still selectively aborted in India each year, according to the award-­winning ‘50 Million Missing’ global campaign founded in 2006 by activist Rita Banerji. This campaign denounces, and urges international action to stop, the systematic extermination of India’s female population through violence in various forms, such as female foeticide, forced abortions, female infanticides, dowry murders and honour killings. These forms of femicide have contributed to render the sex ratio in India the second lowest in the world after China, and to generate a surplus of men, which in turn might contribute to a context conducive to the spread of violence in society (Hudson and Den Boer 2002). Millions of young adults in the next 20 years will remain involuntarily unmarried; mostly from lower socio-­economic classes, they will likely be under-­employed and with poor community ties, and more prone to anti-­social behaviour and violence against both women and other men (Hudson and Den Boer 2002). Researchers predict that the scarcity of women in Indian society

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140  Handbook on gender and violence might lead to reversing the dowry system, with the groom’s family paying a bride price, and increasing women’s ‘value’ in society, as well as potentially fostering new forms of exploitation of women, such as marriage migration and the selling of girls to upper-­class families (Banerjee 2014).

CRITIQUES AND RECOMMENDATIONS The national cases that were briefly outlined above show how femicide has functioned as a powerful explanatory concept in very different cultural contexts. It has done so for different and interconnected reasons. The final task of this chapter is to analyse them and develop some recommendations for future research. Femicide as a concept takes an important ­subject – ­murder – that is universally relevant, and frames it within a compelling narrative of power inequality between men and women (Weil et al. 2018). This narrative has gained momentum in the last years, especially when using it to explain VAW and domestic violence. Formerly assumed to be an issue of private tragedy, VAW and domestic violence have acquired new significance as problems of gender inequality, requiring very different solutions than in the past. Framing both VAW and the killing of women in an analysis of existing gender power relations has targeted wider constituencies and actually built social movements around these issues (as well as fortifying those that already existed). In Mexico, Italy and Argentina we clearly see how the idea of femicide has had the capacity to provide a new impetus in the battle for women’s emancipation. The India case appears to be different. If one compares the two most common Indian forms of femicide against the other national cases, one interesting difference emerges: infanticide, foeticide and dowry deaths are not exclusively perpetrated by men but often involve mothers-­in-­law and female members of the family (Smith and Kethineni 2006; Weil and Vom Berg Mitra 2016). It follows that the domestic violence framework, which applies to violence perpetrated by either men or women against partners, children and other family members, appears to be more appropriate than the gender inequality paradigm in describing these forms of femicide. Selective infanticide and foeticide are the only types of lethal violence that literally respond to the original definition of femicide: the intentional killing of females exclusively because they are or will grow to be women. In other forms of lethal violence (intimate partner homicides in Italy, mass murders associated with crime and rape in Mexico, macho brutality in Argentina and dowry deaths in India), which in the scholarship and social movements’ lexicon fall under the signifier ‘femicide’, the gender of the victim is not necessarily the only factor behind the intention of killing.

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Femicide  ­141 Although the social status and cultural representation of women are certainly recurring elements that need to be taken into account in the analysis of lethal VAW, using a term such as femicide has the effect of emphasizing these factors even before we can ascertain to what extent they are prominent in the complex set of causes of lethal violence. As we have seen, the term enables women’s movements, activists and policymakers internationally to unite under a broad umbrella of organizing coalitions, campaigns and conventions. However, the other side of this argument is that an overarching term, encompassing such an array of killing methods, contexts and social conditions, does not necessarily provide a useful heuristic in the attempt to precisely quantify murder or in understanding nuances of individual cases. Even if femicide is an important contributor to the death of females ­worldwide – a­ long with the connected notions of intimate partner homicide, killing for reasons of honour and prenatal sex ­selection – ­major gaps exist in investigation and measurement. At the national level, data sources for investigation are national and police statistics, court files, mortuary records and newspaper searches. All these sources face similar ­shortcomings – ­such as absence of information on victim–offender relationships, definition of ‘partner’, age cohort of victims and m ­ ore – ­and this makes cross-­national comparisons very difficult. At international level, the most important sources are the collection of violence- and injury-­ related deaths, as well as the compilation of national death statistics by the World Health Organization, and the Global Study on Homicide conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The latter does not classify femicide, but often mainstreams gender in data analysis. In order to reduce femicide, prevent lethal violence and protect victims at high risk of murder we need to improve the collection of reliable and accurate data at both local and national levels. Across the world, women are killed predominantly by men and in intimate/family contexts, whereas homicides of men are predominantly perpetrated by other men outside the family (Trent and Pridemore 2012; UNODC 2016). Therefore, the concept of femicide enables researchers to identify specific social facts or social phenomena differing from other facts existing in a given society. In the social sciences, social phenomena are the very objects under study. These have been described as ‘a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him’ (Durkheim 1895/1982, p. 52). To be analysed and understood, they must be clearly ­identifiable – ­not to be confused or conflated with other similar phenomena. This condition seems to be precarious if femicide as a concept

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142  Handbook on gender and violence is used in the explanatory framework of very disparate cases. Indeed, as we showed above, it is employed with different meanings in different contexts, and therefore may refer to different social phenomena and thus create confusion rather than clarity. Can the mass murder of women in Ciudad Juarez by strangers be examined with the same interpretative categories as intimate partner femicide in Italy and female foeticide in India? A second point is that femicide does not neutrally refer solely to the  female sex of the victim; it also implies possible explanations of the offenders’ actions by applying a pre-­given theoretical framework to the interpretation of murder of women as a social fact: women are killed because they are women, thus because of their social and cultural status in societies marked by gender inequality, sexism and misogyny. Although these are reasonable assumptions, research needs to acknowledge international sociological and psychological literature showing that different risk factors for violence also include personality, psychological pathologies, alcohol and/or drug consumption, family history of violence, socio-­ cultural status, loss of self-­control and more (Collins 2013; Johnson 2005). All these factors are subsumed in gender explanations given by femicide, which flattens the complexity and variety of homicide cases. Also, how can we be certain to what extent a woman is killed because of her sex/gender or because she is that very particular and unique woman? Further, can we ask the same question regarding homicides of men: are men killed (by other men) because they are men? Adam Jones (2004) has gone to great lengths to analyse gender-­selective mass killing, or ‘gendercide’. He argues that non-­combatant men are the group most frequently targeted for mass killing. The wide circulation of the notion of femicide urges researchers to recognize that men, too, are targeted victims, although in different social and political contexts. Finally, can the term femicide help us in taking seriously into sociological consideration the active role of women in perpetrating lethal violence against other women? These questions remain open for further examination in future research. This chapter set out to show the prominence and significance of femicide in different disciplines. The notion has proved to be very flexible in that it adapts well to diverse cultural contexts, very poignant in that it arouses civic consciousness to the problem, and very fertile because it can be incorporated in several research agendas for VAW: the domestic violence, gender inequality and human rights framework. The semantic confusion and empirical shortcomings pointed out above are part of this theoretical fertility, and they can be avoided with efforts towards conceptual and methodological clarity. The notion of femicide has great potential in contributing to a decrease of this violent phenomenon worldwide.

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Femicide  ­143

REFERENCES Amnesty International (2003) ‘Mexico: intolerable killings: 10 years of abductions and murders of women in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua: summary report and appeals cases’, accessed 30 October 2018 at https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/AMR41/027/2003/en/. Bandelli, D. (2017) Femicide, Gender and Violence: Discourses and Counter-Discourses in Italy, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bandelli, D. and G. Porcelli (2016) ‘Femicide in Italy: “femminicidio”, moral panic and progressivist discourse’, Sociologica, 2, 1–34. Banerjee, P.R. (2014) ‘Dowry in 21st-­century India: the sociocultural face of exploitation’, Trauma, Violence and Abuse, 15 (1), 34–40. Cepal (2015) ‘Femicide or feminicide as a specific type of crime in national legislations in Latin America: an on-­going process. ECLAC Notes for Equality’, no. 17, July, accessed 30 October 2018 at https://oig.cepal.org/sites/default/files/noteforequality_​17_​0.pdf. Cohen, S. (2011) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, New York: Routledge. Collins, R. (2013) ‘Entering and leaving the tunnel of violence: micro-­sociological dynamics of emotional entrainment in violent interactions’, Current Sociology, 61 (2), 132–151. Corona, I. and H. Domínguez (2010) Gender Violence at the U.S.–Mexico Border, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Corradi, C. (2014) ‘Il femminicidio in Italia: dimensioni del fenomeno e confronti internazionali’ [Femicide in Italy: national characteristics and international comparisons] in F.  Cimagalli (ed.) Politiche contro la violenza di genere nel welfare che cambia, Milan: Franco Angeli, pp. 157–169. Corradi, C., C. Marcuello-­Servós, S. Boira and S. Weil (2016) ‘Theories of femicide and their significance for social research’, Current Sociology 64 (7), 975–995. Critcher, C. (2003) Moral Panics and the Media. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Dawson, M. (2016) ‘Punishing femicide: criminal justice responses to the killing of women over four decades’, Current Sociology, 64 (7), 996–1016. Dixon, L., C. Hamilton-­Giachritsis and K. Browne (2008) ‘Classifying partner femicide’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 23 (1), 74–93. Durkheim, É (1895/1982) The Rules of Social Method, New York: Macmillan. ECOSOC (2013) ‘Statement submitted by the Academic Council on the United Nations System, a non-­governmental organization in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council’, E/CN.15/2013/NGO/1, Vienna, 22–26 April 2013, accessed 30 October 2018 at https://www.unodc.org/documents/commissions/CCPCJ/CCPCJ_​Sessions/CCPCJ _​22/_​E-­CN15-­2013-­NGO1/E-­CN15-­2013-­NGO1_​E.pdf. Eklund, L. and N. Purewal (2017) ‘The bio-­politics of population control and sex-­selective abortion in China and India’, Feminism and Psychology, 27 (1), 34–55. European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) (2017) Glossary of Definitions of Rape, Femicide and Intimate Partner Violence, Luxembourg: European Institute for Gender Equality. Frye, V., V. Hossein, E. Waltermaurer, S. Blaney and S. Wilt (2005) ‘Femicide in New York City’, Homicide Studies, 9 (3), 204–228. Giomi, E. and F. Tonello (2013) ‘Moral panic: the issue of women and crime in Italian evening news’, Sociologica, 3, 3–29. Glass, N., J. Koziol-­McLain, J. Campbell and C.R. Block (2004) ‘Female-­perpetrated femicide and attempted femicide: a case study’, Violence Against Women, 10 (6), 606–625. González Rodríguez, S. (2012) The Femicide Machine, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts (eds) (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, London: Macmillan. Hudson, V.M. and A. Den Boer (2002) ‘A surplus of men, a deficit of peace’, International Security, 26 (2), 5–38. Jeffries, F. (2013) ‘Documentary noir in the city of fear: feminicide, impunity and grassroots communication in Ciudad Juarez’, Crime, Media, Culture, 9 (3), 301–317.

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144  Handbook on gender and violence Johnson, M.P. (2005) ‘Domestic violence: it’s not about ­gender – ­or is it?’ Journal of Marriage and Family, 67 (5), 1126–1130. Jones, A. (ed.) (2004) Gendercide and Genocide, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Lagarde, M. (2010) ‘Preface: feminist keys for understanding feminicide’ in R.-L. Fregoso and C. Bejarano (eds) Terrorizing Women, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. xi–xxvi. Lameiras Fernandez, M., Y. Rodriguez-­Castro, F. Piacenti, P. Alonso Ruido and M.V Carrera Fernandez (2018) ‘Femicide in Spain, Portugal and Italy: data review from 2004 to 2016’, Sociologia e Politiche Sociali, 21 (1), 45–63. Laudano, C. (2017) ‘Movilizaciones #NiUnaMenos y #VivasNos Queremos en Argentina entre el activism digital y #ElFeminismoLoHizo’ [Mobilizations #NotOneWomanLess and #WeWantOurselvesAlive in Argentina between digital activism and #FeminimsDidIt], paper presented at the joint 13th Women’s Worlds Congress and 11th Doing Gender (Fazendo Gênero) Seminar, 30 July–4 August, Florianópolis, Brazil. Luthra, R. (1994) ‘A case of problematic diffusion: the use of sex determination techniques in India’, Knowledge, 15 (3), 259–272. Monárrez Fragoso, J. (2002) ‘Feminicidio sexual serial en Ciudad Juárez: 1993–2001’ [Serial sexual femicide in Ciudad Juárez: 1993–2001], Debate Feminista, 13 (25), 279–305. Monárrez Fragoso, J. (2008) ‘Fortaleciendo el entendimiento del femicidio/feminicidio’ [Strenghtening the understanding of femicidio/feminicidio], paper presented at the meeting organized by PATH, WHO and the Medical Research Council of South Africa, Washington, DC, 14–16 April. Muftić, L.R. and M.L. Baumann (2012) ‘Female versus male perpetrated femicide: an exploratory analysis of whether offender gender matters’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 27 (14), 2824–2844. Nie, J.-B. (2011) ‘Non-­medical sex-­selective abortion in China: ethical and public policy issues in the context of 40 million missing females’, British Medical Bulletin, 98 (1), 7–20. Osservatorio Europeo sulla Sicurezza (2013) ‘Tutte le insicurezze degli italiani: significati, immagine e realtà’ [All that Italians feel insecure about: meanings, image and reality], accessed 30 October 2018 at http://www.vita.it/static/upload/tut/tutte-­le-­insicurezze-­degli-­ italiani-­rapporto-­2012.pdf. Patel, V. (2010) ‘Sex determination and sex pre-­selection tests in India’, Asian Bioethics Review, 2 (1), 76–81. Pates, G., S. Logroño and D. Medina (2017) ‘Discursividades y violencias: la (re)apropriación de la consigna #NiUnaMenos en Twitter’ [Discoursivity and violence: the (re) appropriation of the hashtag #NiUnaMenos on Twitter], Actas de periodismo y comunicación, 3 (1), accessed 30 October 2018 at http://perio.unlp.edu.ar/ojs/index.php/actas/ issue/view/168/showToc. Radford, J. and D. Russell (eds) (1992) Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne. Richards, T.N., L.K. Gillespie and E.M. Givens (2014) ‘Reporting femicide-­suicide in the news: the current utilization of suicide reporting guidelines and recommendations for the future’, Journal of Family Violence, 29 (4), 453–463. Rosales Matienzo, E. (2018) ‘Femicides in Argentina’, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), accessed 29 June 2018 at http://www.coha.org/femicides-­in-­argentina. Russell, D.E.H. and R.A. Harmes (2001) Femicide in Global Perspective. New York and London: Teachers College Press. Sabri, B., M.V. Sanchez and J.C. Campbell (2015) ‘Motives and characteristics of domestic violence homicides and suicides among women in India’, Health Care for Women International, 36 (7), 851–866. Sela-­Shayovitz, R. (2011) ‘Neo-­Nazis and moral panic: the emergence of neo-­Nazi youth gangs in Israel’, Crime, Media, Culture, 7 (1), 67–82. Šimonović, D. (2016) ‘Violence against women, its causes and consequences’, report transmitted to the UN General Assembly, A/71/398. Smit, P.R., R.R. de Jong and C.C.J.H Bijleveld (2013) ‘Homicide data in Europe: defini-

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Femicide  ­145 tions, sources and statistics’ in M. Liem and W.A. Pridemore (eds) Handbook of European Homicide Research, New York: Springer, pp. 5–23. Smith, B.A. and S. Kethineni (2006) ‘Homicides by males and females in India: the domestic context’, International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 30 (2), 255–287. Spinelli, B. (2008) Femminicidio: dalla denuncia sociale al riconoscimento giuridico internazionale [Femicide: from social awareness-­raising to international legal recognition], Milan: Franco Angeli. Trent, C.L.S. and W.A. Pridemore (2012) ‘A review of the cross-­national empirical literature on social structure and homicide’ in M. Liem and W.A. Pridemore (eds) Handbook of European Homicide Research, New York: Springer, pp. 111–135. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2016) ‘Intentional homicide victims’, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Statistics and Data, accessed 30 October 2018 at https://dataunodc.un.org/crime/intentional-­homicide-­victims. Weil, S. (2018) ‘Research and prevention of femicide across Europe’ in S. Weil, C. Corradi and M. Naudi (eds) Femicide across Europe: Theory, Research and Prevention, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 1–15. Weil, S. and N. Vom Berg Mitra (2016) ‘Femicide of girls in contemporary India’, Ex aequo, 34 (1), 31–43. Weil, S., C. Corradi and M. Naudi (eds) (2018) Femicide across Europe: Theory, Research and Prevention, Bristol: Policy Press. Wright, M.W. (2011) ‘Necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide: gendered violence on the Mexico–U.S. border’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36 (3), 707–731.

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11. Security

Laura J. Shepherd

There are many different ways to think about security, though much of this thinking bears little apparent relevance to gender and violence. In the discipline of International Relations, for example, and in the study of politics and governance more broadly, security is often assumed to take the state as its referent object. This means that when people talk about, or analyse, security practices they are assuming that the thing to be s­ ecured – ­the thing to which security practices refer – is the state. Other humanities and social science disciplines, ­however – ­including philosophy, sociology, anthropology and development ­studies – ­have a different view about the appropriate referent object of security theory and practice, recognizing that all kinds of things exist that can be (perhaps even should be) secured: bodies, livelihoods, and identities, for example, can all be thought about in terms of what it would take to render them secure. Taking bodies, livelihoods, and identities seriously as referent objects of security theory and practice begins to illuminate more obviously the connections between gender, violence, and security. In this chapter I explore the concept of security in the first substantive section, suggesting that whether we think security can be achieved depends a lot on what we think security is. In the second section I provide an overview of the different dimensions of security that are particularly pertinent to the consideration of gender and violence. In the final section of the chapter I elaborate on the idea of security providers, and link ideas about gender, violence, and security to the concept of protection. This section explores not only whose security matters but also how it is claimed that security can be achieved. I conclude the chapter with some reflections on the possibilities for future research.

THE CONCEPT OF SECURITY As mentioned above, whether we think security can be achieved depends a lot on what we think security is. The concept of security has been fiercely debated across different social science and humanities disciplines over many years, and there is no universal agreement over what security ‘means’. One of the fields of research that has devoted a lot of attention to the concept of security is the discipline of International Relations, which 146

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Security  ­147 purports to study, among other things, the ways in which states interact. Security is important in International Relations because it is important, apparently, to ­states – ­so important, in fact, that a state cannot be a state unless it is secure. This traces back to the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which lays out the conditions for statehood in the international system. The first Article of the Convention explains that: ‘The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government; and d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states’ (see Avalon Project 2008). Of particular interest here is item 1.b, relating to the need for a state to have a ‘defined territory’ in order to be recognized as a state. ‘Defined’, in this ­context – ­and certainly in historical ­context – ­came to mean ‘well defended’, which in turn was interpreted as ‘secure’. International Relations as a discipline, then, invested a significant amount of energy in, and attention to, the concept of security, but was conventionally concerned with only a very narrow and partial definition of security as it pertained to the state (this is now changing, as I discuss below). This is known as ‘national security’; thinking about security in this way assumes ‘states are [. . .] the object to which security policy and practice refers and humans can only be secured to the extent that they are citizens of a given state’ (Shepherd 2008, p. 57). The proposition ‘that all human existence is bounded by states’ (Shepherd 2008, p. 57) is manifestly not the case t­oday – a­ s we witness forced migration, displacement, and the movement of people seeking refuge and asylum often as a result of the violent practices of ­states – i­f indeed it ever had validity. Assuming that individuals are defined in relation to the state, which is in turn assumed to have ultimate authority over its peoples, is problematic, as is the assumption that state practices make people more secure. Through the study of different kinds and sites of security, feminist scholars in International Relations have challenged this interpretation of identity and experience as being contained by the state. One particularly notable example is the study of the peace camps at Greenham Common. Greenham Common was the site of a Royal Air Force station (RAF Greenham Common) at which the UK government permitted the storage of nuclear weapons (in the form of cruise missiles) in the early 1980s. A series of protests and camps were situated at the Common, and the people ­involved – ­ultimately women only, which is why the protest site became known as Greenham Common Women’s Peace C ­ amp – ­used different strategies and tactics, including ‘human chains’ stretching for miles around the RAF base to disrupt activities and demonstrate the power of their presence. The individuals at Greenham, who were exercising agency through the use of their bodies in protest against the fact that nuclear

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148  Handbook on gender and violence ‘security’ didn’t make them feel secure, ‘subverted the security-­ based strategic vision of international relations by showing [. . .] acts of everyday insecurity’ (Sylvester 1994, p. 193). The very articulation of these ‘acts of everyday insecurity’ challenges conventional logic of ‘national security’, and demands that the relationship between individuals and the state be examined and problematized. Another way to think about security grew out of development studies, and sought to conceptualize security not as an absence of violence or harm, but in more positive t­ erms – ­as the presence of the conditions necessary to sustain and nourish people. This is often described as a ‘human security’ approach, dating back to the 1994 United Nations Development Program Human Development Report, which includes a chapter entitled ‘New Dimensions of Human Security’. The Report acknowledges all of the shortcomings of the conventional, narrow, conceptualization of security offered by traditional scholarship in International Relations: The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It has been related more to nation-­states than to people. (UNDP 1994, p. 22)

Arguing that, historically, security has been skewed towards ‘freedom from fear’, with insufficient attention being paid to ‘freedom from want’, the 1994 Report proposed a new conceptualization of security that centred the human as the referent object of security theory and practice. This approach extends the political attention and urgency normally afforded to matters of ‘national security’ to a range of ­other – ­indubitably ­important – ­concerns. The concept of human security is envisioned as ‘all-­ encompassing’, comprising (at least) seven components: economic security; food security; health security; environmental security; personal security; community security; and political security (UNDP 1994, pp.  24–25). As one scholar explains: ‘An implicit assumption [. . .] is that the elevation of issues of human rights, economic inequality and environmental change, for example, to the realm of security will allow greater priority to these issues’ (McDonald 2002, p. 277). This became known as ‘securitization’, where issues are ‘elevated’ from the realm of normal, everyday political ­discourse – ­with the usual haggling and back-­and-­forth about funding, and partisan priorities, and so ­on – ­to the realm of security discourse in which (in politics, at least) issues are seen to pose an existential threat to a defined group, and must therefore be dealt with by any means necessary to ensure the group’s survival. Essentially, calling something a ‘security issue’ creates specific political effects and unlocks specific kinds of resources and possibilities that are not available when dealing with ‘normal’ political issues.

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Security  ­149 Of course, ­security – ­whether we are talking about national security or human security (in whole or in part), or the process by which an issue becomes recognizable as a security ­issue – ­is gendered in all sorts of ways. National security, which takes the state as its referent object, only recognizes certain forms of violence as threats to security: large-­scale, inter-­state violence. The people ordering the violence, and the people perpetrating the violence, are often (assumed to be) male; this means that, within this vision of security, security expertise and security practice are both masculinized (and I discuss what this means for how we understand security providers below). Violence perpetrated by and against men in a situation of armed conflict is visible within the optic of national security, but many other kinds of violence, which render all kinds of people insecure, are not seen (including, for example, gender-­based violence, structural violence, economic violence, and child/elder abuse). Security is gendered because violence is gendered, and vice versa. Moreover, it is not simply the case that security is gendered because certain kinds of violence happen to, and are permitted by, certain kinds of bodies: there are logics to the way that security is both thought of and practised that create ­certain – ­and specifically ­gendered – ­political possibilities and realities while excluding others. The political possibilities that are ‘thinkable’ within a human security approach are broader and more wide-­ranging than those we can identify within the narrow ‘national security’ optic. That said, and although a human security approach takes a much broader view of what counts as violence and who should be the focus of security theory and practice, there are still issues with how we interpret the ‘human’ in ‘human security’. A ‘gender lens’ on human security foregrounds the need to be clear about how gendered identities and experiences interact with security practices and provisions and create differential effects for differently gendered individuals:1 Feminist work ‘highlights the need to link a normative approach to human security (the human being as the key referent to the human security policy framework) with an interpretive approach (i.e., which human beings are we talking about, in what context, where and to what effect) that recognizes the 1   The idea of a ‘gender lens’ is very useful when trying to think analytically about the work that gender does to organize how we think about and interact with the world. Just as looking at the world through rose-­tinted glasses colours everything a charming shade of pink, looking at the world through a gender lens reveals the operations of gendered power that are often concealed or taken for granted. I learned this term from a pair of brilliant feminist researchers, Anne Sisson Runyan and Spike Peterson, who explain that ‘a gender-sensitive lens [. . .] reveals the political nature of gender as a system of difference construction and hierarchical dichotomy production that constitutes virtually all contemporary societies. Gender is about power, and power is gendered’ (Runyan and Peterson 2014, p. 6).

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150  Handbook on gender and violence complexity of the operation of power within and across categories of gender, ethnicity, and generation. (Truong et al., quoted in Sjoberg 2009, p. 206)

It is not enough to substitute ‘the human’ for ‘the state’; just as there are important and politically salient differences between different states in terms of resources, capabilities, terrain, and location, so too are there important and politically salient differences between ­ humans – ­ many of which intersect and interact with gender in complex ways. As Heidi Hudson notes: ‘There is a real danger that collapsing femininity or masculinity into the term “human” could conceal the gendered underpinnings of security practices’ (2005, p. 157). The final element to consider in developing an understanding of the concept of security and how it relates to both gender and violence is the ways in which the securitization process, outlined above, is gendered. Here, the work of Lene Hansen and others is particularly illuminative. According to the logic of securitization theory, security can only be ‘known’ if it can be both spoken and heard: an issue cannot become a security issue without both the ‘speech acts’ that articulate it as such and its reception as a security issue by the targeted audience (see Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998). The original formulation of securitization theory does not, however, account for the ways in which gender in particular interacts with (in)security to preclude various actors from successfully ‘elevating’ pertinent issues from the realm of the political to the realm of security (Hansen 2000, p. 286). Lene Hansen uses the example of ‘honour killings’ to demonstrate how a (gendered) threat against a collective (in this case, mostly women) cannot be ‘spoken’ into the realm of security because ‘an attempt to securitise one’s situation would in these cases, paradoxically, activate another threat posed to these women [. . .] For instance, those who choose to fight the current legal and cultural practices might become subjected to threats’ (Hansen 2000, p.  294). Hansen skilfully shows the limitations of the securitization approach ­and – ­more importantly for the purposes of this c­ hapter – h ­ ow gender and violence are sometimes overlooked even by those research approaches critical of the conventional view of things like security. This section has provided an overview of some of the different ways to think about the concept of security. There is no single, viable, definition of security, and many scholars have devoted much energy to thinking through not only what security means but also how the idea of security has political effects. Thus, though we cannot define security in any satisfactory way, we can certainly explore how it functions, politically, and examine the measures that are taken in the name of security, for example, or the kinds of violence that are determined to be security threats at certain times

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Security  ­151 (while others are excluded from such categorization). Inevitably, ideas about gendered bodies and behaviours ­inform – ­and indeed are informed ­by – t­he functions and parameters of security. It is useful, therefore, to interrogate in more detail how specific dimensions of security have gendered foundations and effects. I turn to this question in the section that follows.

(IN)SECURE CONDITIONS In this section I provide an overview of the different dimensions of security that are particularly pertinent to the consideration of gender and violence. The 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, as mentioned above, outlines seven interrelated dimensions of security, all of which can be subject to scrutiny through a gender lens (see Box 11.1). The Report highlights the importance of broadening our understanding of security threat in parallel with shifting our thinking about the referent object of security. Where, within the discourse of national security, threats are limited to acts of aggression from other states, if we adopt a broader understanding of security (and I would most certainly argue that we should), then our thinking about security threats obviously needs to change in order to include the kinds of violence that are rendered invisible by the national security approach, which necessitates the re-­thinking of security in the first place.

BOX 11.1  DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN SECURITY ‘Among these seven elements of human security are considerable links and overlaps. A threat to one element of human security is likely to ­travel – ­like an angry ­typhoon – ­to all forms of human security’ (UNDP 1994, p. 33). Economic security – secure income, employment, and working conditions Food security – access to sufficient nutrition Health security – access to primary and preventative health care, including vaccinations against preventable communicable diseases Environmental security – living in balance with the natural world, with clean air and clean water Personal security – living free from physical violence Community security – the ability to live safely within a group and participate effectively in group/social life Political security – living under an authority structure that upholds human rights and human security Source:  UNDP (1994), Human Development Report, pp. 24–33.

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152  Handbook on gender and violence This section proposes a few examples of insecurity that we might take seriously in our broader thinking about security practices, inspired by the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report. The imminent security threats identified in the Report include: disparities in economic opportunities; environmental degradation; drug production and trafficking; and international terrorism (UNDP 1994, p.  34). Despite the fact that the Report was published more than two decades ago, these phenomena are arguably still causing insecurity today for many people across the world. To these conditions I would add resource scarcity and unequal access to those resources (including food, water, and land) as major sources of insecurity in the world today. In the remainder of this section I examine each of these in turn through a gender lens to tease out further the intersections of gender, security, and violence (broadly conceived). Firstly, let us examine economic inequalities and the gendered insecurities caused by disparities in economic opportunity. A primary concern here is the extent to which gendered differences exist in control over financial resources and access to income-­generating activity. This can be conceptualized as a gap or disparity in economic independence: if they work outside the home, women tend to earn less than men (even when they are doing the same job); and men tend to have more control than women over household finances, land, and assets (Ortiz-­Ospina and Roser 2018). Economic opportunity is of course related to other kinds of opportunity, and vice versa. Where women are denied the opportunity to work outside the home, for example, their mobility may be curtailed and their access to support networks diminished as they have fewer reasons to leave the family home on a day-­to-­day basis. Similarly, it is common in abusive relationships for women to be denied control over financial assets and resources as a means of keeping them in the relationship because they literally cannot afford to leave. It is clear, then, that there are gendered insecurities that might manifest as a result of disparity in economic opportunity. This relates to the gendered insecurity of resource scarcity. There are often gendered inequalities and forms of discrimination that prevent access to land and the means to secure a livelihood. Land rights are a gender issue as, in many places, land and property assets are handed down from male to male. In post-­conflict settings, where many of the men have died during the conflict and thus many of the households are headed by women, there are complicated settlement issues regarding secure access to land and the means to secure a livelihood (see Chant 2016). If a female head of house has no legal right to residence or tenancy, she is vulnerable to being evicted from her home, often losing both domicile and access to food supply (if there is a garden plot or allotment) and water source

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Security  ­153 (if they had previously dug a well). ‘Both male and female agricultural producers are affected by inadequate access to land and tenure insecurity in developing countries. There are, however, deep insecurities with respect to the extent to which each group experiences these challenges’, given the structural inequalities that exist regarding legal provisions for women and men (Barthwal-­Datta and Basu 2015, p. 203). Changes in the global political economy are increasing the gap between the very wealthy and those living in poverty, creating new forms of insecurity as people have to travel further, work longer hours, and sacrifice more in order to provide financially for themselves and their families. Men may feel that their masculinity is challenged or compromised if they are unable to find work, especially in areas where heavy industry or ­conflict – ­both of which construct a strong, powerful masculine subject as the ‘ideal type’ w ­ orker – ­have previously been the primary means of economic engagement. The lack of economic opportunity locally can push people to move sometimes many hundreds of miles from their families and communities in order to find employment, which itself can be a source of insecurity: many of the women murdered in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico), for example, a city notorious for the prevalence of violence against women, work as maquiladoras in export processing zones (Wright 2006; Chant and McIlwaine 2016, p. 144). Further, environmental degradation is a cause of gendered insecurity, particularly in the ­developing – ­or ‘majority’ – world.2 If an immediate need for food and water cannot be met, this has obvious implications for health and wellbeing. In countries where there are gendered protocols governing food distribution (where, for example, the male head of household might eat first, followed by the first-­born son, and so on, with the youngest daughter being the final person to receive food), reduction in food production as a result of drought or pests will have a significant effect on the health and wellbeing of the female population. In countries where women and girls are responsible for gathering water and fuel such as firewood, when water holes and rivers dry up this can increase the distance that women and girls travel to fetch water by many miles each day, which can cause physical problems. Conversely, where sea levels rise and small-­ scale or subsistence agriculture is disrupted, this can have gendered effects. Further, measures to diminish the impact of environmental degradation, including population management, are premised on gendered logics and have gendered effects, often focusing on policing the bodies of women and 2   I refer to the ‘developing world’ sometimes as the ‘majority world’ to remind myself that most of the world’s population lives in countries that are deemed to be still ‘developing’, though arguably the so-­called ‘developed world’ still has a lot of ‘developing’ to do.

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154  Handbook on gender and violence ignoring the role that men have in human reproduction: ‘this is particularly true in relation to women of the Global South, who are often constructed as [. . .] “over-­reproductive” in this context’ (Foster 2015, p. 70). This hyper-­focus on female sexuality can be a source of insecurity, creating a permissive environment for measures such as forced sterilization. Moving to the issue of drug production and trafficking, the global narcotics industry is a multi-­billion dollar business that affects millions of lives worldwide. The gendered insecurities associated with drug production and trafficking are varied. Drug supply chains tend to be dominated by men, often young men, and they are vulnerable to, as well as being perpetrators of, violence, coercion, and abuse. This is a cause of both psychological and physical harm. Similarly, those ­employed – ­or ­forced – ­to traffic drugs risk their health as well as their freedom; they are often younger women and men who feel deprived of any alternative economic opportunity. At the other end of the supply chain, the gendered effects of drug addiction are evident, as addicts require care, and care labour is disproportionately undertaken by women. The mental and physical health effects of long-­ term drug abuse are likely to affect men and women differently, and the vulnerabilities faced by men and women who are, for example, without a fixed residence as a result of addiction are also gendered and racialized in complex ways. Finally, it may seem counter-­intuitive to suggest that international terrorism has gendered causes and effects: surely a bomb does not ask questions about the gender identities of its targets before detonation? But if we think more holistically about terrorism and the kinds of social and political factors that support and are supported by contemporary manifestations of terrorism, we can easily see how it is gendered. One gendered dimension of terrorism relates to the ways in which many fundamentalist ideologies rely on and perpetuate very strict gender ideologies that position women as subordinate to men. Women are often depicted in these ideological narratives as property or willing subjects under male authority. One insightful analysis, for example, examines the ways in which white supremacist discourse in the USA (re)produces gendered hierarchy through both imagery and text: ‘The highest duty and honor of a white man, according to white supremacist discourse, is to preserve the white family and with it a hierarchy of race, gender, and sexuality’ (Daniels 1997, p. 34). This kind of ideology normalizes gendered hierarchies and even violence as a way of maintaining such hierarchies; it is thus clearly a source of insecurity. ­ perates – a­ nd is renAt a more conceptual level, international terrorism o dered ‘knowable’ – through the same structures of gender, race, and power that organize much geopolitical practice in the contemporary world: many security ­efforts – ­operations, deployments, and ­missions – ­are now under-

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Security  ­155 taken as part of the global ‘war’ on terrorism. It is of critical importance to understand how these security efforts cause insecurity for many: ‘the war on/of (global) terror operates through the deployment of ideas of sexuality and race [. . .] particularly the racialization of terrorist bodies, while fear and other responses to terrorism in the West predominantly impact on Muslim and Arab communities’ (Bhattacharyya 2008 and Puar 2007, cited in Pain 2014). These cognitive frames cause widespread insecurity and harm that is both racialized and gendered. Gendered and racialized power operates to enable particular kinds of security practice to seem legitimate and reasonable and to legitimize certain security actors, which means that they can perpetrate legitimate acts of violence. This brings me to the last dimension of security that I want to explore here: the security providers. In the final section I turn to those actors who ­offer – ­or claim to ­offer – s­ ecurity, and examine the gendered and often violent nature of these security acts.

SECURITY PROVIDERS As discussed above, war-­fighting is seen to be the preserve of men. In order to understand war, we need to deploy our ‘gender lens’: ‘Femininity and masculinity are invoked in specific ways and men and women perform a variety of roles in wars which either entrench gender hierarchy and uphold gender subordination or transform gender relations in significant ways’ (Parashar 2015, p. 100). One of the key gender dimensions of war is the distinction between the security provider and the person/group for whom security is being provided. Jean Bethke Elshtain (1987) famously described these roles as the ‘Just Warrior’ and the ‘Beautiful Soul’. The ‘Just Warrior’ is the ‘ideal soldier’, the pre-­eminent provider of security who goes to war to fight for a just and noble cause. The ‘Beautiful Soul’ is the embodiment of all that is fought for. Elshtain’s figurations are mapped neatly onto the conventional gender binary, with the former constituted as a masculine subject and the latter as the archetype of the feminine. Conceptually, then, the conventional security provider is male. There is continuity between the idea of security provider and the idea of protector. As Spike Peterson explains, the protector/protected dichotomy is ‘embedded in constructions of masculine autonomy (freedom, control, heroics) and feminine dependency’ (1992, p.  54), which resonate with the Just Warrior/Beautiful Soul narrative. To bring the discussion back around to the national security approach with which I started, it is interesting to explore Iris Marion Young’s analysis of the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ that animates state security practice. According to Young, the

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156  Handbook on gender and violence idea of the state as a security p ­ rovider – ­the state which has ‘rights and duties’ pertaining to security, as outlined a­ bove – ­is reliant on a gendered logic of protection: In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculinist protectors puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. [. . .] At the same time that it legitimates authoritarian power over citizens internally, the logic of masculinist protection justifies aggressive war outside. (Young 2003, p. 2)

It is evident, then, that the provider of security can also b ­ e – ­must also be, in f­ act – v­ iolent. The source of security is also the source of insecurity, depending on one’s location vis-­à-vis the security act. Empirically, this is demonstrably true. Security ­ providers – ­ from UN peacekeepers to the guards at detention ­centres – ­perpetrate horrific violence against the people they are supposed to protect. Security ­providers – ­militaries, police, paramilitary ­forces – ­perpetrate horrific violence against those who are deemed to present ‘a threat’. And yet we continue to support the system that affords these actors legitimacy, for the illusion of security it provides us.

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have outlined the ways in which the concept of ­security – ­what we think security is/­means – i­s gendered, with conventional visions/ versions of ‘national security’ implying certain gendered configurations of power and authority over security discourse and practice. If we take ‘the human’ to be the referent object of security, this does not absolve us from considering gender, as gender shapes and informs what we think humans are and what humans n ­ eed – ­including in the realm of security. In the second section I explored some of the ways in which insecurities are gendered, using a ‘gender lens’ to examine the ways in which insecurity, injustice, and violence manifest and affect differently gendered bodies differently. Finally, I discussed the gendered politics of security ‘providers’, those charged with protecting others against violence and permitted to use violence in those protection efforts. Security is a concept that is ‘both experienced and realised through social practice’ (Hoogensen and Stuvøy 2006, p.  224). Further, Maria Stern (2006) has commented that security is implicated in the ways in which we practise our identity; and the imbrication of s­ ecurity – ­manifest in both ‘material’ and ‘discursive’ ­ practice – ­ in both our enacted or embodied being in the world and our cognitive apprehension of the same

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Security  ­157 is central to this conceptualization. There is no objective or empirical reality to security as an ontological condition; what is available to researchers is the possibility of identifying a range of factors that relate to or challenge security as it is both perceived by and manifest in the referent object (be that an individual, a household, a community, or a state). By careful disaggregation of the various elements of gender security in any given context, it should be possible to investigate what it means to live a secure life as a gendered subject, and to develop an understanding of how gendered insecurity can be apprehended.

REFERENCES Avalon Project (2008) Convention on Rights and Duties of States (Inter-American), 26 December 1933, accessed 31 January 2019 at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_​century/ intam03.asp. Barthwal-­Datta, M. and S. Basu (2015) ‘Land, water and food’, in L.J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (2nd edn), London: Routledge, pp. 197–209. Buzan, B., O. Wæver and J. de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Chant, S. (2016) ‘Female household headship as an asset? Interrogating the intersections of urbanisation, gender, and domestic transformations’ in C.O. Moser (ed.) Gender, Assets and Just Cities: Pathways to Transformation, London: Routledge, pp. 21–39. Chant, S. and C. McIlwaine (2016) Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South: Towards a Feminised Urban Future, London: Routledge. Daniels, J. (1997) White Lies: Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse, London: Routledge. Elshtain, J.B. (1987) Women and War, New York: Basic Books. Foster, E.A. (2015) ‘Environmental politics and ecology’ in Laura J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politic: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (2nd edn), London: Routledge, pp. 62–73. Hansen, L. (2000) ‘The Little Mermaid’s silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the Copenhagen School’, Millennium, 29 (2), 285–306. Hoogensen, G. and K. Stuvøy (2006) ‘Gender, resistance, and human security’, Security Dialogue, 37 (2), 207–228. Hudson, H. (2005) ‘“Doing” security as though humans matter: a feminist perspective on gender and the politics of human security’, Security Dialogue, 36 (2), 155–174. McDonald, M. (2002) ‘Human security and the construction of security’, Global Society, 16 (3), 277–95. Ortiz-­Ospina, E. and M. Roser (2018) ‘Economic inequality by gender’, Our World in Data, accessed 31 January 2019 at https://ourworldindata.org/economic-­inequality-­by-­gender. Pain, R. (2014) ‘Everyday terrorism: connecting domestic violence and global terrorism’, Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 531–550. Parashar, S. (2015) ‘War’, in Laura J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (2nd edn), London: Routledge, pp. 99–109. Peterson, V.S. (1992) ‘Security and sovereign states: what is at stake in taking feminism seriously?’ in V.S. Peterson (ed.) Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 31–64. Runyan, A.S. and V.S. Peterson (2014) Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, Boulder, CO: Westview.

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158  Handbook on gender and violence Shepherd, L.J. (2008) Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice, London: Zed Books. Sjoberg, L. (2009) ‘Introduction to security studies: feminist contributions’, Security Studies, 18 (2), 183–213. Stern, M. (2006) ‘“We” the subject: the power and failure of (in)security’, Security Dialogue, 37 (2), 187–205. Sylvester, C. (1994) Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1994) Human Development Report, 1994. New York: United Nations Development Programme, accessed 31 January 2019 at http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/255/hdr_​1994_​en_​complete_​nostats.pdf. Wæver, O. (1995) ‘Securitization and desecuritization’ in R.D. Lipschutz (ed.) On Security, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 46–86. Wright, M. (2006) Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, London: Routledge. Young, I.M. (2003) ‘The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29 (1), 1–25.

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PART II REPRESENTATIONS

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12. The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem Ben Swanton

There is nothing new about gender violence. Only in the last few decades, however, has it come to be seen as problematic and in need of being addressed as an object of policy. In the 1970s, feminists in the West drew attention to wife beating and rape. Since then, many other abusive practices have come to be recognized as gender violence. Today, most governments take various actions to address the issue, signifying that gender violence has become a public issue intervened in by states and other actors. Across different settings, legislation has been passed criminalizing ‘domestic violence’; dedicated services have been established to support victims and work with perpetrators; and treaties that recognize gender violence as a human rights violation have been signed.1 This chapter traces the emergence of gender violence as a policy problem. It starts by looking at early reform efforts in the West. Policy development in the twentieth century is then discussed, drawing on examples from national and international contexts. The focus then shifts to contemporary policy discourses on gender violence. It is argued that while policy may be made in response to social movements, policy may also make gender violence. The chapter concludes by considering how gender violence policy is being reframed as an ‘evidence-­based practice’, and some likely effects of this representation.

GENDER VIOLENCE AS A POLICY PROBLEM ‘Gender violence’ (also known as ‘gendered violence’ or ‘gender-­based violence’) may include violence from intimate partners, rape by known and unknown persons, femicide and acid attacks. Dowry-­related violence, honour killings, trafficking for prostitution, foeticide, and female genital mutilation are other forms. Sexual harassment, the main focus of the 1   Attesting to the scale of this work, a one-­day survey in the United States by the National Network to End Domestic Violence identified 1,894 domestic violence programmes providing services to people who had experienced violence, and captured 1,398 trainings to 27,708 community members and service professionals (NNEDV 2015).

160

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The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem  ­161 global #MeToo campaign, is also gender violence. In academic research and policy documents, violence tends to be reified as something concrete and measurable. Definitions of violence often refer to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse (or the threat thereof), isolation and control of movements and abuse through the control of money. Violence, however, has material and discursive dimensions: it is both something experienced in terms of bodies and something that is represented, analysed and reproduced in culture (Hearn 1998a). The Emergence of Gender Violence as a Policy Problem in the West Early efforts to reform gender violence in the West were focused on the problem of ‘wife beating’. In the United States, policy reform prohibiting such abuse has been traced to Puritans in the seventeenth century (Pleck 1989). During the nineteenth century, first-­wave feminists in the UK and the United States were concerned about the issue (McMillan 2007; Pleck 1989). Anglo-­American common law had traditionally recognized a husband’s right to ‘chastise’ his wife so long as he did not permanently injure her (Siegel 1996). By the end of the century, the situation in the West had begun to change. In the United States, legislatures in several states enacted statutes prohibiting wife beating (Schneider 2000). Across the Atlantic, in 1853 Henry Fitzroy asked parliament to extend to women the same protection ‘as they already extended to poodle dogs and donkeys [. . .] under the Cruelty to Animals Act’ (Cobbe in Dobash and Dobash 1981, p.  570). The same year, the British government passed the Act for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children. Before 1878, when further legislation was passed, the ‘rule of thumb’ law, whereby husbands could beat their wives so long as the stick was not thicker than their thumb, was used in British courts (Hearn 1998).2 Despite these reforms in both the United States and the United Kingdom, for the next century ideals of domesticity, privacy and the sanctity of the family served to discourage state intervention (Dobash and Dobash 1981; Schneider 2000).3 Schechter (1982, pp.  11, 27) notes that, before the 1970s, millions of American women who were beaten had virtually nowhere to go. ‘Had abusive behavior been generally declared illegitimate’, she argues, ‘then a woman’s right to leave and exist as a 2   Gordon (1988) perceptively argues that the specification of width suggests that the issue was being debated and reform was considered necessary. 3   Schneider (2000) notes that over the same period of time in the US, the legal system continued to be treat wife beating as distinct from cases of assault and battery.

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162  Handbook on gender and violence s­ eparate and independent person would have been supported with government services and resources.’ The Emergence of Gender Violence as an International Policy Problem In 1975 most governments around the world did little or nothing to address gender violence. Government reform efforts, in certain settings, accelerated by 1985, with great variation in state responses prevailing by 2005 (Htun and Weldon 2018). The United Nations Secretary-­General’s in-­depth study on all forms of violence against women found that, by 2006: 89 states had some legislative provisions that specifically addressed domestic violence; marital rape could be prosecuted in at least 104 states; 90 states had some form of legislative provision against sexual harassment; 90 states had some legislative provision regarding trafficking in human beings; and 15 of the 28 African states where female genital mutilation is prevalent had enacted laws criminalizing the practice (UN 2006). Instances of transnational feminist activism around this issue can be traced to the 1970s (Schechter 1982, p. 150). It was not until the 1990s, however, that gender violence emerged as a problem for international human rights policy. Advocates argued that women’s rights were not being recognized as human rights (Bunch 1990). The original text of the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), while comprehensively detailing norms of equality, made no mention of violence. Not a single word referred to men’s violence against their partners, or of rape, genital mutilation or other forms of abuse (Keck and Sikkink 2014). A general recommendation in 1992 made the link between gender, discrimination and violence explicit (Johnson et al. 2007, p. 6). ‘Gender-­based violence’ was defined as ‘violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately. It includes acts that inflict physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty.’ The focus on gender in ‘gender violence’ served to highlight how such abuse is disproportionately perpetrated by men against women and maintained by social a­ rrangements – ­and is thus not inevitable (UN 1995). The concept connected diverse practices which were previously considered distinct issues: from violence by men against their female partners in the West, to dowry violence in India, rape of political prisoners in Latin America, and female genital mutilation in Africa (Keck and Sikkink 2014). In 1993, women’s rights were officially recognized as human rights in the Vienna Declaration. ‘[V]iolence against women’, the declaration read, ‘is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between

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The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem  ­163 men and women’ and one of the ‘crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position’. The same year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, which called on member states to condemn violence against women, sanction perpetrators and provide access to justice (UN 1994). Since Vienna, a raft of international agreements has been signed, and several United Nations resolutions have been passed on gender violence. These extend to trafficking in women, violence in conflict and peacekeeping, and crime prevention (Johnson et al. 2007). Today, eliminating violence against women, and other harmful practices, feature as targets in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the most high-­profile agenda for world change. How does Gender Violence Policy get Made? Accounts of the emergence of gender violence as a policy problem tend to emphasize the role of claims makers or social movements in putting new issues on the policy agenda (Bacchi 1999).4 Recent comparative cross-­national studies (Htun and Weldon 2012, 2018; Weldon and Htun 2013), for instance, find that it is the autonomous organizing of feminists in domestic and transnational contexts – not leftist parties, women in government or national ­wealth – ­that is the critical factor accounting for policies that seek to address violence against women. Autonomous mobilization of feminists in civil society, these scholars conclude, is the key to reducing violence: ‘protest makes policy’ (Weldon 2011). Such research offers important insights to understanding how gender violence emerges as a policy problem. A different genre of enquiry, however, has emphasized how moral panic and broad concerns about inequality get produced as ‘social problems’ and become objects of policy. Pleck (1989), in her history of criminalization of ‘family violence’ in the United States, observes uneven reform, with periods of criminalization and others of decriminalization dating back to 1640. She concludes that reform occurs when violence is considered a threat to the social order, not just its victims. Carol Bacchi (1999, p. 166) argues that concerns of a particular period and culture may produce a certain understanding of a ‘problem’ which comes to be reflected in policy. She highlights how in the nineteenth century the problem, when it was considered to be a problem, was ‘wife battering’, while in the twentieth century ‘domestic violence’ was more common. 4   See also, for example, Htun and Weldon (2018), Keck and Sikkink (2014), McMillan (2007) and Schechter (1982).

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164  Handbook on gender and violence Ways of framing gender violence may carry a moral significance which shapes the issue’s political status (Arnold 2006). Arnold cites instances in the nineteenth century in which reformists, such as those from the temperance movement, framed ‘wife beating’ as an example of social ills they proposed to remedy, and contrasts this to the interpretation offered by feminists as an expression of difference in social power between men and women. Wife beating, in the nineteenth century, was not considered to be a crime against women; nor was society under an obligation to directly aid women who were beaten: ‘Instead, male brutishness was caused by drink, making both the husband and the wife victims of the evils of alcohol’ (Arnold 2006, p. 31).

REPRESENTING GENDER VIOLENCE IN POLICY Gender violence has been represented in policy using gendered (‘gender-­ based violence’) and gender-­neutral frames (‘intimate partner violence’, ‘family violence’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘spousal violence’), at times with explicit mention of the actors who experience it (‘violence against women’, ‘female genital mutilation’) and less so the perpetrators (‘male violence’ or ‘men’s violence against women’). Observing shifts in representation over time, Linda Gordon argues that: ‘[t]he modern history of family violence is not the story of changing responses to a constant problem, but, in large part, of redefinition of the problem itself’ (1988, pp. 27–28). The language used to frame gender violence has important implications. Schechter (1982) recounts how feminist activists in the West thought they needed to reframe the language used to describe men’s violence against women, from ‘battered women’ to ‘domestic violence’, in order to attract funding for their work. Gillian Walker (1990, 1995) emphasizes how the way violence is framed in policy may do more than name or describe an underlying ‘problem’. She observes how concerns about men’s domination of women were transformed into discrete social problems after feminists adopted the state’s analytical categories (‘family violence’, ‘domestic violence’ and so on), leading ‘women’s struggles against the many forms of coercion and abuse that arise in the context of oppression and inequality [to be] subsumed within theories of a sick society in which individuals need treatment’ (Walker 1990, p. 82). Different actors, aware of the importance of naming and framing violence, have attempted to shape that language used to refer to gender violence. Feminists have long used the frame ‘violence against women’ to emphasize that violence is directed toward women because they are women (Watts and Zimmerman 2002). This framing, however, has been

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The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem  ­165 criticized for assuming a binary view of gender in which ‘women’ and ‘men’ are treated as fixed, unproblematic categories. Gender, used in this way, means the classification of ­bodies – ­an understanding which, as Connell (2012) observes, reinforces an essentialist view of masculinity and femininity as being binary opposites. The discourse of ‘violence against women’ has also been criticized for denying women agency (Shepherd 2008) and silencing violence against other individuals and groups on the basis of gendered and sexual identities (Erbaugh 2007). In an attempt to refocus the attention on men as the ‘doers of violence’, Hearn (1998) argues that we should explicitly name men and refer to ‘men’s violences’. Doing so, he (1) attributes violence to men; (2) denies biological inevitability; (3) clarifies that there is nothing innately ‘male’ about violence; and (4) acknowledges the plurality of violence perpetrated by men. Others see ‘gender violence’ as offering a more expansive concept that includes ‘connections among violence against heterosexual women and men, lesbians and gay men, and children’ (O’Toole et al. 2007, p. xiii). The language of gender violence has, however, proven to be controversial. The Coalition of Feminists for Social Change (COFEM), for instance, argues that ‘gender violence’ has served to undermine transformative agendas and depoliticize the concept of violence against women ‘toward a more politically neutral frame that encompasses violence against everyone’ (COFEM 2017, p. 2): The space that was once reserved for attention to and action on violence that women and girls face is now crowded with multiple forms of violence deemed to have any sort of gendered dimension, regardless of whether the violence is grounded in sexuality, gender identity, gender relations or gender norms, rather than inherent, fundamental or systematic gender discrimination and inequality. (COFEM 2017, p. 4)

Critical race theorists have complicated thinking on the issue by highlighting how men’s use, and women’s experiences, of violence is far from uniform. Gender violence is not just gendered: it is shaped by other aspects of people’s identity, such as race and class (Crenshaw 1991). Shepherd (2008, p.  50), highlighting how feminist discourses produce different understandings of gender and violence, critiques both ‘violence against women’ and ‘gender-­based violence’. In place, she advances a poststructural approach focused on how gender upholds and requires people to adhere to rigid norms: ‘the violence of gender’. This framing directs attention to the violent ordering of gendered bodies and the violent process through which gender is reproduced (Shepherd 2018). Bacchi (1999, p.  178) makes the point that ‘violence against women’, just like the category ‘women’, may be used to advance feminist or

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166  Handbook on gender and violence non‑feminist agendas. Rather than advance one category over another, she suggests we should focus on how policy, in making proposals for change, implies a particular interpretation of the ‘problem’ of violence (policy constructs violence) which produces a range of effects. A lively area of research inspired by this thinking has explored the implications of problem representations in gender violence policy. Hearn and McKie (2010), for instance, have shown how anti-­violence policy framed in terms of protecting ‘women’s safety’ in Finland and Scotland fails to problematize the gendered nature of violence, examples that may be contrasted to a Swedish context in which such abuse is represented as ‘men’s violence against women’ and defined as an expression of unequal power relations between men and women (Hearn et al. 2016). Elsewhere, Burrell (2014) observes that the way men’s violence against women has been constituted in policy in the UK and Finland has meant that men’s practices are rendered invisible through six key problem representations: (1) as a problem of women; (2) as a problem without perpetrators; (3) as a problem without context; (4) as a ‘gender-­neutral’ problem; (5) as an ‘agentless’ problem; and (6) as a problem of the Other(s). The implication of this way of representing violence, he argues, is that women are made responsible for both causing violence and needing to do more to address it. On the other hand, Seymour (2009), interrogating Australian domestic violence policy, has highlighted that a notable silence produced by representing violence against women as remarkable and gendered is that the violence men use against other men is unremarkable and unrelated, and, by implication, not a ‘problem’ to be addressed. Similarly, Dolan (2014, p.  80), who analysed United Nations Security Council Resolutions on conflict-­related sexual violence, argues that while these resolutions have ‘succeeded in drawing greater attention and funding to the particular needs of some women’, they have silenced the reality of conflict-­related sexual violence against men and boys, and thereby failed in responding to the phenomenon of conflict-­related sexual violence. Taken together, these studies highlight how particular ways of naming and framing violence in policy serve to make certain forms of abuse problem violence, while silencing the gendered nature of violence, the role of men as perpetrators and violence between men. Policy proposals to address violence, far from simply describing some underlying condition, serve to locate the origins of ­violence – ­suggest who or what is responsible for it. Policy, at least in part, creates the ‘problem’ to be addressed. Thus, while policy on gender violence may be made in response to social movements, policy may also make gender violence.

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The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem  ­167

GENDER VIOLENCE POLICY AS ‘EVIDENCE-­BASED PRACTICE’? An important issue at present concerns calls to make gender violence policy an ‘evidence-­based practice’. Feminists and anti-­feminists alike have mobilized ‘evidence’ to shape problem definitions and advance different research and intervention agendas. Donor agencies require programmes to be based on ‘rigorous’ evidence of effectiveness. In response, researchers are producing ‘evidence reviews’ on what ‘causes’ gender violence and ‘what works’ to prevent it. The extension of evidence-­based practice from medicine to other areas of social policy has attracted widespread criticism. To date, however, scholars of gender violence have largely neglected the issue (see, for exceptions, Gondolf 2012, 2015). ‘Evidence’ is central in contemporary policy discourses of gender violence. Feminists have used ‘evidence’ to highlight the gendered nature of violence and promote policies to address unequal gender relations (Devries et al. 2013). Others have also mobilized this concept, arguing that women are as violent as men in intimate partner relationships and, as such, violence is not a gender issue (Corvo et al. 2008; Dutton 2012a, 2012b; Langhinrichsen-­Rohling and Capaldi 2012; Straus 2009a, 2009b). Yet others contend that interventions informed by feminist insights are not supported by scientific evidence, and have called for such policies and programmes to be repealed (Dixon et al. 2012; Graham-­Kevan 2007). In an interesting twist, some feminist researchers (Heise and Fulu 2014) have drawn on the ‘evidence’ on gender symmetry, which suggests violence between intimate partners in the global North is not a gender issue, to highlight the gendered nature of violence in the South and rationalize interventions informed by feminist insights. The stakes are high because ‘evidence’ affects what type of problem violence is understood to be and what should be done about it. In contrast to its more general usage of facts to indicate a belief to be true, in gender violence policy ‘evidence’ is defined as scientific proof of effectiveness. Policy documents such as those produced by the UK’s Department for International Development refer to ‘evidence’ in narrow terms of ‘rigour’ and ‘policy relevance’ (DFID 2013, p. 6). More restrictive meanings are found in evidence reviews that aim to establish ‘what works’ to prevent violence. These reviews (for example, Fulu et al. 2014) use criteria to rank the quality of research evidence on the effectiveness of different intervention approaches (couple interventions, school interventions, and so on) and make recommendations for practice. In most criteria, experimental research ­designs – ­research designs that use a control group as a ­comparator – ­are considered to produce higher-­quality evidence of

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168  Handbook on gender and violence e­ ffectiveness than non-­experimental methods. In certain reviews (Arango et al. 2014), non-­experimental research is excluded at the outset, and thereby prevented from becoming evidence. Some actors have used these criteria to develop certification standards. Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, a research project at the University of Colorado in Boulder, for instance, maintains a certification standard for violence prevention programmes. A spectrum ranging from ‘experimentally proven’ to ‘opinion informed’ is used to rank the effectiveness of different intervention models. Experimentally proven models are deemed ‘ready for scale’ (and funding), while ‘research-­informed’ or ‘opinion-­informed’ interventions are not considered ‘evidence-­based’. The picture that emerges is that only research generated from ‘scientific’ experimental methods (randomized control trials, controlled trials, and cohort studies) counts as credible evidence of effectiveness. Knowledge generated from other methods is viewed as unreliable. Such methods include observational studies, ethnography and life history research. Also devalued are ways of knowing that emerged as attempts to democratize knowledge production (standpoint theories and participatory research) and how feminist activists have built theory from practice and centred marginal perspectives as the basis for action. Similarly, indigenous knowledges and lay knowledge (based on direct experience) are not viewed as a reliable basis for practice. An underlying assumption of this approach to practice is that there is a single hierarchy of research methods; some ways of knowing are seen as better than others. Similarly, Western/Northern knowledge systems are viewed as superior to Eastern/Southern perspectives. Critics, however, highlight how different methods allow us to understand different aspects of social problems and efforts to address them. All methods, as Hammersley (2013) argues, have strengths and weaknesses and they do not form a single hierarchy. Relying on a narrow form of scientific research to make decisions about policy is likely to limit people from influencing control over initiatives that may affect them. Scientific approaches to policy, as Papanagnou (2011) notes, are based on a sharp distinction between the capacities of professionals and laypeople. In the criteria discussed above, it is the expertise of researchers trained in epidemiological methods that is valued, while practitioners’ expertise is treated with suspicion and laypeople’s knowledge is deemed irrelevant. This approach risks leading to a situation whereby policy is made for people without their participation. Putting experimental methods at the centre of practice also sits in tension with the social movement ­philosophies – ­emphasizing collective deliberation and political ­organization – ­on which work to address gender

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The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem  ­169 violence was based. To be sure, it was feminist activists, not professionals or scientists, who first drew widespread attention to violence against women. Starting in the 1970s across Europe, the United States and other countries, activists set up shelters to provide safe havens for women escaping abusive relationships and established rape crisis centres. These organizations employed ‘consciousness-­ raising’ techniques that placed women at the centre of analysing their own problems and making decisions about how to address them: a strategy of empowerment focused on redefining what was previously considered private (and therefore not requiring intervention) as public and political (and thus a focus for collective action). Early voluntary efforts were suspicious of professionals (who had historically blamed women for men’s violence) and saw women as the authorities on their own experiences (Schechter 1982). In light of this history, the current emphasis on evidence-­based practice represents a radical attempt to reconfigure the relationship between knowledge and anti-­violence practice. A more fundamental issue with ‘evidence-­based’ approaches is that they tend to imply that there is a neutral evidence base which can directly inform policy. This model gives a large role to research evidence in making decisions about practice, while downplaying questions of value and purpose. The focus on ‘what works’, for instance, presupposes consensus on the problem to be ‘fixed’ by policy. It also implies that the key to ending violence is to generate more of the ‘right’ type of evidence. Gender violence, however, has been problematized in diverse ways, each of which suggests different ‘causes’ and ‘solutions’. Ongoing debates about how violence should be framed in policy, which highlight how defining the ‘problem’ is a site of political contestation, suggest that there is no one problem to solve. On the contrary, they raise questions about the current emphasis on producing evidence of what works to prevent violence. As Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) argue, if the very nature of the ‘problem’ is contested, then the idea that we simply need to generate more evidence about how to solve it seems to be misplaced. Gender violence policy is being reframed as an evidence-­based practice. Despite the far-­reaching implication of this discursive shift, it remains a neglected area of study. As calls for more evidence-­based policy continue unabated, we are likely to witness an increase in research documenting this development and the effects it produces.

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170  Handbook on gender and violence

CONCLUSION While there is nothing new about gender violence, it is only recently that it has been named as such and widespread efforts have been promoted to address it. Over time, different acts have come to be recognized as violence and problematized as undesirable and requiring reform. Gender violence, represented in various ways, now appears as an object of policy across different contexts. While accounts of the emergence of gender violence as a policy problem emphasize the role of claims makers and social movements, it is important to be attentive to the way problems are constructed in policy and the consequences this may have. The reframing of anti-­violence policy in terms of evidence-­based practice is one such representation that is likely to have far-­reaching effects.

REFERENCES Arango, D.J., M. Morton, F. Gennari, S. Kiplesund, and M. Ellsberg (2014) Interventions to Prevent or Reduce Violence against Women and Girls: A Systematic Review of Reviews, Washington, DC: World Bank, accessed at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/700731468149970518/Interventions-­to-­prevent-­or-­reduce-­violence-­against-­women-­ and-­girls-­a-systematic-­review-­of-­reviews. Arnold, G. (2006) ‘The social construction of wife beating in political discourse’, Iowa Journal of Communication, 38 (1), 27–54. Bacchi, C. (1999) Women, Policy and Politics: The Construction of Policy Problems, London: Sage. Bunch, C. (1990) ‘Women’s rights as human rights: toward a re-­vision of human rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 12 (4), 486–498. Burrell, S. (2014) ‘The invisibility of men’s practices: a discourse analysis of gender in domestic violence policy’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 12 (3), 69–93. COFEM (2017) ‘Reframing the language of “gender-­based violence” away from feminist underpinnings’, Coalition of Feminists for Social Change, Feminist Perspectives on Addressing Violence Against Women and Girls Series, Paper 2, accessed at http://raising voices.org/whats-­new-­at-­raising-­voices/. Connell, R.W. (2012) ‘Gender, health and theory: conceptualizing the issue, in local and world perspective’, Social Science and Medicine, 74 (11), 1675–1683. Corvo, K., D. Dutton and W.-Y. Chen (2008) ‘Toward evidence-­based practice with domestic violence perpetrators’, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, 16 (2), 111–130. Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43 (6), 1241–1299. Devries, K.M., J.Y. Mak, C. Garcia-­Moreno, M. Petzold, J.C. Child, G. Falder [. . .] and C. Pallitto (2013) ‘The global prevalence of intimate partner violence against women’, Science, 340 (6140), 1527–1528. DFID (2013) ‘Business case: violence against women and girls research and innovation fund’, accessed at https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-­1-203709/documents. Dixon, L., J. Archer, and N. Graham-­Kevan (2012) ‘Perpetrator programmes for partner violence: are they based on ideology or evidence?’ Legal and Criminological Psychology, 17 (2), 196–215. Dobash, R.P. and R.E. Dobash (1981) ‘Community response to violence against wives: charivari, abstract justice and patriarchy’, Social Problems, 28 (5), 563–581.

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The emergence of gender violence as a policy problem  ­171 Dolan, C. (2014) ‘Has patriarchy been stealing the feminists’ clothes? Conflict-­related sexual violence and UN Security Council resolutions’, IDS Bulletin, 45 (1), 80–84. Dutton, D.G. (2012a) The case against the role of gender in intimate partner violence, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 17 (1), 99–104. Dutton, D.G. (2012b) ‘The prevention of intimate partner violence’, Prevention Science, 13 (4), 395–397. Erbaugh, E.B. (2007) ‘Queering approaches to intimate partner violence’ in L.L. O’Toole, J.R. Schiffman and M.L. Kiter Edwards (eds) Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2nd edn) New York: New York University Press, pp. 451–459. Fulu, E., A. Kerr-­Wilson and J. Lang (2014) ‘Annex F. What works to prevent violence against women and girls: evidence review of interventions to prevent violence against women and girls’, Pretoria: What Works, accessed at https://www.whatworks.co.za/. Gondolf, E.W. (2012) The Future of Batterer Programs: Re-assessing Evidence-based Practice, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gondolf, E.W. (2015) ‘The evidence-­based practice movement’ in R.A. Scott and S.M. Kosslyn (eds) Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, New York: Wiley. Gordon, L. (1988) Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880–1960, New York: Viking. Kevan, N. (2007) ‘Domestic violence: research and implications for batterer Graham-­ ­programmes in Europe’, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 13 (3), 213– 225. Hammersley, M. (2013) The Myth of Research-Based Policy and Practice, London: Sage. Hearn, J. (1998) The Violences of Men: How Men Talk about and How Agencies Respond to Men’s Violence to Women, London: Sage. Hearn, J. and L. McKie (2010) ‘Gendered and social hierarchies in problem representation and policy processes: “domestic violence” in Finland and Scotland’, Violence Against Women, 16 (2), 136–158. Hearn, J., S. Strid, L. Husu and M. Verloo (2016) ‘Interrogating violence against women and state violence policy: gendered intersectionalities and the quality of policy in the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK’, Current Sociology, 64 (4), 551–567. Heise, L. and E. Fulu (2014) ‘Annex D. State of the field of violence against women and girls: what do we know and what are the knowledge gaps?’ Pretoria: What Works, accessed at https://www.whatworks.co.za/. Htun, M. and L. Weldon (2012) ‘The civic origins of progressive policy change: combating violence against women in global perspective, 1975–2005’, American Political Science Review, 106 (3), 548–569. Htun, M. and L. Weldon (2018) The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights Around the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, H., N. Ollus and S. Nevala (2007) Violence Against Women: An International Perspective, New York: Springer. Keck, M.E. and K. Sikkink (2014) Activists Beyond Borders, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Langhinrichsen-­Rohling, J. and D.M. Capaldi (2012) ‘Clearly we’ve only just begun: developing effective prevention programs for intimate partner violence’, Prevention Science, 13 (4), 410–414. McMillan, L. (2007) Feminists Organising Against Gendered Violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) (2015) ‘Domestic violence counts 2015: a 24-­hour census of domestic violence shelters and services’, National Network to End Domestic Violence, accessed at http://nnedv.org. O’Toole, L.L., J.R. Schiffman and M.L. Kiter Edwards (2007) Domestic Violence Policy in the United States: Contemporary Issues (2nd edn), New York: New York University Press. Papanagnou, G. (2011) ‘Building bridges? The challenges of social science for policy’ in G.  Papanagnou (ed.) Social Science and Policy Challenges: Democracy, Values and Capacities, Paris: UNESCO, pp. 7–23.

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172  Handbook on gender and violence Pleck, E. (1989) ‘Criminal approaches to family violence, 1640–1980’, Crime and Justice, 11, 19–57. Schechter, S. (1982) Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement, Boston: South End Press. Schneider, E.M. (2000) Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking, New Haven: Yale University Press. Seymour, K. (2009) ‘Problematisations: violence intervention and the construction of expertise’, paper presented at the Foucault 25 Years On conference, University of Adelaide, 25 June. Shepherd, L. (2008) Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice, London: Zed Books. Shepherd, L. (2018) ‘Gender, sex, and sexual violence against men’ in M. Zalewski, P. Drumond, E. Prugl and M. Stern (eds) Sexual Violence Against Men in Global Politics, London: Routledge, pp. 129–131. Siegel, R.B. (1996) ‘The rule of love: wife beating as prerogative and privacy’, Yale Law Journal, 105 (8), 2117–2208. Straus, M.A. (2009a) ‘Gender symmetry in partner violence: evidence and implications for prevention and treatment’ in D.J. Whitaker and J.R. Lutzker (eds) Preventing Partner Violence: Research and Evidence-Based Intervention Strategies, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 245–271. Straus, M.A. (2009b) ‘Why the overwhelming evidence on partner physical violence by women has not been perceived and is often denied’, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, 18 (6), 552–571. United Nations (1994) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, accessed at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/vaw/reports.htm. United Nations (1995) Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 4–15 September. New York: United Nations, accessed at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/ beijing/pdf/Beijing%​20full%​20report%​20E.pdf. United Nations (2006) ‘In-­depth study on all forms of violence against women: report of the Secretary-­General’, accessed at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/vaw/v-­sg-­study.htm. Walker, G. (1990) ‘The conceptual politics of struggle: wife battering, the women’s movement, and the state’, Studies in Political Economy, 33 (1), 63–90. Walker, G. (1995) ‘Violence and the relations of ruling: lessons from the battered women’s movement’, in M. Campbell and A.N.N. Manicom (eds) Knowledge, Experience, and Ruling, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 65–79. Watts, C. and C. Zimmerman (2002) ‘Violence against women: global scope and magnitude’, The Lancet, 359 (9313), 1232–1237. Weldon, S.L. (2011) When Protest Makes Policy: How Social Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Weldon, S.L. and M. Htun (2013) ‘Feminist mobilisation and progressive policy change: why governments take action to combat violence against women’, Gender and Development, 21 (2), 231–247.

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13. Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches Roxani Krystalli*

Well, this is all very interesting, ­really – ­I just had one question: Do you have any data? I’d be very curious to see the hard evidence.

I had just finished presenting my research at a workshop that drew together scholars of political violence. The majority of the participants were political scientists based at institutions in the United States and conducting research in other countries. They studied issues ranging from how people keep themselves safe during civil war to electoral politics after mass atrocities. My own research explores the politics of victimhood during transitions from violence. I investigate this topic by engaging with bureaucracies of justice in Colombia and the ways in which they produce the category of ‘victim’ through their protocols, processes, and officials. I also conduct in-­ depth interviews with individuals who vie for recognition as ‘victims’ and with those who refuse or reject that identity altogether. Finally, I ethnographically observe processes of interaction between conflict-­affected individuals and state entities, paying particular attention to how hierarchies of visibility and recognition emerge among different experiences of suffering. The question did not come as a surprise to me. I have confronted many variants of it as a researcher who is interested in narratives of violence: the peer reviewer who suggested replacing ‘feel’ with ‘believe or know’, the colleague who suggested ‘maybe running a regression, just to be sure’. These issues are not particular to that workshop setting, to political science, or to researchers who study violence. Rather, they represent a broader distrust among certain academic circles of life story as a piece of legitimate, credible evidence, of narrative as a way of knowing. *  I am thankful to Laura Shepherd for her hard, creative, feminist work in assembling this volume, and for being the best imaginable thought partner on these issues. Malachy Tallack provided insightful feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. The field research I discuss throughout the chapter was possible thanks to the generous support of the Social Science Research Council, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, the Henry J. Leir Institute for Human Security, and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I am immensely grateful to my interlocutors in Colombia, who continue to teach me most everything I know about narratives, feminism, politics, and peace.

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174  Handbook on gender and violence In this chapter, I explore how what we know about violence changes when we take narratives seriously. To do so, I draw from a growing feminist tradition of narrative ­research – ­and I ask what is feminist about these approaches. I argue that engaging with narratives is not only a methodological choice, but also an ethical posture: a curiosity about knowledge and an orientation towards power. I begin by examining the skepticism towards narrative approaches to research about violence. This can lead to the discrediting of both individual narratives and the reliance on narratives as a way of researching violence. Much of that resistance emerges from two sources: gendered ideas about emotions and knowledge; and concerns about credibility or unverifiable, unstable, unreliable truths. I then examine a key question that narrative scholars confront through their work: Which stories do we tell and who is allowed to tell them? Next, I turn to how feminist scholars engaging with narratives challenge binaries of knowledge production and express curiosity about categories, indicators, and hierarchies. In the section that follows, I explore how we engage with silences, omissions, and non-­linear accounts of time. Finally, I look at the stories we tell about violence as narratives themselves: How do we ­locate – ­or ­obscure – ­ourselves in our writing? How does the language in which we write about our research raise questions about accessibility and the politics and hierarchies of knowledge production? It would be ironic to write about narratives without narrating. Throughout this chapter, I draw from my own research on the politics of victimhood in Colombia to illustrate the above dilemmas.

THE FEMINIST POLITICS OF CREDIBILITY: MANY FEELINGS, MANY TRUTHS A reliance on people’s stories as a way of understanding violence invites us to consider what Leigh Gilmore calls ‘conferring the status of the truth’ upon a narrative (2001, p. 145). Engaging with narratives requires embracing partiality, surrendering to the multiplicity of truths, and recognizing the value of half-­truths, rumors, denials, or lies as narratives in themselves. For feminist scholars, these are not estranging ­pronouncements – ­instead, they are at the core of what Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True call a ‘feminist research ethic’. This involves ‘attentiveness to the power of epistemology, boundaries, relationships, and the situatedness of the researcher’ (Ackerly and True 2008, p. 702). These pillars are not unique to feminist research. As Lisa Wedeen notes, interpretive social science (a) acknowledges knowledge as imbued with power; (b) understands knowledge as relational and socially made; (c) eschews individualism and

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Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches  ­175 ‘rational choice’ explanations; and (d) becomes interested in language and social systems (Wedeen 2010, pp. 260–262). This approach to research can give rise to two types of discomfort: First, as Sara Ahmed’s work has highlighted, ‘feminists who speak out against established “truths” are often constructed as emotional, as failing the very standards of reason and impartiality that are assumed to form the basis of “good judgment” ’ (Ahmed 2013, p. 170). Ahmed points out the ways in which these assumptions ‘translate into a hierarchy between subjects: whilst thought and reason are identified with the masculine and Western subject, emotions and bodies are associated with femininity and racial others’ (Ahmed 2013, p.  170). These gendered and racialized politics of seriousness discredit feeling as a way of knowing and credibly explaining. And yet, when contemplating experiences of violence, people feel violated, abandoned, marginalized. They feel grief, anger, vengeance, determination, hope. Erasing those f­eelings – ­or relegating them to a less credible, less visible background while ‘hard evidence’ takes the f­orefront – i­s a form of narrative violence. The second type of discomfort with narrative approaches arises out of a concern with telling ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’, ‘truth’ from ‘lies’. As Foucault (1980, p. 131) reminds us, ‘every society has its régime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; [. . .] the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true’. The ‘truth’, in this case, is imagined as out there, discoverable, knowable, verifiable, ­singular – ­and it is the job of the social scientist to find it. For researchers of ­violence – ­but not just ­violence – ­that job can become quite messy. As Lee Ann Fujii has asked with reference to her research on the Rwandan genocide, ‘to what extent should researchers trust personal narratives and local histories that are generated in politically sensitive contexts?’ (2010, p. 232). One of the common reactions I have confronted when I present my own research on victims’ claims and experiences of justice during the transition from the armed conflict in Colombia is: How do you know they are not lying to access benefits? Securing state recognition as a victim of the armed conflict can allow individuals to access reparation (both symbolic and material) and participate in public policy creation. Analyses of both humanitarian assistance in the wake of armed conflict or disasters (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Utas 2005) and welfare systems in the United States (Fraser 1987) have shown that it is not uncommon for those petitioning for assistance, protection, or recognition to be treated with skepticism. My approach to victims’ claims arises not only from choosing to embrace what Ricoeur calls a ‘hermeneutic of trust’, but also from a commitment to viewing the researcher less as a detective and more as a curious

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176  Handbook on gender and violence human treating each narrative as a text: What does recognition as a victim mean to those who vie for this status? Why might one feel compelled to lie to access particular benefits? What structural conditions have made them believe they cannot access this recognition otherwise? And why are certain individuals readily imagined as potential liars, while other voices are always already credible and believable? ‘The value of people’s narrations about their experiences of ­violence – ­what they saw, did, felt, or ­heard – ­does not necessarily lie in their “accuracy” or “truthfulness” ’, Fujii argues: ‘Their value might lie in the meaning with which the narrator endows the events or moments she narrates’ (2010, p. 234). Taken together, the emotionality, partiality, and unreliability of story­ telling can discredit narrative approaches to research on violence. Yet, those features are not the weakness of narrative approaches; they are the key strength. We do not resort to narratives as ‘a failed form of empiricism, “almost a science,” the thing one does if one has no head for numbers or cares more about “feelings” than “facts” ’ (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007, p. 166). Instead, we turn to them as a way to represent the messy ways in which humans embody, remember, and make sense of violence. Working with narratives requires being able to hold multiple truths in one embrace. In this endeavor, messiness, incoherence, or contradiction are not inconveniences on the road to fact discovery. They are defining features of violence, and thus part of its story.

WHO TELLS THE STORY AND WHOSE STORY DOES SHE TELL? The narration of violence requires the researcher to reflect on whose story she tells and how to situate herself within that story. ‘The question of whose story it is that is being told and who benefits provokes feelings of guilt and shame in those who see themselves as appropriating the stories of others’, Jenny Edkins writes in her meditation on novel forms of writing in international relations (2013, p. 290). Post-­colonial feminists have written extensively about the need to interrogate the entitlement that researchers feel to others’ ­stories – p ­ articularly when the ‘other’ in question is vulnerable or systemically marginalized (Spivak 1988). The politics of this type of storytelling become even more complicated when one considers that ‘in the English speaking academy, there are very few of us who ever actually encounter or experience the violence about which we write and upon which [. . .] we build our careers’ (Dauphinee 2013b, p. 348). At the same time, as Roxane Gay cautions, ‘we would live in a world of silence if the only people who were allowed to speak from experience

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Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches  ­177 or about difference were those absolutely without privilege’ (2014, p. 19). Applying this frame to her research on women’s post-­war mobilization in Bosnia, Elissa Helms argues that ‘insisting on authentic victims’ voices, too, means that highly knowledgeable and experienced practitioners, activists, and theorists can be easily dismissed for not having “felt the war on their own skin” ’ (2013, p. 237). In this view, placing the narrative obligation exclusively on those who suffered harm may lead to what Sara Ahmed calls ‘wound fetishism’ (2013, p.  173), locking individuals into a ‘single story’ that does not reflect the texture of their lives. It also potentially erases the complicity of the powerful in oppressive or violent systems. Feminist researchers have adopted a number of strategies to navigate this dilemma of whether, what, and how to narrate, particularly when examining the violence others suffered. One strategy involves directing our gaze at sites of power, not just sites of vulnerability. Cynthia Enloe (2013) proposes doing this by conducting feminist gender analyses of institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund or the United Nations Department of Peace-­Keeping Operations. In this way, Enloe underscores the need to examine not just the wound, but also the site and process of its production. Researchers have heeded this call to conduct investigations of bureaucracies (Buchely 2016), gatherings of defense intellectuals (Cohn 1987), United Nations agencies (Shepherd 2017), military barracks (Belkin 2012), and Wall Street investment banks (Ho 2009), among others. What the above inquiries have in common is a preoccupation with sites of power, many of which can simultaneously be sites of production of physical, structural, or systemic violence. The interactions researchers have at these sites may, at first glance, differ from those they might have when engaging directly with victims/survivors of armed conflict or with former combatants. However, many of the dilemmas of storytelling persist. Specifically, when engaging with the above sites through a critical lens, feminist scholars have expressed a concern that they are betraying the affective relationships they built with their ­interlocutors – ­many of whom are themselves caught within complex hierarchies of power (Shepherd 2017; Dawes 2013). This dilemma consistently surfaces in my own research with bureaucrats who implement transitional justice policies in Colombia: How can I effectively critique the ways in which these bureaucrats embody the state and complicated notions of justice without denying the generosity they have exhibited towards me and my ­research – ­and, crucially, without erasing their own critiques of the system of which they are a part? Laura Shepherd has addressed these questions in her reflections on writing about United

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178  Handbook on gender and violence Nations peace-­building after having spent time in the company of the people who work on this issue. She writes: I must confess that I found the analysis of my data intensely problematic. [. . .] I was analysing texts that I had created through an encounter with another person. I breathed the same air as these people, they welcomed me into their offices, and we talked beyond the research, sharing small details of our lives. Deconstructing their words [. . .] felt decidedly wrong, as though I were trying to catch them out, trip them up, or twist their words. As I made notes, I could hear them in my head: ‘That’s not what I meant!’ (Shepherd 2017, p. 29)

As Shepherd illustrates, directing narrative inquiries at sites of power may address some concerns about not fetishizing vulnerability and not displacing the first-­person storytelling of others, but it still carries with it the ethical dilemmas that imbue feminist research. Addressing them requires a candid engagement with the storyteller’s ‘I’, an issue to which I return in the last section of this chapter.

CHALLENGING BINARIES AND INTERROGATING CATEGORIES Feminist narrative approaches further interrogate the categories and indicators by which social scientists seek to make sense of the world. When writing about violence, ‘the impulse towards the certainties of order and the desire to classify or categorize is strong and asserts itself particularly when destabilization occurs’ (Edkins 2013, p.  286). Feminist scholars challenge that impulse in five ways: (a) by inquiring what statuses, identities, and categories mean to our interlocutors, rather than assigning these labels ‘from above’; (b) by shedding light on the process of production of indicators and categories; (c) by troubling binaries in favor of fluidity; (d) by exposing the limitations that systems and structures place on the stories wartime subjects are allowed to tell when they are presumed to speak ‘for’ a group or from within a perceived category; and (e) by looking within categories to challenge monoliths and render hierarchies visible. I examine each of these approaches below. First, rather than assigning categories and identities to their interlocutors, feminist researchers inquire about what these statuses mean to the individuals who vie for them or refuse them (Kinsella 2011; Dauphinee 2013a). What does it mean to identify as a victim, survivor, perpetrator, witness, or bystander of violence? What kind of symbolic, strategic, emotional, and political value do these labels carry? How might the same person employ or disavow them in different contexts?

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Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches  ­179 Second, feminists employing narrative approaches pay attention to how categories are created, how they circulate, and how they are imbued ­with – ­or stripped ­of – ­political meanings. As Sally Merry argues in her ethnographic exploration of the construction of United Nations indicators on gender-­based violence, indicators are seductive because they ‘address a desire for unambiguous knowledge, free of political bias’ (Merry 2016, p. 4). Merry sheds light on the interpretive work of category production and on which experiences of violence are elevated or left out in the process. She also emphasizes the politics of i­ndicators – t­ he ways in which they are ‘subtly and even unconsciously shaped by [. . .] the disciplinary and institutional site of their creation’ (Merry 2016, p. 20). This is not to suggest that narrative scholars do not rely on numbers, indicators, or categories; rather, they engage with them in research not as objective, apolitical reflections of truth, but as constructed sites of contested, partial meanings. Third, feminist narrative scholars are skeptical about binary framings of violence, choosing to highlight instead the fluidity of identities and statuses. ‘The world where perpetrator and victim, researcher and subject are distinct falls apart’, argues Edkins (2013, p.  292). As scholars researching the lives of women combatants in non-­state armed groups have shown, challenging binaries requires acknowledging the possibility of the co-­presence of multiple identities: a simultaneity of victimhood and perpetration, of agency and the limitations upon it (MacKenzie 2015; Matfess 2017). Rejecting binary categories in favor of fluidity also involves examining the ways in which certain identities are readily assigned to particular kinds of wartime subjects. Cynthia Enloe (2004) has summarized a common narrative trope as ‘all the men are in the militias, all the women are victims’. Numerous scholars have sought to trouble these gendered, racialized, and classed essentialisms that accompany categories and identities. Examples of these approaches involve investigating the role of women as perpetrators of physical and structural violence and oppression, including researching women as wartime rapists (Sjoberg 2016) or as part of hate movements (Blee 2002). This approach to binaries and the assignment of categories or statuses further involves questioning the immediacy with which certain men are interpreted as ‘always already’ violent (Baird 2012; Bhattacharyya 2013), and looking beyond sexual violence as the ‘emblematic womanly wound’ of war (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013; Theidon 2015, p. 192; Meger 2016). Fourth, challenging the ease of assigning statuses and identities to particular types of wartime subjects entails exposing the limitations that systems place on the stories war-­affected subjects are allowed to tell. Kimberly Theidon’s research with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru

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180  Handbook on gender and violence highlights the ways in which it encouraged women who experienced sexual violence to tell their s­ tory – ­but only that story. The Commission privileged narratives of victimhood over the narratives of heroism, survival, or agency that some of the women wanted to tell alongside it (Theidon 2007, pp. 465–471). In this case, the researcher’s voice functions as a form of meta-­narrative by treating the women’s testimony as text and critically examining the politics of narrative imposition or permissiveness that affected its production. Fifth, feminist scholars look within categories to identify the hierarchies that certain narrative frames contain or obscure. Feminists ‘exercise curiosity about how and why certain plots become emblematic, certain narratives become hegemonic’ (Wibben 2010, p. 51). As a result, they hesitate to speak of ‘refugees’ writ large without analyzing the gendered, ethnic, religious, and other hierarchies that shape refugees’ relationships with each other, as well as with systems of protection and assistance (Krystalli et al. 2018). They direct attention towards challenging monoliths and rendering hierarchies visible with reference to a multitude of concepts, ranging from ‘the victims’ (Berry 2018) to ‘the state’ (Das and Poole 2004), ‘civil society’ (Philipps 2002), and more. A failure to pay attention to hierarchies is an erasure of difference in experiences of violence and ­survival – ­and, consequently, an erasure of the ways in which power is ever-­present, diffuse, and, at turns, both hides and reveals itself.

LISTENING TO SILENCES AND EMBRACING NON-­LINEARITY ‘The backdrop against which we communicate is always murmuring, always noisy, often unruly, and also frequently conditioned by silence and by all the richness of what silence can convey’ (Dauphinee 2013b, p. 349). Interpreting silence and absence is as essential a component of feminist narrative approaches as the examination of voice, presence, and speech. However, ‘like “fact” and “fiction”, talking and silence may also be a “false binary” ’ (Fujii 2010, p. 238). In this section, I examine silence as a form of speech and explore two dilemmas of engaging with silences as part of narrative approaches. Feminist scholarship has highlighted silence as a legitimate narrative choice on the part of subjects who experienced violence. This has implications not only for how we tell the story of violation, but also for how we investigate it. Veena Das (1996) underscores the ways in which silence about ­rape – ­and the refusal to recount or narrate v­ iolation – ­is a form of agency and dignity. Similarly, in her investigation of the experiences

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Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches  ­181 of Hutu refugees in Tanzania, Liisa Malkki emphasized her ‘willingness to leave some stones unturned, to listen to what my informants deemed important, and to demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where I was not wanted’ (2012, p.  51). In this sense, as examined in an earlier section, narrating a feminist story may sometimes involve not requiring others to narrate. Engaging with ­silences – ­much like engaging with ­categories – ­requires investigating the process of their production. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak argues that ‘measuring silences’ can tell a story about silencing mechanisms (1988, p.  287). Cynthia Enloe echoes, ‘not all silences come from being silenced, but many do’ (2004, p. 70). Considerations on the production of silences go beyond the silences one encounters when interviewing others to include engagement with documents and procedures. For example, Michel-­Rolph Trouillot’s work illustrates the moments that silence enters the historical archive. As his work in Haiti and beyond has shown, ‘effective silencing does not require a conspiracy, not even a political consensus. Its roots are structural’ (Trouillot 1995, p. 106). As a result, it is not enough for scholars engaging with narratives to ask ‘who speaks?’ We must also ask: Who is permitted to speak? In front of whom and about what? Whose voice carries weight? And, in the words of Elizabeth Dauphinee, ‘what is the procedure, then, through which we identify and privilege a speaking voice?’ (2013b, p. 349). Taking silences seriously further involves paying attention to the ways in which bodies speak without words. This is what Sara Ahmed calls ‘learning to read pain’, and it requires ‘doing the work of translation, whereby pain is moved into a public domain and, in moving, is transformed’ (2013, p.  173). A fluency in the language of pain and in its corresponding translation requires scholars to reckon with linearity, and with the ways in which bodies remember and recount violence messily and out of order. This resistance to linearity is not a narrative failure or flaw, but a constituent part of the logic of violence and its remembrance (Edkins 2003). As Marysia Zalewski reminds us, ‘looking for the “barely visible”, yet solidly felt, in a discipline weighed down by heavily guarded institutional memory/­amnesia – a­ s well as a­ naesthesia – i­ s clearly difficult, yet this is where we might find rigorously pursued feminist methodologizing’ (2006, p. 53).

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KNOTS I CANNOT ESCAPE: NARRATIVES, LANGUAGE, AND POWER So far, I have reviewed key dilemmas that scholars confront when working with narratives of violence. I now turn to examining the narratives we produce, not in terms of stylistic decisions or personal preferences, but as sites of power. This requires interrogating the complicated politics of accessibility, agency, and ­dignity – ­an interrogation that begins by examining our language and ‘the silence that is imposed on other ways of knowing and narrating that our profession requires in order to theorize war and engage in pedagogy’ (Dauphinee 2013b, p. 358). In the summer of 2016, I translated a draft academic article about my ongoing research in Colombia into Spanish. Much has been written about the politics of translation (Benson and Nagar 2006) and the ways in which our interlocutors can often not access the narratives we produce about them by virtue of where they are published (Collyer 2018). Yet, the English language or the fee that academic journals charge per article would not have been the only access barriers here. When I shared my translated draft with a Colombian interlocutor with whom I have been interacting for nearly a decade, he said, ‘Look, I think this all sounds very important. Very formal, very academic. I just don’t see myself in it.’ I had quoted this interlocutor in the draft and had attempted to follow through on the feminist ethic of centering the voices of research participants (Ackerly et. al. 2006; Wibben 2016). ‘That’s not the main problem’, he told me. ‘I just could not get past the parentheses and quotes.’ For my interlocutor, the theorizing and engagement with scholarship that were of paramount importance for the academic politics of seriousness were themselves barriers to access. In attempting to craft a narrative that fulfilled perceived conditions of credibility, I violated the life stories with which I had been trusted. This is the fundamental contradiction academics who engage with narrative approaches confront: How can we honestly and authentically write about violence and power when our own writing can reinforce the same inequalities we sometimes hope to write against? In the words of Jenny Edkins (2013, p. 282), ‘I know, from bitter experience, that all that writing in the academic way does in the end is entangle me in knots I cannot escape.’ A potential escape out of the knots may lie at the beginning of Edkins’ sentence: ‘I’. Academics in different fields and disciplines have different opinions on the propriety of first-­person narration. Feminist scholars have advocated for preserving the ‘I’, for not erasing the self who narrates (Shepherd 2016). In his book Evil Men, based on interviews with Japanese

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Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches  ­183 war criminals who fought in the Sino-­Japanese war, James Dawes writes that the presence of the self in the story can be ‘narcissistic’, ‘luxury morality’. He continues: But a­ voidance – ­refusing to interrogate one’s own relationship to the desire to see, to make something see-­able – ­is no better, perhaps worse. Why do you do this kind of work? What personal dramas are you playing out, and what blind spots might that leave you with? Atrocity work requires an appropriate drawing of the gaze toward the self that is inappropriate. (Dawes 2013, p. 38)

Research and narratives reflect and produce selves, not only for the research participants but also for the researcher who tells the story. This requires us to consider ‘the silences in the selves we admit to’ (Shepherd 2016, p. 11). How can the theorizing self, the knowing self, the authoritatively narrating self make room for the vulnerable self, the self that still carries doubt (Inayutullah 2001), the self that wishes to hold multiple truths in one embrace? Answering these questions is, of course, an individual, private endeavor. Yet, it is worth considering how our scholarly narratives about violence would be different if we allowed some of that ­reflection – ­some of those other ­selves – ­to be part of the public texts we produce. My Colombian interlocutor had an additional question regarding the translated text with which I presented him in the summer of 2016: Why was there so little of him in it? He did not dispute that the analysis accurately reflected his experience or that the theory I proposed appropriately emerged from the data I had gathered. But he wondered how a ten-­year affective research relationship of research could have been summarized in one quote on the seventh page. His concern reveals two issues in engaging narrative approaches: First, when narratives are the data, how can the theoretical imperatives of academic scholarship not displace the voices at the heart of the research? Second, how can researchers working with narratives deal with the fragmentation and selectiveness that the editing process requires without compromising the integrity of the discourses of their interlocutors? With regard to the first question about the relationship between theory, empirics, and narratives, feminist researchers have long pointed out the ways in which theory privileges a particular authorial voice, as opposed to the voices of our interlocutors. As Ackerly and True have asked, ‘if theory is historically the project of elites, when the research question comes out of engagement with the real world experience of non-­elites, what theoretical perspectives are appropriate to consider?’ (2008, p. 702). It is dangerously easy to treat narratives as ‘flair’, as ‘supporting anecdotes’, as opposed to the foundation from which theory originates. More often than not, it is

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184  Handbook on gender and violence my interlocutors who do the theorizing. In the case of my current research project, they are the ones who teach me about what it means to be a political subject, about what it means to found subjectivities on a basis of victimhood, about what claim-­making looks like vis-­à-vis a state of both violence and neglect. What academia considers ‘theory’ – and, conversely, what is considered a­ theoretical – i­s part of the politics and hierarchies of seriousness (Enloe 2004). As long as the voices of interlocutors can only, at best, be treated as evidence (and, at worst, as anecdote), leaving the researcher to theorize ‘on her own’, narrative approaches will fail to disrupt the politics of knowledge production that they are well placed to challenge. As I have written elsewhere, ‘the analysis and writing processes of research [. . .] necessitate fragmentation. We edit narratives, drawing a broader analytical point from quotes about people’s lived experience’ (Krystalli in Wilson et al. 2017, p. iii). For reasons of privacy, security, and brevity we can rarely recount stories of violence in the exact form they are told to us. Illustratively, at the time of writing, my research project on the politics of victimhood has yielded over 1,000 pages of field notes, coupled with an additional 780 pages of transcribed interview material. In telling the story of my research in the 6,000–8,000 words that most academic journals allocate, I make decisions about which narratives to include and exclude. When writing about hierarchies of victimhood, these editing decisions have substantive and political implications, in that they are part of the process of hierarchy creation on the part of the researcher: we privilege our most articulate interlocutors. In our directly cited excerpts, we rely on their most quotable words. ‘For an explanation to be useful’, Cynthia Enloe writes, ‘a great deal of human dignity has to be left on the cutting room floor’ (2004, p. 22). These ­decisions – ­and the dynamics of politics and power behind ­them – ­are rarely addressed explicitly in academic writing. As Enloe points out, these dilemmas are not particular to the narratives we produce through writing; rather, they are common to any experience of storytelling that requires curation. For example, ‘war museums bestow the mantle of seriousness on only some memories, but not others. They preserve some interpretations, but not others’ (Enloe 2004, p. 203). The question, therefore, becomes: How do we render visible the process of bestowal? In response to these questions, some feminist scholars have chosen to accompany the release of their journal articles and reports with the publication of life stories, with light editing aimed at preserving the security and privacy of their interlocutors (Wilson et al. 2017). Rather than having the researcher excerpt a few quotes to illustrate her broader point, this approach allows interlocutors to tell the story on their own terms. The

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Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches  ­185 publication of detailed codebooks on how research data was analyzed further allows researchers to shed light on this portion of the narrative process (Parkinson and Wood 2015). That said, there is still little academic writing about the editing portion of the process of working with narratives, thus highlighting an opportunity for further reflection in this field.

CONCLUSION: ARE ALL NARRATIVE APPROACHES FEMINIST? This chapter has summarized the key pillars of narrative approaches to research on violence. It has framed narratives as a simultaneous site of agency, obligation, entitlement, burden, freedom, and resistance. It has also reviewed the key feminist approaches to engaging with narratives, including a multitude of strategies to challenge monoliths and binaries, interrogate categories, and render hierarchies visible. Further, it discussed interpreting silences and non-­linear accounts of time, as well as the politics of how scholars narrate their own selves within the research. As I have shown throughout, many of the reviewed pillars of narrative research echo key tenets of feminist research ethics and methodologies. This is particularly the case with the approach to the concept of multiple, constructed, subjective truths, the positioning of the researcher and her voice, and the reflexivity that research requires throughout its cycle. I want to close, however, by noting that narrative approaches are not inherently ­benign – j­ust as they are not inherently feminist. The point here is two-­fold: First, we, as feminist scholars, have to do the work of reflexive narration, mindful of the ways in which we, too, can tell a story badly or do narrative injustices to the experiences of our interlocutors. Second, we have to resist framing narrative approaches as necessarily superior to other methods of knowing. Such an approach would reproduce the very hierarchies of knowledge production that we resist as feminists, while also creating a blind spot to the pitfalls of our own narratives. Throughout this chapter, I have demonstrated the ways in which narratives can be sites of not only power, but also care. That dual attentiveness to care and power, to the possibility of agency alongside the possibility of harm, is itself a key feminist tenet that scholars of violence can carry forward as they engage with narrative approaches in their work.

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REFERENCES Ackerly, B. and J. True (2008) ‘Reflexivity in practice: power and ethics in feminist research on international relations’, International Studies Review, 10 (4), 693–707. Ackerly, B.A., M. Stern and J. True (eds) (2006) Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahmed, S. (2013) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York: Routledge. Baird, A. (2012) ‘Negotiating pathways to manhood: rejecting gangs and violence in Medellín’s periphery’, Journal of Conflictology, 3 (1), DOI: 10.7238/joc.v3i1.1438. Belkin, A. (2012) Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898–2001, New York: Columbia University Press. Benson, K. and R. Nagar (2006) ‘Collaboration as resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography’, Gender, Place and Culture, 13 (5), 581–592. Berry, M.E. (2018) War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhattacharyya, G. (2013) Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the ‘War on Terror’, London: Zed Books. Blee, K.M. (2002) Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, Berkeley: University of California Press. Buchely, L. (2016) ‘Bureaucratic activism and Colombian community mothers: the daily construction of the rule of law’, Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, 8 (2), 196–242. Cerwonka, A. and L.H. Malkki (2008) Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohn, C. (1987) ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12 (4), 687–718. Collyer, F.M. (2018) ‘Global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: global north, global south’, Current Sociology, 66 (1), 56–73. Das, V. (1996) ‘Language and body: transactions in the construction of pain’, Daedalus, 125 (1), 67–92. Das, V. and D. Poole (2004) ‘Anthropology in the margins of the state’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 30 (1), 140–144. Dauphinee, E. (2013a) The Politics of Exile, London: Routledge. Dauphinee, E. (2013b) ‘Writing as hope: reflections on the politics of exile’, Security Dialogue, 44 (4), 347–361. Dawes, J. (2013) Evil Men, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edkins, J. (2003) Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edkins, J. (2013) ‘Novel writing in international relations: openings for a creative practice’, Security Dialogue, 44 (4), 281–297. Enloe, C. (2004) The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, C. (2013) Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises As If Women Mattered, Berkeley: University of California Press. Eriksson Baaz, M. and M. Stern (2013) Sexual Violence As a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond, London: Zed Books. Fassin, D. and R. Rechtman (2009) The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Conditions of Victimhood (trans. R. Gomme), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon. Fraser, N. (1987) ‘Women, welfare and the politics of need interpretation’, Hypatia, 2 (1), 103–122. Fujii, L.A. (2010) ‘Shades of truth and lies: interpreting testimonies of war and violence’, Journal of Peace Research, 47 (2), 231–241. Gay, R. (2014) Bad Feminist: Essays, London: Corsair.

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Narrating violence: feminist dilemmas and approaches  ­187 Gilmore, L. (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Helms, E. (2013) Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ho, K. (2009) Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Inayatullah, N. (2001) ‘If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes: staging an encounter between social science and literature’, essay prepared for F. Wilmer and D.J. Puchala (eds), Through the Eyes of Others, n.p. Kinsella, H.M. (2011) The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Krystalli, R., A. Hawkins and K. Wilson (2018) ‘“I followed the flood”: a gender analysis of the moral and financial economies of forced migration’, Disasters, 42, S17–39. MacKenzie, M.H. (2015) Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, Security, and Post-Conflict Development, New York: New York University Press. Malkki, L.H. (2012) Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matfess, H. (2017) Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses, London: Zed Books. Meger, S. (2016) ‘The fetishization of sexual violence in international security’, International Studies Quarterly, 60 (1), 149–159. Merry, S.E. (2016) The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parkinson, S.E. and E.J. Wood (2015) ‘Transparency in intensive research on violence: ethical dilemmas and unforeseen consequences’, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, 13 (1), 22–27. Phillips, A. (2002) ‘Does feminism need a conception of civil society?’ in S. Chambers and W.  Kymlicka (eds) Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 71–89. Shepherd, L.J. (2016) ‘Research as gendered intervention: feminist research ethics and the self in the research encounter’, Critica Contemporánea: Revista de Teoría Política, 6, 1–15. Shepherd, L.J. (2017) Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space: Locating Legitimacy, New York: Oxford University Press. Sjoberg, L. (2016) Women as Wartime Rapists: Beyond Sensation and Stereotyping, New York: New York University Press. Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, London: Macmillan, pp. 271–313. Theidon, K. (2007) ‘Gender in transition: common sense, women, and war’, Journal of Human Rights, 6 (4), 453–478. Theidon, K. (2015) ‘Hidden in plain sight: children born of wartime sexual violence’, Current Anthropology, 56 (12), S191–200. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon. Utas, M. (2005) ‘West-­African warscapes: victimcy, girlfriending, soldiering: tactic agency in a young woman’s social navigation of the Liberian war zone’, Anthropological Quarterly, 78 (2), 403–430. Wedeen, L. (2010) ‘Reflections on ethnographic work in political science’, Annual Review of Political Science, 13, 255–272. Wibben, A.T.R. (2010) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, New York: Routledge. Wibben, A.T.R. (ed.) (2016) Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics, London: Routledge. Wilson, K., R. Krystalli and A. Hawkins (eds) (2017) The Financial Journey of Refugees: A Compendium of Field Notes from a Three-Country Study – Greece, Jordan, and Turkey, Medford, MA: Institute for Human Security at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,

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188  Handbook on gender and violence Tufts University, accessed at https://sites.tufts.edu/ihs/a-­compendium-­of-­field-­notes-­from-­ a-three-­country-­study-­greece-­jordan-­and-­turkey/. Zalewski, M. (2006) ‘Distracted reflections on the production, narration, and refusal of feminist knowledge in international relations’, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 3, 42–61.

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14.  Gender, violence, and popular culture Andrea McDonnell

Film producer Harvey Weinstein is indicted on charges of rape and criminal sexual assault. An advertisement for Dolce & Gabbana depicts a woman, pinned to the ground by a muscular man, surrounded by a group of intimidating onlookers. OK! magazine prints a story, following the assault of pop star Rihanna by musician Chris Brown, with the headline, ‘Why she took him back’. These examples are just a few of the many narratives appearing in American popular culture that shape the way we think about the relationship between gender and violence. Though often looked down upon as lowbrow, trashy, and disposable, popular cultural products are also clues, pieces of the puzzle of the milieu whose presence both springs from and informs our understanding of the time and place in which we live. Because pop culture is typically undervalued, it may easily slip below the radar of our critical gaze. It becomes so ubiquitous that we may not even notice its presence. It becomes, as cultural critic Stuart Hall (1977) writes, part of our ‘common sense’ understanding of how our society functions. We may assume that popular culture embodies the ideas and aspirations of a majority because, by definition, it is consumed by and recognizable to many people. It may be tempting, then, to see pop culture as a mirror that simply reflects our true selves back to us. When people use this mirror metaphor, media scholar Susan Douglas urges us to smash it. ‘Because if the media are mirrors’, Douglas writes, ‘they are fun house mirrors’ (2010, pp.  18–19). They don’t simply reflect who we are. They exaggerate and distort, they emphasize certain people and stories while minimizing and obscuring others. Thus ‘common sense’, as Hall reminds us, is actually a complex set of ideologies produced through cultural institutions, including the mass media. Popular cultural texts may contain explicit representations of aggression, but they also have the potential to produce a more subtle form of violence, one defined not only by the representation of hostile acts but also by the composition of the content itself. That is to say, these texts provide audiences with scripts that inform our understanding of our ­culture – ­our aspirations, our desires, our values, and our fears. Whose stories get told and whose values get represented? Too often, mainstream popular cultural content excludes, underrepresents, or stereotypes people of color, LGBTQ 189

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190  Handbook on gender and violence people, persons of different sizes and physical abilities, and those from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. This may lead to what Ana-­Isabel Nölke calls ‘the erasure’ of marginalized groups (2017, p. 224). The concept of symbolic erasure links to and extends the work of George Gerbner and Larry Gross, who contend that the media is a landscape of mythologies and rituals wherein symbols make ‘dramatically visible that which in the real world is usually hidden’; ‘representation in the fictional world signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation’ (1976, pp.  182–183). Over the past 50 years, media narratives have expanded to include more (and more representative) depictions across a variety of racial and ethnic groups, gender identities, sexualities, and class categories (Garfield 1991; Goetzl 1999; Neff 1999). Still, these developments have been slow and incremental, as mainstream media in the United States continues to overemphasize upper-­middle-­class whiteness, thinness, and heterosexuality as markers of aspirational identity, as seen through the lens of an industry dominated by white men (Kunur 2010; Sanders 2006). In this world, symbolic violence is, as Gerbner and Gross describe, ‘a demonstration of power and an instrument of social control serving, on the whole, to reinforce and preserve the existing social order’, one in which certain groups are excluded, disempowered, and annihilated (1976, p. 189). This chapter considers the ways in which popular cultural r­ealms – ­advertising, television, and celebrity ­culture – ­contribute to our ‘common sense’ understanding of the relationship between gender and violence. This discussion serves as a three-­pronged case study through which I trace the interlocking mechanisms that make violence appear normal, even entertaining, and the ways in which the very act of representation (or exclusion) may constitute a form of violence. Finally, I discuss popular culture’s ability to influence and redirect public sentiment in light of the current wave of social activism aimed at combatting sexual assault.

ADVERTISING One important point to note about popular culture is that it functions largely through consumption. Women remain the primary consumers within the American economy, and globally. Forbes recently reported that women drive 70–80 percent of all consumer purchasing, through a combination of their buying power and influence, and global spending by female consumers was predicted to reach $18 trillion by 2018 (King 2017). It is therefore especially noteworthy that much advertising targeted to female consumers features violent, objectifying imagery and messaging.

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Gender, violence, and popular culture  ­191 Representations within the world of fashion advertising are particularly problematic in this regard (Jhally 2009). Here, women’s bodies are often broken down into parts, shown as being limp, immobile, or incapacitated. Women are also routinely shown to be ‘spaced out’, in a daze, with faces or eyes covered, or with eyes averted from the camera. At times, women are represented in ways such that the shape, color, and position of their bodies echo those of the product and thereby stand in for or become the object for sale. All of these visual tropes work to objectify the female body, presenting women not as autonomous actors but as things whose bodies are available for consumption, just like the products on display (Jhally 2009). This type of imagery is particularly pernicious because, as advertising scholar Jean Kilbourne (2010) notes, ‘turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person’. In addition, fashion advertising has long been criticized for its near exclusive depiction of women whose bodies are exceedingly thin. In 2016, Newsweek reported that the average fashion model has a body mass index (BMI) of 16, which is classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as ‘severely thin’. Couple this with the fact that the typical fashion model is 17 years old (Okwodu 2016), with many in the industry even younger, and it is clear that the bodies on display do not correlate to those of most female consumers. In the United States, BMIs have been on the rise; today, the average American woman is a size 16 and has a BMI of 26.5 (Firger 2016). The over-­representation of very thin women promotes the aspirational idealization of a body type that is unrealistic and largely unobtainable. Many studies have examined the relationship between exposure to media images that support this thin-ideal and female viewers’ self-­esteem (see Veldhuis et al. 2014), body satisfaction (see Whyte et al. 2016), and tendency towards disordered eating and body dysmorphia (see Loeber et al. 2016). Findings suggest that repeated exposure to fashion advertising and related imagery significantly impacts the likelihood that girls and young women will internalize the thin beauty ideal, express body dissatisfaction, and engage in disordered eating (Lopez-­Guimera et al. 2010). These issues are compounded by our current digital culture wherein high-­quality cameras and editing software, once reserved for professional photographers, are now available to ordinary consumers. While it has long been recognized that images in fashion and celebrity magazines may be edited to enhance their appeal, such practice has now spread to mainstream consumers. Numerous image-­editing apps, such as VSCO and Facetune, allow users to re-­light, re-­shape, and ‘enhance’ their body and face prior to posting on sites such as Facebook and Instagram. In its press

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192  Handbook on gender and violence release for its new edition, Facetune, whose tag line is ‘wow your friends with every selfie’, claims its software: Enables users to reshape specific facial features, using AI [artificial intelligence] to understand how the feature should be manipulated to naturally fit with the rest of the face for true 3D reshaping. As an example, when snapped in a picture without smiling, users can use the ‘reshape’ feature to adjust the face to create a natural looking smile. (Facetuneapp.com)

No longer are ‘perfect’ faces and bodies expected only of the rich and famous. As our media landscape has become ever more saturated with images manipulated to mirror idealized expressions of beauty, it has become increasingly difficult for the average consumer to determine whether or not an image truly represents the appearance of its creator. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that higher rates of engagement with general and social media are associated with greater body-­related and eating concerns, or that active social media use (including self-­editing and photo manipulation on the part of the user) may be a maintaining factor when it comes to internalization of the thin-­ideal (McLean et al. 2015). While numerous companies, including Dove and Aerie, have moved to include more diverse representations in their advertising or to reject digitally manipulated images of their models, the mainstream advertising industry continues to rely, almost exclusively, on images of women that overemphasize thinness, youth, and whiteness in their conception of beauty. Naomi Wolf, cultural critic and author of The Beauty Myth (1991), argues that this overemphasis on a narrow version of beauty constitutes a form of violence against women and girls. She likens our beauty culture to an iron maiden, a medieval torture device designed to look like an attractive, smiling young woman, within which victims were starved or impaled to death. Wolf contends that, as women have gained more freedom in society, the workforce, and the political sphere, idealized beauty standards, especially those around weight, have served as a check on female p ­ rogress – ­a kind of backlash designed to keep women physically small and emotionally disempowered. Today, the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA 2018) finds that approximately 7 in 10 women and girls report a decline in body confidence and an increase in beauty and appearance anxiety, which they say is driven by the pressure for perfection from media and advertising’s unrealistic standard of beauty. Anorexia is now the third most common chronic disease amongst young people and 75 percent of those who suffer from the disease are female. But men are not immune to these influences. For much of the twentieth century, men were shielded from beauty messaging due largely to the fact

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Gender, violence, and popular culture  ­193 that they were not considered influential household consumers; however, by the mid-­1990s, corporations and advertisers were reconsidering male purchasing power. Just as gay men were beginning to achieve greater visibility in culture, politics, and mass media, the trope of the metrosexual – a straight man who puts care into his grooming, fashion, dining, and lifestyle ­choices – ­moved into the mainstream vernacular. Metrosexual masculinity was presented, modeled, and explained by fashion and grooming tutorials in popular magazines like GQ and Details, and through media profiles of celebrities such as football star David Beckham and actor Brad Pitt, whose appearance and lifestyle made them millennial trendsetters. The discourse of metrosexuality paradoxically reinforced and assuaged homophobic fears about a culture in which a man’s sexuality could not be discerned by his physical appearance, but it also worked to mark all men as potential consumers who could expect to be judged on the basis of their appearance. We see in the discourse of metrosexuality a push towards what Amir Rosenmann et al. call ‘consumer masculinity’, a post-­industrial notion of manliness grounded in the idea that consumption, not production, is the core marker of identity. In recent decades, this model of masculinity has increasingly hailed men as consumer-­subjects, in terms that emphasize physical appearance and the body. But where women’s consumption has long focused on beauty and thinness, today’s consumer masculinity emphasizes physical prowess and the muscular-­ideal (Rosenmann et al. 2018, p.  259). Recent scholarship suggests that media and advertising messages play a role in the development of muscle dysmorphia and eating disorders in men (Dryer et al. 2016), and the proliferation of social media accounts dedicated to ‘fitspiration’, body building, and the display of male muscularity may negatively influence men’s perceptions of their own bodies (Kunitz 2017). This emphasis on physical strength supports an advertising landscape that celebrates ‘hypermasculinity’ as a preferred mode of self-­presentation. Hypermasculinity is a term which Donald Mosher and Mark Sirkin (1984) use to describe a version of masculinity defined by callous attitudes toward women, and the belief in violence as manly and danger as exciting. Print advertisements often show men as violent, physically aggressive, hypersexual, and thrill-­seeking (Katz 2011). Alternately, when men are the subjects of advertising violence, it is often presented as humorous or ‘just a joke’ (Gulas et al. 2014). Though ads that victimize incompetent, bumbling, middle-­aged men often appear light-­hearted, this humor may distract from or trivialize violent messaging, and audiences may be less likely to scrutinize such depictions (Young 2008). Here, advertising teaches that men must project toughness, lest they risk being subject to ridicule and scorn. Media scholar Jackson Katz argues that such messages should be

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194  Handbook on gender and violence understood as a form of violence against men, in that they limit the social scripts that men and boys view as acceptable, discursively link masculinity with physical strength and aggressive behavior, and emotionally isolate men from one other (see Katz et al. 2016).

TELEVISION Whether viewed on tablets, smartphones, or traditional TV sets, televisual content provides an influential glimpse into the popular cultural zeitgeist. Television is a medium of intimacy. Unlike film, which has historically required viewers to leave the comfort of home and travel to the theater to view its stars up on the silver screen, TV exists in our most familiar spaces. The accessibility of TV, and its small format relative to film, has positioned the medium as a friendly fixture of the American household and a pillar of popular culture. But television also offers a broad range of violent narratives. Whether tuning into the nightly news, cartoons, soap operas, or primetime dramas, audiences are exposed to a steady stream of stories that feature murder, assault, rape, and death. One genre that revolves around violence, especially violence against women, is the police procedural. From fictional shows such as Cagney and Lacey, Law and Order, and CSI, to documentary-­style formats such as 48 Hours or Dateline, these programs present audiences with a new mystery to be solved in each episode. The crime victims are typically women who have been attacked, sexually assaulted, or even killed, almost always by men. Yet paradoxically, female audiences are the primary consumers of this type of televisual content. Jane Latman, former head of development at ID, a network dedicated to shows in this category, notes that women may feel drawn to these types of program because they offer a non-­ threatening, fictional outlet through which viewers can confront real-­life anxieties. ‘I think there is a cathartic journey that the audience goes on that in the end makes you feel somehow safer’, explained Latman in an interview with Time magazine. It’s counterintuitive, but when the handcuffs are on, justice is served and the perpetrator is behind bars and you see these real people getting on with their lives, you kind of feel like ‘Okay, I can go to bed and I’m not going to check my door ten times.’ (Latman quoted in Goff 2013)

If these creative narratives appeal to women by assuaging our fears, it may be because these fears are being stoked across other media genres. According to a report by the Women’s Media Center (2017), news stories across print, televisual, and online platforms were far more likely to

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Gender, violence, and popular culture  ­195 depict women as victims of crime than men, with women rarely framed as survivors. While police procedurals reflect a dark side of reality, more recently a genre has emerged which makes violence seem trivial, funny, and ironic. The early years of the twenty-first century have seen an explosion in reality TV, shows that are allegedly unscripted and which claim to present ordinary people living their true lives. But these shows have also ratcheted up the volume and variety of violence that we see on television and have made it appear ordinary, even banal. From chef Gordon Ramsay berating contestants on Hell’s Kitchen, to Dance Moms coach Abby Lee Miller screaming in girls’ faces, to Teresa Giudice, one of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, flipping a dining table in a fit of rage, these shows normalize violence, even turn hostility and anger into a source of humor and irony (Douglas 2010). Here, aggression is presented as a built-­in feature of gender roles. In the reality TV world, men are again expected to exhibit hypermasculine traits. On Jersey Shore, for instance, self-­described ‘guidos’ trawl the clubs for potential sexual conquests, flaunt muscular physiques, and are quick to turn an off-­color remark into a physical altercation. On competition shows like Big Brother, Survivor, and Road Rules the physical nature of challenges rewards strength and celebrates those who are willing to put their bodies on the line for the sake of the team. Even dramas show men acting aggressively; when Kourtney Kardashian’s then-­partner, Scott Disick, got into an alcohol-­fueled fight on their reality show, the episode drew the highest ratings of the season (Canning and Stewart 2011). Women are not exempt from violence in this reality universe. Portrayed as catty, bitchy, and uber-­competitive, women constantly fight with one another over power, men, money, attention, and success. Dramas like The Hills and The Real World cast women as nasty backstabbers, untrustgrubbers, and petty gossips. Dating programs such as worthy money-­ The Bachelor, Joe Millionaire and Flavor of Love position men as objects of desire, over whom women are inevitably bound to fight. It’s not only eyes – ­ reality shows often feature girl-­ on-­ girl verbal barbs and stink ­ violence. For example, on season two of Jersey Shore, two female participants got into a knock-­down, drag-­out brawl while the rest of the housemates looked on, and, in 2011, a contestant on Teen Mom was arrested for punching another woman (Canning and Stewart 2011). But women are also the victims of reality TV violence: in another episode of Jersey Shore Snooki was punched by a man; and, on The Real World: Seattle, Irene was hit in the face by fellow housemate Stephen, in what would become known as ‘the slap heard round the world’. Irene later reported that castmates were ‘set up to fight’ by producers looking to boost drama (Davies 2017).

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196  Handbook on gender and violence Representations of violence on reality TV disproportionately impact women of color, who are regularly depicted as angry ‘bitches’. On the first season of NBC’s The Apprentice (2004), Omarosa Manigault, an African American woman, used conniving tactics and blindsides to advance her position on the show; her confrontational style helped her earn the title of  the ultimate reality TV villain. Omarosa’s early infamy within the genre,  and her subsequent appearances on Celebrity Apprentice and Celebrity Big Brother, helped solidify a nasty reality TV trope: that of the ‘black bitch’. This stereotype has been repeated on shows like America’s Next Top Model, Bring It, and The Real Housewives, which regularly feature women of color fighting, cursing, threatening, and yelling at one another. Taken together, the scope of representation that we see embedded in reality television presents a dark view of our society, one in which aggression and competitiveness are rewarded, and wherein verbal hostility and physical violence are normalized and deemed entertaining. Though we may view these shows through an ironic l­ens – g­ rateful that we are not in the cast members’ positions or amused by the ridiculousness of the petty matters that spark these a­ ltercations – s­ uch depictions nevertheless have the potential to negatively affect the way we perceive our own realities. In the 1980s, George Gerbner coined the term ‘mean world syndrome’ to describe this effect, arguing that ‘for most viewers, television’s mean and dangerous world tends to cultivate a sense of relative danger, mistrust, dependence, a­ nd – d ­ espite its supposedly “entertaining” n ­ ature – ­alienation and gloom’ (1987, p. 56). Reality television may further solidify such effects on viewers, since it claims to reflect the world as it ‘really’ is.

CELEBRITY CULTURE Today’s celebrities are a ubiquitous part of our popular culture. The rise of social media platforms, the professionalization of paparazzi photography, and the expansion of print and digital celebrity gossip publishing in the early years of the twenty-­first century combined to intensify audiences’ awareness of, and feelings of connection to, the rich and famous. At the same time, the rise of reality television and the burgeoning notion that platforms such as YouTube and Instagram could transform ordinary people into stars intensified our fascination with fame. Graeme Turner (2004, p. 83) contends that this shift has led to ‘a demotic turn’, a democratization of fame resulting from ‘the multiplication of [media] outlets, of formats and of the numbers of people subject to the discursive processes of “celebrification” ’. This shift produced a new understanding of celebrity,

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Gender, violence, and popular culture  ­197 one based not on the allure of an aspirational, distant stardom, but on the idea that anyone could be a star and that celebrities are ‘just like us’ (McDonnell 2014; Schmid 2006). As such, celebrities have the potential to serve as avatars, relatable figures who enact life’s key ­events – ­from first dates to pregnancies, to plastic surgery, divorce, and everything in between. Social media and celebrity journalism encourage us to follow the lives of the stars as though they were our close friends. In doing so, as Charlotte De Backer et al. suggest in a recent study (2007, p. 336), audiences may view celebrities as friends and teachers, and may use celebrity narratives as a form of social learning; their stories serve as vicarious experiences through which we can safely and easily observe social outcomes. Celebrity narratives provide rich information about which behaviors, people, and attitudes are rewarded, and which are punished. For these reasons, celebrity culture may be particularly salient as we consider the relationship between gender and violence in our everyday lives. Indeed, the past few years have seen an explosion of debate and discussion in this regard. Throughout the early 2000s, a number of famous men had been publicly accused of sexual assault and violence against women, but media narratives were quick to shift the blame. Allegations against photographer Terry Richardson, comedian Bill Cosby, musician R. Kelly, and numerous other celebrities were regularly discussed across media outlets and yet, despite multiple, credible allegations, offenses were typically downplayed or explained away. Worse yet, victims were often portrayed as contrived, money-­hungry attention-­seekers. Even famous women fell victim to this news frame, as was the case when Chris Brown assaulted his then-­girlfriend Rihanna in 2009. Following the attack, Rihanna, who was 19 years old at the time, provided graphic interviews to the press, detailing the battery. The gossip website TMZ published images of Rihanna’s face, which showed the extent of the violence she described. Yet tabloid coverage following the assault emphasized Rihanna’s role in the incident and ­insinuated – ­sometimes subtly, sometimes ­explicitly – ­that she was at fault. Magazine covers fueled public outrage at the thought that Rihanna would ‘take him back’ and demanded that she ‘leave him’, ignoring the difficult realities of domestic violence. On average, victims make seven attempts to leave abusive partners before they are successful, and the period of transition to independence is the most dangerous time: more than 70 percent of domestic violence murders occur after the victim has left the relationship (STAND! 2018). Even some four years after the assault, when Rihanna appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a spread ironically photographed by alleged abuser Terry Richardson, the magazine dubbed her ‘crazy in love’.

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198  Handbook on gender and violence A few years later, numerous celebrity women had their personal data stolen and shared across the Internet. The most high-­profile of these hacks occurred in 2014, when a user of the online platform 4chan posted photos of actor Jennifer Lawrence, model Kate Upton, and soccer player Hope Solo, along with others. The photos were apparently shot as private images, with the subjects posed nude or provocatively. Jennifer Lawrence later likened the release of the photos to ‘a gang bang’ (Bruner 2017). That this could happen to ­celebrities – ­some of the most powerful, beautiful, wealthy women in the ­world – ­underscored the vulnerability of all women in what had become an era of ‘revenge porn’. As author Roxane Gay (2014) wrote in an article for The Guardian, the hack was designed to embarrass, to humiliate, ‘to remind women of their place’. The message, Gay argued, was clear: ‘your bared body can always be used as a weapon against you [. . .] Your bared body is at once desired and loathed.’ Online, women’s bodies could be shared anonymously, often without consequence, as a means of shaming, victimizing, and cutting down. When, in October 2016, The Washington Post published a video of then-­presidential candidate Donald Trump graphically describing a form of physical, sexual assault on women, the public was once again reminded, to use Gay’s words, of women’s place. In the video, Trump remarked glibly, candidly, on his power as a wealthy, white, male celebrity, saying, ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.’ The video prompted immediate outcry, with some calling for him to withdraw his nomination, but Trump deflected, just days later holding a press conference with four women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault. It was Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominated by a major party for the presidency of the United States, who was Trump’s opponent, but it mattered little. Trump brought Bill Clinton’s accusers to the next debate, their presence in the audience that night designed to lay blame for her husband’s misdeeds at Hillary’s feet (Diaz and Zeleny 2016). Shortly thereafter, Trump was elected President of the United States. By the following year, when The New York Times and The New Yorker published stories detailing decades of accusations of sexual harassment and assault by several women against influential film producer Harvey Weinstein, the sense of collective outrage had reached a tipping point. Social media reaction was swift, decisive, and anchored by a series of A-­list celebrities, including Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Angelina Jolie, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who all spoke out against Weinstein. Following the report, actor Alyssa Milano used the hashtag #MeToo, a phrase introduced by activist and social justice advocate Tarana Burke, to encourage others to share their stories of sexual abuse and harassment across social media. The call produced a viral catharsis, with millions of users, famous

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Gender, violence, and popular culture  ­199 and unknown, posting about their experiences in an expression of solidarity. And this outcry continues, as more and more stories emerge and users activate their social media networks to express solidarity and call out instances of abuse and harassment, bringing crimes once deemed ‘private’ firmly into the public sphere. Thus, a steady churn of celebrity stories detailing violence against women, stories which initially may have seemed like simple tabloid fodder, have sparked intense social and political debate. This has been possible, at least in part, because celebrities are not personally known to us, even though we may feel we know them (Gamson 1994). As such, they serve as recognizable figures whose experiences allow audiences to initiate safe, sociable conversation about serious issues, including domestic violence and sexual assault, which are not typically discussed in mainstream media (McDonnell 2014). The stories that famous figures choose to tell us about their lives may help drive conversation about the prevalence of sexual assault and improve the way popular narratives frame those who come forward to share their stories. And while the media spotlight may shine brightest on celebrities, what the #MeToo movement shows is that ordinary people can also, by sharing our stories, make visible and collective what might otherwise be invisible and individual.

CONCLUSION This chapter has considered three snapshots of contemporary popular ­culture – a­ dvertising, television, and celebrity c­ulture – a­ s a way into thinking about the representation of gender and violence. These are just a few of many genres: video games, music videos, sports, social media, and many other realms of our popular culture are rich with texts that shape our understandings and expectations. Across all of these areas, representation ­matters – ­not only in terms of narrative content, but also in terms of which people are shown, which stories are told, and which are ignored. As this chapter has shown, our popular culture informs our ‘common sense’ understanding of what society can and should be. Media representation has the power to reinforce narratives of aggression and violence and to bolster stereotypes about gender roles; but it also has the power to challenge these. Our critical awareness of this potential may allow us to be thoughtful and purposeful consumers of popular cultural texts, and to activate these texts in ways that advance public discourse.

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Gender, violence, and popular culture  ­201 Kunur, P. (2010) ‘Study finds Super Bowl ad creators are overwhelmingly white and male’, Advertising Age, 81 (19), 8. Loeber, S. et al. (2016) ‘Short-­term effects of media exposure to the thin ideal in female inpatients with an eating disorder compared to female inpatients with a mood or anxiety disorder or women with no psychiatric disorder’, International Journal of Eating Disorders, 49 (7), 708–715. Lopez-­Guimera, G., M.P. Levine, D. Sanchez-­Carracedo and J. Fauquet (2010) ‘Influence of mass media on body image and eating disordered attitudes and behaviors in females: a review of effects and processes’, Media Psychology, 13 (4), 387–416. McDonnell, A. (2014) Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, Cambridge: Polity. McLean, S.A., S.J. Paxton, E.H. Wertheim and J. Masters (2015) ‘Photoshopping the selfie: self photo editing and photo investment are associated with body dissatisfaction in adolescent girls’, International Journal of Eating Disorders, 48 (8), 1132–1140. Mosher, D.L. and M. Sirkin (1984) ‘Measuring a macho personality constellation’, Journal of Research in Personality, 18 (2), 150–163. National Eating Disorders Association (2018) ‘Statistics and research on eating disorders’, accessed 6 June 2018 at https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/. Neff, J. (1999) ‘Diversity as a selling point scores for marketers’, Advertising Age, 70 (7), S2. Nölke, A. (2017) ‘Making diversity conform? An intersectional, longitudinal analysis of specific mainstream media advertisements’, Journal of Homosexuality, 65 (2), LGBT-­ 224–255. Okwodu, J. (2016) ‘Thank god, some of the models at couture are not teenagers’, Vogue, 26 January, accessed 7 June 2018 at https://www.vogue.com/. Rosenmann, A. et al. (2018) ‘Consumer masculinity ideology: Conceptualization and initial findings on men’s emerging body concerns’, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 19 (2), 257–272. Sanders, L. (2006) ‘Still so white, and no one really wants to discuss it’, Advertising Age, 77 (25), 1–25. Schmid, D. (2006) Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. STAND! (2018) ‘Domestic violence victims: STAND! For families free of violence’, accessed 14 June 2018 at http://www.standffov.org/statistics/. Turner, G. (2004) Understanding Celebrity, Los Angeles: Sage. Veldhuis, J., E.A. Konijn and J.C. Seidell (2014) ‘Counteracting media’s thin-­body ideal for adolescent girls: informing is more effective than warning’, Media Psychology, 17 (2), 154–184. Whyte, C., L.S. Newman and D. Voss (2016) ‘A confound-­free test of the effects of thin-­ideal media images on body satisfaction’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 35 (10), 822–839. Wolf, N. (1991) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, New York: Morrow. Women’s Media Center (2017) ‘The status of women in the U.S. media 2017’, accessed 9 March 2018 at http://www.womensmediacenter.com/reports/the-­status-­of-­women-­in-­u.s.media-­2017. Young, D.G. (2008) ‘The privileged role of the late-­night joke: exploring humor’s role in disrupting argument scrutiny’, Media Psychology, 11 (1), 119–142.

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15.  Gender and violence on film Lee Broughton

In filmic terms, gender and violence have been inextricably and often controversially linked since the dawn of narrative cinema. Indeed, one of the most enduring public memories of silent cinema’s thematic content (having been communicated and perpetuated by an endless series of pastiches found in films and television shows) revolves around a key example of male-­on-­female and male-­on-­male violence. We are all familiar with black and white, jerky film frames that show a beautiful but weak and passive female victim being kidnapped and roughed up by a black-­clad, moustache-­twiddling villain who subsequently proceeds to tie her to a railway track as an out-­of-­control steam train hurtles towards them. The villain is of course soon subjected to violence himself when the dashing, white-­clad hero shows up in the nick of time in order to rescue the prized female and punish her tormentor. At first glance it is tempting to dismiss the scenario just described as a cliché of monumental proportions, and yet it is quite clear that variations of the same scenario continue to be found in most of the popular cinema films produced today. In Hollywood films, the violent behaviour of male and female characters and its narrative consequences were strictly controlled by the prescriptive requirements of the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code (which was in place between 1930 and 1968) and the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings system (which was introduced in 1968). These two industry tools served to mould the filmic sensibilities of American audiences throughout the twentieth century and beyond. That is not to say that there have not been times w ­ hen – b ­ y accident or d ­ esign – ­filmmakers in both America and the wider world have upended their audience’s expectations and produced novel scenarios that reconfigure the dynamics of gender-­related violence on film in striking ways. While acknowledging that the theories of psychoanalysis have been fruitfully employed to interrogate some patterns of gender-­related violence on film, this chapter also considers how the essence of these patterns often seems to capture the zeitgeist and reflect pressing contemporaneous societal debates or concerns. It would be impossible to give a full account of the multifarious ways in which gender-­related violence has appeared on film. Hence, in this chapter I limit my focus to key examples from just a handful of popular genres. 202

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Gender and violence on film  ­203

THEORIZING THE REPRESENTATION OF GENDER AND VIOLENCE ON FILM Richard D. Gross observes that ‘“gender” is a psychological or cultural term, which does not necessarily reflect [an individual’s] biological sex’ (1992, p.  674), while Liesbet van Zoonen notes that gender is not a fixed property but is ‘part of an ongoing process by which subjects are constituted, often in paradoxical ways’ (1994, p.  33). Our understanding of gender in film is signalled in part using a character’s symbolic accoutrements and/or patterns of behaviour that are deemed to possess gendered properties. For example, in Westerns, as a genre, the possession of guns and the ability to use them, wearing buckskin clothing, owning strong horses that provide mobility and possessing the ability to ride them fast, villainous behaviour, fist fighting, and drinking alcohol all tend to be coded as masculine attributes and abilities. While there is nothing to physically stop female characters from appropriating masculine accoutrements or adopting masculine behaviour, having them do so has traditionally been deemed transgressive. So much so that informal ‘rules’, which were partly informed by the Hays Code, came into play to tame or punish any unruly females at a narrative level. The same patterns of transgression, taming, and punishment occur in all manner of Hollywood genre films from the classical period and, indeed, in many films made since. Efforts to understand why female characters are treated this way have relied heavily upon the theories of psychoanalysis. For example, Laura Mulvey (1975, p.  9) cites Sigmund Freud’s work on scopophilia and voyeurism when noting how the act of watching a film gives ‘the spectator an illusion of [secretly] looking in on a private world’. Mulvey also cites Jacques Lacan’s work on the mirror phase and identity formation in children in order to draw comparisons between the similar functions of the mirror and the cinema screen (1975, pp. 9–10). In doing so, she asserts that male spectators are prompted to identify with a film’s lead male character, who they perceive to be an ‘ideal ego’. These male characters are also ‘the bearer[s] of the look’ or gaze which grants them possession of meaningful point-­of-­view shots that promote a masculine worldview. Their point-­ of-­view shots inevitably include eroticized images of female characters who have been coded to connote a sense of ‘to-­be-­looked-­at-­ness’ (1975, pp. 11–13). Mulvey’s early intervention in this area argues that those classical Hollywood film narratives that feature powerless and passive female characters who are dominated by powerful and active lead male characters were designed to mirror and reinforce the patriarchal nature and values of wider Western society (1975, pp. 1, 11–13).

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204  Handbook on gender and violence When applied to film, the theories of psychoanalysis suggest that castration anxiety arises in male characters and thus, by default, in male spectators too due to the female character’s lack of a penis, and Mulvey observes that this anxiety can only be allayed at a narrative level in one of two ways. Firstly, male characters can adopt the ‘voyeuristic gaze’, which can be used to investigate and demystify the female character, ultimately leading to her being found guilty of something that will result in her either being offered forgiveness via romantic involvement with the lead male character or punished by death. Secondly, male characters can adopt the ‘fetishistic gaze’, which can be used to accentuate a female character’s physical beauty or focus on a particular part of her body, and thus transform her into a fetishistic object that evokes reassurance rather than danger (1975, pp.  13–14). As such, Mulvey suggests that female characters necessarily tend ‘to work against the development of a storyline [… by freezing …] the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’ (1975, p. 11). By contrast, male characters, who are seen as mobile ‘figure[s] in a landscape’, possess the power to drive narrative developments forward (1975, p. 204). Thus gender-­related violence on film tends to arise when female characters become unruly and are deemed to be in need of taming or punishment. Noting the male voyeuristic gaze’s ‘associations with sadism’, Mulvey observes that ‘this sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story’ (1975, p.  14). Indeed, on one level Mulvey’s initial work (1975) suggests that the primary pleasure provided by watching a film is a masculine pleasure that involves male spectators observing male characters tame and punish female characters. In her later work, Mulvey suggests that, in their own search for pleasure in the film viewing experience, female spectators might undergo a process of temporary ‘masculinisation’ by employing what she dubs ‘trans-­sex identification’ (1989, pp.  30, 32) in order to align themselves with the ideal ego of the lead male character too. However, Carol Clover’s examination of the spectator–character identification dynamics at work in the viewing of slasher films (a horror subgenre that is noted for its routine depictions of gender-­related violence) leads her to argue that a different kind of trans-­sex identification is possible. In the first instance, Clover deconstructs the male killer figure found in slasher films and finds that, by and large, they are hardly the epitome of masculinity. In fact, they are often emasculated characters. Clover observes that the reason the female victim ‘must be killed rather than fucked, is that slasher killers are by generic definition sexually ­inadequate – ­men who kill precisely because they cannot fuck’ (1992, p. 186). As such, Clover asserts that, in slasher films, ‘violence and sex are not concomitants but alternatives’; so the killer’s weapon’s (knives, drills, nail guns and so on) are read as phallic symbols that are ultimately put to a ‘phallic pur-

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Gender and violence on film  ­205 pose’ when they are seen to violently penetrate the ‘the trembling bodies of young women’ (1992, pp. 29, 47). These violent psychosexual stalkings and attacks are sometimes seen via the male killer’s point-­of-­view shots in what has been dubbed the ‘assaultive gaze’ (1992, p. 182). Coded as a masculine gaze, the presentation of the assaultive gaze typically involves a shot of the killer’s face or eyes that is followed by a point-­of-­view shot that features the female victim as its object. However, Clover argues that another ­gaze – ­the ‘reactive gaze’ – carries more weight and importance in slasher films. Coded as a feminine gaze, the presentation of the reactive gaze typically involves a shot of a surprised, shocked or frightened female character’s face or eyes that is followed by a point-­of-­view shot that shows the reason for her distress (1992, pp. 191–192). As such, Clover argues that the majority of the slasher film’s male spectators actually identify with the genre’s female victims in a masochistic way rather than identifying with the male killer in a sadistic way (1992, pp.  211–212). Here there is the suggestion of a type of trans-­sex identification (male spectators identifying with female characters) that had not previously been considered by feminist film theorists. To support this argument, Clover cites Freud’s work on ‘feminine masochism’, a term and concept that revolves around the assertion that the male masochist must necessarily adopt a passive position that is ‘coded as “feminine” ’ (1992, p. 215). Clover thus concludes that ‘“feminine masochism” as it has been outlined in psychoanalysis’ explains why male viewers would actively ‘choose to “feel” fear and pain through the figure of a female’ when electing to watch a slasher film (1992, p. 224). There is an interesting caveat to consider here though. The female character that male spectators are most likely to ­remember – ­and thus remember identifying w ­ ith – ­is the survivor, who Clover dubs ‘the Final Girl’ (1992, p.  35). Clover concedes that ‘the gender of the Final Girl [. . .] is compromised [. . .] by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance, her apartness from other girls, [and] sometimes her name’ (1992, p. 48), as is the case with the character Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) from John Carpenter’s Halloween (USA, 1978). Furthermore, in those slasher films where the Final Girl destroys the killer herself, she is invariably phallicized when she appropriates and uses phallic weapons such as knives in order to penetrate her assailant’s body (Clover 1992, p. 49). Noting that academic interpretations of horror films have tended to place an emphasis on women as the victims ‘of the (mainly male) monster’, Barbara Creed (1993, p. 1) uses theories relating to psychoanalysis in order to identify a number of active monstrous-­feminine types that are found in such films. Her most useful work in relation to this chapter focuses on character types that are said to relate directly to male castration

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206  Handbook on gender and violence anxieties. Creed observes that the castrating woman ‘assumes two forms: the castrating female psychotic [. . .] and the woman who seeks revenge on men who have raped or abused her in some way’ (1993, p. 123). While a small number of both types of women do literally castrate their male victims, the majority of them carry out symbolic castrations by inflicting injuries on men that take on the form of bleeding wounds. Equally, the strong and phallicized female can be symbolically castrated and returned to her normative gender position if she succumbs to an attack that results in a wound that bleeds. Creed (1993, p.  112) cites Freud’s assertion that ‘the male child may mistake the mother’s menstrual blood as that which issues from the wound caused by her [presumed] castration’ when pointing out the significance of the image of the bleeding wound in horror films. But while they can be coded as monstrous and deviant, the majority of the female characters that Creed discusses in this regard occupy nominally real-­world scenarios and they do not possess supernatural powers. As such, Creed’s work provides a useful tool that can be used to interrogate the instances of gender-­related violence found in other film genres. Indeed, the symbolism of the bleeding wound being equated with symbolic castration, and thus emasculation, can be employed when interrogating the fates of male and female aggressors more generally. The remainder of this chapter employs the work of Mulvey, Clover and Creed to interrogate a range of films from a number of popular genres: the Western; film noir; juvenile delinquency films; exploitation films; and female revenge films. In doing so, it shows how knowledge of a film’s historical context of production and the employment of carefully selected theories relating to psychoanalysis can provide illuminating readings of the films’ narratives and their representations of gender and violence.

THE WESTERN The Western is one of Hollywood’s most masculine film genres. When the genre’s huge body of films is taken as a whole, the number of meaningful female characters in evidence is very small, a fact that is reflected in an observation that was made by the Hollywood director Budd Boetticher: What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance. (Quoted in Mulvey, 1975, p. 11)

As such, the violence found in the Western is most commonly played out between men. However, strong and violent female characters do appear

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Gender and violence on film  ­207 occasionally, and it is actually possible to detect a series of representational and narrative rules that served to ensure that females such as these could be tamed or punished in some way before their film’s finale. Jon Tuska observes that females who consort with villains in classical Hollywood Westerns must, like the villains themselves, die at their film’s denouement (1985, p.  226). In George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again (USA, 1939), Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) is an assertive and aggressive saloon girl who beats men at poker, handles guns and physically assaults anyone who upsets her. She is thus doomed to die by virtue of her aggressive character and her relationship with the villainous Kent (Brian Donlevy). Similarly, Philip French notes that female characters who take up guns and seek revenge against male antagonists in American Westerns are fated to die as a punishment for stepping ‘outside their appointed role’ within the genre (2005, p. 42). In King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (USA, 1946), a tough, sharp-­shooting and independent woman, Pearl (Jennifer Jones), dies when she enters into a shoot-­out with her villainous former lover Lewt (Gregory Peck) after he threatens to kill his brother Jesse (Joseph Cotten). It is clear that any woman who took possession of phallic weapons such as pistols or rifles or behaved in a manner that upset patriarchal order in classical Hollywood Westerns was duly tamed or punished. However, national political dynamics meant that unruly female characters fared much better in Westerns that were produced by the British film industry. As I have argued elsewhere (Broughton 2014, 2016), a series of crises of masculinity experienced by the British nation state (the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, the Suez Crisis and loss of Empire territories during the late 1950s, the rise of the consumer society during the mid-­1960s and the emergence of second-­wave feminism during the early 1970s) coincided with the production of British Westerns that featured strong, active and gun-­toting females who were able to break the prescriptive gender-­related rules of the Hollywood Western outlined above without being tamed or punished at a narrative level. These productions culminated with the British Western Hannie Caulder (UK/USA, 1971), a violent rape revenge tale in which the villainous Clemens brothers (Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin) kill Hannie Caulder’s (Raquel Welch) husband before gang raping her and leaving her for dead. Hannie learns to shoot, before successfully tracking down and killing each brother in a series of bloody gunfights. Hannie becomes phallicized when she takes ownership of a pistol; and the use of bloody special effects squibs that give the impression of bleeding wounds work to represent the symbolic castration of Hannie’s male victims when she shoots them. A small number of female characters similar to Hannie would eventually appear in later American Westerns, but the British Western remains distinguished

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208  Handbook on gender and violence by its consistently atypical representations of strong and active women out West.

FILM NOIR Film noir flourished in America during the 1940s and 1950s. Set in contemporary, crowded and alienating big cities, David A. Cook asserts that ‘film noir held up a dark mirror to post-­war America and reflected its moral anarchy’ (1990, p. 471). Uncertainty, confusion, impulsiveness and paranoia were the order of the day, and film noir’s amoral c­ haracters – ­greedy and promiscuous femme fatales, down-­at-­heel private detectives, ruthless gangsters, dangerous drifters, burnt-­out cops and opportunistic ­chancers – ­were primed to take advantage of the situation with their nefarious schemes and psychopathic personalities. Whether they are built around tales of gangland chicanery, dark and murderous romances, police procedurals or private detective investigations, these films tend to feature strong, active and manipulative women and impulsive, reckless and sometimes emasculated men who are easily led astray. The film noir’s concrete jungle is an unforgiving landscape where violence reigns supreme. Much of this violence is played out between men, but women have an important role to play too. When compared to the Western, these women are much more likely to take part in violent acts or, at the very least, play a significant role in planning or instigating such acts. Furthermore, these violent acts are almost always villainous in nature. Yvonne Tasker notes that film noir ‘is often understood as a cinematic space that both expresses and challenges patriarchal constructions of women (and, indeed, as a form of cinema that challenges conventional forms of masculine heroism)’ (2013, p. 354). The key contextual moments here are the years following the end of World War II. The war years demanded that American women take up employment in traditionally masculine workspaces as part of the war effort. With these changes came increased wages and social freedoms for a significant number of women; but when men began returning home from the war it was necessary for American society’s gender relations to be returned to something like their pre-­war model. Film noir is thus understood to reflect this societal agenda in the way that its strong and independent women are demonized and punished. At the time, female sexual agency was deemed problematic but, as Molly Haskell notes, in film noir ‘the guilt for sexual initiative [. . .] was projected onto [the] woman: she became the aggressor’ (1973, p. 198). The beautiful but cold and cunning Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (USA, 1944) is a perfect

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Gender and violence on film  ­209 example of a femme fatale. Having caused the death of the first Mrs Dietrichson while working as her nurse, Phyllis snares an easily manipulated insurance salesman, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), and convinces him to issue a fraudulent insurance policy in her husband’s name. With Phyllis’s help, Neff kills Mr Dietrichson (Tom Powers) and makes it look like an accident, but paranoia sets in when the insurance company investigates Mr Dietrichson’s death. The film ends with the phallicized Phyllis drawing a gun and wounding ­Neff – ­resulting in a bleeding gunshot wound that underlines his state of symbolic c­ astration – ­before he in turn shoots her dead. Later films noir would up the ante in terms of the female’s involvement in violent acts. In Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (USA, 1950), a phallicized carnival sharpshooter, Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), seduces a good-­ natured gun enthusiast, Bart Tare (John Dall), and convinces him to join her on a series of armed robberies. On one robbery she coshes a cop, and on another Bart has to stop her from petulantly shooting a man dead. It transpires that she has already killed a man, and on what is judged to be their final get-­rich robbery she callously shoots a female supervisor and a security guard dead. When the duo hides out in Bart’s hometown they are discovered and pursued into the mountains by the police. With a deranged Laurie threatening to shoot two of Bart’s childhood friends as they approach to negotiate a peaceful surrender, Bart is forced to shoot her dead before dying in a hail of bullets himself. Interestingly, the film features two key sequences where Laurie dresses in Wild West garb; and we might therefore consider that, although they were fewer in number, those contemporaneous Hollywood Westerns from the 1940s and 1950s that sought to tame or punish strong women at a narrative level were also part of the ideological agenda to re-­set American society’s gender relations following the end of World War II.

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY FILMS In 1950s America, the nuclear family was promoted as a prized symbol of national solidarity in the discourses that surrounded the cold war. However, the rise of the teenager and youth cultures soon threatened the concept of the nuclear family, and America was rocked by a moral panic related to juvenile delinquency. As Stephen L. Markson notes, the media often ‘blurred the distinction between the good and bad teen implying that all teens lacked an internal moral code and therefore needed external control and discipline’ (1990, p.  31). In Hollywood films such as Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One (USA, 1953) and Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a

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210  Handbook on gender and violence Cause (USA, 1955), the moral panic was brought to life with examples of largely male-­on-­male violence. Murray Forman observes that these films usually feature ‘tough, influential vehicle-­controlling masculine leaders’ (2001, p. 117), be they the owners of prized cars or motorbikes. Such films also firmly cemented the idea that the wearer of a black leather jacket was by default a tough and masculine individual. However, American independent filmmakers took the moral panic a stage further by making film noir-­like productions that focused on violent girl gangs. William Morgan’s The Violent Years (USA, 1956) tells the story of Paula Parkins (Jean Moorhead), a spoilt rich kid whose distracted parents are too busy to govern her properly. She’s the car-­owning leader of a gang of four promiscuous girls who are responsible for a string of violent armed robberies. Interestingly, the girls appropriate masculine symbols of toughness (they wear leather jackets and drink alcohol), while also utilising the masculine variants of their Christian names: Paula becomes Paul, Phyllis (Gloria Farr) becomes Phil, Geraldine (Joanne Cangi) becomes Gerry and Georgia (Theresa Hancock) becomes George. Their violent activities include holding up a petrol station at gunpoint and nearly killing the pump attendant, and holding up a young couple on a country road. When two of the gang die in a shoot-­out with the police, Paula seeks revenge by shooting a male cop dead. She also shoots and kills a female criminal contact who refuses to help her when she goes on the run. Captured and sentenced to confinement for life, Paula is punished further when it transpires that she is pregnant and she dies while giving birth. Similar girl gang activity and violence can also be found in Robert C. Derteno’s Girl Gang (USA, 1954), but the evils of addictive ­narcotics – ­rather than parental n ­ eglect – a­ re posited as the cause for female-on-male violence here. In this film we see a girl gang hold up a male driver at gunpoint, cosh him out cold and steal his car to sell for drugs money. Later on, a promiscuous young woman called June (Joanne Arnold) – who we see progress from marijuana abuser to heroin ­addict – ­brawls with a female criminal contact and shoots a male petrol pump attendant dead during a hold-­up with her pal, the equally promiscuous Wanda (Mary Lou O’Connor). Wanda is punished by death when she catches a bullet while the police eventually apprehend June. It is significant to note that the females in both films are phallicized by their use of guns and their possession of motor vehicles. However, much like their antecedents in Double Indemnity and Gun Crazy, these unruly females are punished at a narrative level for their transgressions.

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Gender and violence on film  ­211

EXPLOITATION FILMS Jim Morton observes that the exploitation films that were made on the outer limits of Hollywood or in regional filmmaking centres outside of California during the 1960s tended to be ‘referred to by the trade papers as “ghoulies,” “roughies” and “kinkies,” depending upon the ratio of sex to violence’ (1986, p.  163). The ‘ghoulies’, which had some discernible element of the horror genre about them, were established primarily by Herschell Gordon Lewis’s influential ‘gore’ film, Blood Feast (USA, 1963). Blood Feast took the voyeuristic essence of mainstream horror thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (USA, 1960) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (UK, 1960) and upped the a­ nte – ­and, some might argue, the misogynistic aspects of the g­ enre – b ­ y using bloody special effects in order to openly show the gory evisceration of female bodies onscreen. Here an Egyptian caterer, Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), murders a succession of women in order to harvest body parts (legs, an eye, a tongue, blood and so on) that he intends to use in a rite that will bring a dormant Egyptian goddess back to life. Ramses’s unwavering devotion to his goddess makes him an emasculated man, and the police in Blood Feast are equally emasculated too: they miss really obvious clues, and Ramses is able to outrun them during the film’s final scene despite having a limp. Bloody wounds abound in Blood Feast, but Creed’s (1993) suggestion that the bleeding wound represents a symbolic castration cannot be applied here, as none of Ramses’s victims are phallicized women. There is no Final Girl activity of note here either; Ramses is the author of his own downfall when he jumps into the back of a garbage wagon as he makes his escape. The nihilistic nature of the contemporary world-­set ‘roughie’ films from the early 1960s in which ‘men erupted into jealous rages’, ‘women were abused’ and ‘lust led to violence’ (Muller and Faris 2000, p. 95) was said to be reflective of the nation’s lost, dazed and confused mindset following the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Muller and Faris 2000, p. 93). Michael J. Bowen adds that the roughie genre ‘claimed to take harsh reality as its subject matter, bespeaking the dangers of urban life and the failure of traditional values’ (2002, p. 117). Typical examples include Herschel Gordon Lewis’s Scum of the Earth (USA, 1963) and Lee Frost’s The Defilers (USA, 1965). Essentially stories in which men exert physical, psychological and monetary dominance over vulnerable or unsuspecting women, Lewis’s film concerns a group of sleazy men who use violence and blackmail in order to pressure young women into taking part in nude photo shoots, while Frost’s film is concerned with two misogynistic hedonists who take their routine abuse of young women to new levels of depravity when they kidnap a new girl in town. They subdue her with violence and intimidation

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212  Handbook on gender and violence and keep her locked in a warehouse basement for use as their personal plaything. Given that Mark Simpson notes that men who assault women are judged to be ‘unmanly’ (1994, p. 191), the roughies appear to reflect the growing sense of emasculation that the American nation state suffered throughout the 1960s, caused in part by political assassinations and the war in Vietnam. Indeed, Clover’s (1992) work on male spectatorship and feminine masochism could be applied to some of the women-­in-­peril scenarios that are found in these films. Efforts to put a novel spin on this formula actually resulted in films such as Barry Mahon’s Prostitutes Protective Society (USA, 1966) in which women become empowered victors. Mahon’s film is an exploitation flick that was primarily made to titillate male spectators, but in their efforts to cause outrage, the film’s producers only succeeded in telling a tale that seemingly confirmed the sense of emasculation that the American nation was experiencing. Here Sue is a madam who organizes a team of prostitutes working in New York City, and business is good until a local mobster called Carny Bill muscles in and demands 10 per cent of their earnings. When they refuse to cooperate, the girls’ numbers are quickly reduced when Carny Bill’s men carry out one machine gun attack, three stabbings, a pistol shooting and a hanging. Refusing to be cowed, the girls hit back and take out Carny Bill’s men with two shootings, a stabbing and a drowning before they kidnap Bill and castrate him as a warning to any other mobsters who might try to intimidate them. Remarkably, these unruly women break just about every contemporaneous filmic rule relating to the behaviour of women in American ­cinema – ­they’re self-­ sufficient, control their own active sex lives and successfully take up arms against ­men – ­without suffering any narrative punishment whatsoever. Furthermore, the film is bold enough to present an actual castration rather than a symbolic variation. ‘Kinkies’ were a more extreme take on the roughie film, in as much as they featured much nudity and softcore sexual situations while utilizing fetishistic bondage imagery. Director Michael Findlay’s trilogy of films – The Touch of Her Flesh (USA, 1967), The Curse of Her Flesh (USA, 1968) and The Kiss of Her Flesh (USA, 1968) – which detail the misogynistic, sadistic and murderous activities of a cuckolded and emasculated arms dealer, Richard Jennings (Michael Findlay), are good examples of this subgenre that feature male-­on-­female violence. While voyeurism has a part to play here, Jennings’s control of the gaze is weakened (he wears a patch over one eye) and Clover’s (1992) work on male spectatorship and feminine masochism can be readily applied to his violent acts. However, atypical representations of women can be found in this subgenre too, as is evidenced by Joseph P. Mawra’s Olga’s House of Shame (USA, 1964).

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Gender and violence on film  ­213 Here the crime lord Olga (Audrey Campbell) runs her criminal empire from her remote hideout with a rod of iron. A number of her female operatives are found to have been working against her (stealing contraband and drugs and fraternizing with her competitors), which necessitates Olga torturing them for information. After shackling them to chairs, walls or wooden frames in bondage-­like poses, Olga sets about her unfortunate victims with hand slaps, whips, sticks, hot tongs, pliers, pincers, scrubbing brushes and the like while exposing their breasts for added humiliation. As with Michael Findlay’s Flesh trilogy, voyeurism plays a part here too; but while Olga’s sticks and other tools of torture serve to phallicize her and make her a possible figure of identification for male viewers, the sadistic nature of her activities again demands that they be read with Clover’s (1992) work in mind. Similarly, the bloody wounds that Olga inflicts on her subjects can be read as symbolic castrations that return her rebellious girls to their previously subordinated positions within Olga’s criminal empire. Interestingly, Jopi Nyman notes that being able to endure and live through pain allows for the ‘reaffirmation of masculinity’ in some victimized male characters (1997, p. 108); but it is a female, Elaine (Judy Young), who endures and lives through the pain of Olga’s extreme torture while refusing to be broken. Impressed by her strong character, Olga allows Elaine to become her deputy torturer. Olga’s brother, Nick (W.B. Parker), is one of only two male characters who appear in the film, and Elaine soon dominates him when he tries to seduce her. Nick is completely emasculated when he follows her order to get down on his knees and tell her that he loves her. She responds by slapping his face and barking ‘I’ll send for you when I want you.’ Olga, who seemingly has lesbian tendencies, possesses the normally masculine power of the erotic gaze when she spends her downtime watching her belly dancer, Marianna (Josel), perform sensual dances. This circumstance would chime with Linda Williams’s observation that females who control the look often possess ‘dubious moral status’ (1984, p. 85). Neither Olga nor Elaine suffers narrative punishment for any of the cruel and patriarchy-­defying acts that they commit.

FEMALE REVENGE FILMS The crisis of masculinity experienced by the American nation state during the early 1970s related primarily to the country’s failing foreign policy in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. There was a wave of female revenge-­orientated urban action films produced at this time, and Doris

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214  Handbook on gender and violence Wishman’s Deadly Weapons (USA, 1974) is one of the more curious examples. Here a naïve advertising executive, Crystal (Chesty Morgan), is intent on marrying a mob enforcer, Larry (Richard Towers). When he tries to double-­cross his b ­ oss – w ­ ho is initially only identified by his right hand which bears a distinctive s­ car – b ­ y stealing a notebook full of sensitive information he is executed by Captain Hook (Mitchell Fredericks) and Tony (Harry Reems), who we have seen commit acts of male-­on-­male violence earlier in the film. Crystal hears Larry being murdered over a dropped telephone, which also allows her to hear the names of his killers and the hotels that they will be hiding out in. It is interesting to note that Crystal does not need the masculine power of the look to solve Larry’s murder. She uses the feminine power of listening instead. With Morgan billed as sporting a 73-­inch bust, Crystal signifies overt sexual difference while also possessing breasts that can be readily focused on as extreme fetish objects. Not surprisingly, voyeurism has a part to play here, but while Crystal’s bosoms are used to ingratiate herself with both Captain Hook and Larry, they are also employed as weapons: in two separate sequences, Crystal incapacitates each man with a sedative before violently smothering him with her breasts. When talking about the glamorous full-­figured actresses of the 1950s, Molly Haskell notes that ‘the mammary fixation is the most ­infantile – a­ nd most A ­ merican – o ­ f the sex fetishes’ (1973, p. 105), which suggests that Chesty Morgan’s casting has something to say about the infantile state of American masculinity during the mid-­1970s. Crystal’s revenge mission appears to have been executed without her suffering punishment, until it is revealed that her father (Phillip Stahl) is the mob boss who ordered Larry’s murder. He shoots and mortally wounds ­Crystal – s­ he receives a bleeding gunshot wound directly between her fetishistic breasts, and is thus symbolically castrated and returned to her correct gender ­position – ­but she in turn manages to shoot him dead. Interestingly, in the film’s final shot, she crawls to her father’s dead body and dies with her head placed lovingly on his chest. As such, Crystal remains subordinated to flawed patriarchy in death.

CONCLUSION This chapter has considered how our understandings of the ways in which gender and violence are represented on film can often be both contextualized by the time and the place in which a film is produced and enhanced by the employment of theories relating to psychoanalysis. All of the films examined here capture the zeitgeist to some extent by reflecting contem-

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Gender and violence on film  ­215 poraneous societal concerns about gender and the general mood of their respective nation states. Hannie Caulder makes for an interesting case study since it reveals how the British nation state’s sense of emasculation during the early 1970s resulted in a very striking take on the Western genre that differed markedly to America’s own Westerns. The content of Hannie Caulder, Olga’s House of Shame and Prostitutes Protective Society can be seen to upset the usual patterns of transgression, taming and punishment that were routinely applied to the female characters in the classical Hollywood films that Laura Mulvey (1975) examined. By contrast, those same patterns do readily play out in films such as Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy, The Violent Years, Girl Gang and Deadly Weapons. It would be possible to retrospectively apply Carol Clover’s (1992) work on male spectatorship and feminine masochism to some of the women-­ in-­peril scenarios that are found in Blood Feast, Scum of the Earth, The Defilers, the Flesh trilogy and Olga’s House of Shame. But while bloody wounds abound in Blood Feast, there is little room in that film for the application of Barbara Creed’s (1993) suggestion that the bleeding wound can be understood to represent a symbolic castration. However, the use of bloody squibs that give the impression of bleeding wounds when Hannie executes her male victims do allow Creed’s work to be productively employed when reading Hannie Caulder. The same can said of Neff’s wound in Double Indemnity and Crystal’s wound in Deadly Weapons. Overall, these findings suggest that a multidisciplinary approach that fuses knowledge of a film’s historical context of production with the employment of carefully selected theories relating to psychoanalysis can provide a fruitful methodology for interrogating the representation of gender and violence on film.

REFERENCES Bowen, M.J. (2002) ‘Doris Wishman meets the avant-­garde’ in X. Mendik and S.J. Schneider (eds) Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon, London: Wallflower Press, pp. 109-­122. Broughton, L. (2014) ‘Upsetting the genre’s gender stereotypes: Ramsbottom Rides Again (1956) and the British out West’ in C.J. Miller and A.B. van Riper (eds) International Westerns: Re-Locating the Frontier, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, pp. 121–141. Broughton, L. (2016) The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film, London: I.B. Tauris. Clover, C. (1992) Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cook, D.A. (1990) A History of Narrative Film, New York: Norton. Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Abingdon: Routledge. Forman, M. (2001) ‘Boys will be boys: David Cronenberg’s Crash course in heavy metal’ in

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216  Handbook on gender and violence M. Pomerance (ed.) Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 109–127. French, P. (2005) Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre and Westerns Revisited, Manchester: Carcanet. Gross, R.D. (1992) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Haskell, M. (1973) From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Markson, S.L. (1990) ‘Claims-­making, quasi-­theories and the social construction of the rock “n” roll menace’ in C.R. Sanders (ed.) Marginal Conventions: Popular Culture, Mass Media and Social Deviance, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pp. 29–41. Morton, J. (1986) ‘Sexploitation films’ in V. Vale and A. Juno (eds) Incredibly Strange Films, London: Plexus, pp. 160–165. Muller, E. and D. Faris. (2000) That’s Sexploitation!! The Forbidden World of ‘Adults Only’ Cinema, London: Titan. Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 3 (16), 6–18. Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Nyman, J. (1997) Men Alone: Masculinity, Individualism and Hard-Boiled Fiction, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Simpson, M. (1994) Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity, London: Cassell. Tasker, Y. (2013) ‘Women in film noir’ in A. Spicer and H. Hanson (eds) A Companion to Film Noir, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 353–368. Tuska, J. (1985) The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western, Westport: Greenwood. van Zoonen, L. (1994) Feminist Media Studies, London: Sage. Williams, L. (1984) ‘When the woman looks’ in M.A. Doane et al. (eds) Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Los Angeles: American Film Institute, pp. 83–99.

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16.  Gender violence online Sandra Yao

On 3 July 2018, Rosey Blair (@roseybeeme) shared a thread on Twitter that captured what she thought to be a special moment between two strangers. Blair infused her thread with the generic expectations of a modern-­day romantic comedy, replete with the possibility of true love. Blair’s post started with her asking another woman to change seats with her, and joking that perhaps the new seat partner could very well turn out to be the love of this unknown woman’s life. Indeed, a young man boarded the flight and sat beside this woman shortly after. Spotting this serendipitous turn of events, Blair shared the interactions between the two strangers sitting in the two seats in front of her over the course of 50-­plus threaded tweets. The first tweet in this series garnered more than 300,000 retweets and more than 800,000 likes, and it was hard to not be swept up in the story. What is more romantic than witnessing the budding romance of two complete strangers? As Blair watched the couple in front of her interact with one another, Blair further shared the story through Instagram, which formed the content for what was later tweeted to such acclaim. She took pictures of the couple sharing family photos, relayed the conversation they had about their mums, shared their food order, speculated about their ­language – ­spoken and ­otherwise – ­and even added some innuendo when they left for the restroom together. And all of this was documented without the pair’s knowledge. The story was quickly swept up by Twitter users and soon gained traction on other social media platforms, eventually being picked up by mainstream American media. Most disseminators framed the story as heart-­warming and sweet. A few pointed to the privacy issues that were at play: though the couple had remained anonymous throughout the flight, Blair had sought to identify the couple in question. Euan Holden, the male in this story, was happy to step into the spotlight. He adopted the hashtag #Planebae. The woman was, however, hesitant. While Blair and Holden took the opportunity to appear on television or to advertise their personal and professional endeavours, the woman (later identified as Helen) revealed that she had become the target of harassment online and offline. Helen documented the results of Blair’s tweet: ‘I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world. I did not ask for and do not seek a­ ttention. 217

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218  Handbook on gender and violence #PlaneBae is not a r­ omance – ­it is digital-­age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent’ (Fagan 2018). Helen’s account made the conversation a much more serious one, which speaks to the importance of but relative lack of privacy that we have come to expect from having parts of our lives online. More importantly, her account was also emblematic of the double standards that women face in this digital age. Instead of being tagged with a new trendy hashtag and asked about the potential romance, Helen faced consequences for a lack of discretion for which she was not even responsible. Online strangers shamed and insulted her for her innocuous actions on the plane. Her personal information was shared online, which left her vulnerable to offline abuse. Though Helen did not comment outside of the official statement that was first published by Business Insider (Fagan 2018), it is not hard to imagine the type of anxiety and fear that she must have felt under these circumstances. There is no shortage of online abuse against women. Helen’s story is but a small sample of women’s experience on the Internet. Helen did not ask for any of the attention she received; nor was she aware that a part of her life was being shared online. She was punished for simply being part of a story she never asked to participate in. Being a woman was reason enough for her to be harassed. The past few years have created many high-­profile cases of harassment, which have saturated news headlines with the lurid details of women forced from their homes, their online and offline lives exposed by a flurry of sexist, racist and transphobic discrimination. Police and criminal justice agencies also face challenges in trying to keep up with the rising level of reports of online crime and abuse. Another reason why combating online harassment is challenging is that it is often difficult to reach a consensus regarding whether or not a specific action crosses a line in a relatively new and relatively uninhibited version of absolute democracy. Hate mobs, groups similar to those associated with large-­scale online harassment campaigns like Gamergate, and individual abusers and stalkers have multiplied online in recent years, which makes online spaces ­dangerous for many women. In 2017, a survey by the Pew Research Center in the United States revealed that, while men experience slightly higher levels of online harassment in the form of name-­calling and physical threats compared to women, women are much more likely to experience severe types of gender-­based sexual harassment. Of the women between 18 and 29 who responded, 21 per cent of them had been sexually harassed online. This is more than twice the percentage of men in the same age group (9 per cent) (Duggan 2017). A 2014 EU-­wide survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) discovered that 1 in 10 women in

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Gender violence online  ­219 the European Union reported having experienced cyber-­harassment since the age of ­15 – ­including having received unwanted, offensive, sexually explicit emails or SMS messages, or offensive, inappropriate advances on social networking sites (FRA 2014). Women were also disproportionately impacted and harmed offline by online abuse. The interrelated nature of our online and offline lives makes it increasingly difficult to consider one without the other. In theory, the vastness of the Internet should have brought the possibility to expand current knowledge and broaden discussions to include equal representation online. However, this potential has not been realized. Women continue to be underrepresented across forms of media and, more problematically, stereotypes of women continue to be circulated despite women’s authoritative presence online. Gender inequality is not just reflected in the lack of equal representation, but in media perceptions, characters and, more importantly, in the direct harassment and abuse that women disproportionately face. Gender violence online is a reflection of the gender inequality that exists in many arenas of life, and becomes more pronounced as life moves increasingly into the ethereal sphere of online exchange. It is important, moreover, to emphasize that digital technologies do not only facilitate or aggregate existing forms of misogyny; they also create new forms that are fundamentally related to the technological ­affordances – t­ he defining factors of a technology and its resulting a­ pplications – ­of new media. The algorithmic politics of certain platforms, the workplace cultures that produce these technologies, and the individuals and communities that use them all play a role in the application of new technology. Understanding and tracing the relationship between what is offline and what is online is also challenging. Although gender violence online has lately become a more contemporary topic, it is certainly not new. Legislation concerning women’s online safety goes back to the Beijing Declaration in 1995 (United Nations 1995). Despite this international action, it was not until more recently that we have started to pay closer attention to women’s struggle with online violence. This chapter summarizes the attention that has so far been paid to this troubling social phenomenon. It begins by outlining the different ways that online harassment has generally been defined, and then works to refine a more specific concept of what that harassment looks like in a gendered context. I use the experience of two prominent women, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn, to further establish how different gender violence online is from online harassment more generally. Their connection to Gamergate will serve a bridge to understand the male-­dominated spaces.

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220  Handbook on gender and violence

ONLINE HARASSMENT TO GENDER VIOLENCE ONLINE ‘Online harassment’, as a general term, has been used to describe a variety of behaviours, which makes creating a clear definition difficult. A report by the Data and Society Research Institute (Lenhard et al. 2016, p. 59) categorizes online harassment into three types: direct harassment; invasion of privacy; and denial of access. Direct harassment can include experiences such as being called offensive names, being threatened physically, and being stalked. Invasion of privacy, alternatively, includes any harm done to a person through the unauthorized access to, exposure or spreading of information beyond an owner’s control without the owner’s consent. Being hacked, having personal information exposed online without permission, or being monitored and tracked online are examples of such an invasion. Finally, denial of access occurs when someone uses specific features of a technology or platform to create situations where the victim is denied access to digital tools or platforms. This might include being sent a very large number of unwanted messages, or the misuse of reporting tools in order to render accounts inaccessible or to have them blocked by service providers. Defining harassment in such broad terms, however, does not capture the power structures of the harassment itself. Harassment is lived through anxiety and fear in the object of the treatment’s mind. The abuser’s power derives from, in a sense, denial of shared humanity through the digital medium. Online harassment thus, by design, does not account for the fact that certain groups are more targeted, other than to exploit this social reality. Harassment is often interlaced with, among other things, racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and discrimination against minority groups. Women, especially women of colour and queer women, are more prone to being harassed online and also more likely to define negative behaviours online as harassment because their offline experience creates a learned response to online stimuli. These experiences are so common that young women may often just interpret them as a normal part of being online (Marwick and Caplan 2018). Citron (2014) emphasizes the deep emotional and physical suffering that is experienced by many victims of online harassment, many of whom are again women or minorities. Women are often subjected to loosely coordinated campaigns of unrelenting harassment, ­doxxing – t­he online release of personal information such as real name, street address, social insurance number, and so ­on – ­and violent threats across message boards and social media sites. When women are the targets of harassment, the harassment often focuses on their gender, resulting in sexist speech, pornographic imagery, and rape threats.

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Gender violence online  ­221 Women are in many ways being punished for being visible online. While trolling, verbal abuse, sextortion, non-­ consensual sharing of intimate pictures, manipulation of photos, cyberstalking, doxxing, and hacking attacks might occur exclusively online, they are often tied up with offline events, and they almost always have repercussions for women’s affective responses in online and offline worlds. In a 2018 report from Amnesty International, 41 per cent of women who experienced online abuse or harassment said that, on at least one occasion, these digital experiences made them feel that their physical safety was threatened. What is it about online spaces that makes abuse so common? The Internet, despite what some might have hoped, was not designed as an even playing field, and its structural inequalities have only persisted. Jessie Daniels (2009) for example, explains that racist and white supremacist websites were among the first to appear and to be maintained online. The creation of these segregated spaces is indicative of offline narratives of domination migrating to new spaces. Even without the physical aspect of offline spaces, boundaries of belonging and exclusion are drawn, this time through corporate or communal regulation of the right to express. Online harassment is a symptom of this age-­old display of dominance. It is a symptom that targets those who are identified as being on the outside, and it is meant to protect the delineated space from outside influence. Gender violence online, therefore, is the embodiment of the offline efforts that have been made to keep women out of male-­dominated spaces. It is a reaction to the perceived fear, or even danger, of allowing women to encroach upon what have been defined male spaces for expression. Gamergate, therefore, was about more than the video game industry. It was about the women who visibly stood against or who represented an attack on the supposed core values of gaming. The harassment that Sarkeesian, Quinn, and various other women have faced is representative of the effort to undermine opposing ideas in order to restore and reinforce the power and control of these spaces. Anita Sarkeesian In 2012, Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a video project to explore the representation of women in digital games. At the time, Sarkeesian was already an established feminist media critic. She had created videos touching on a range of topics, including BitTorrent, LEGO and Kanye West. Her YouTube channel, Feminist Frequency, attracted thousands of subscribers seeking accessible feminist interventions. Following a six-­part series that she created for Bitch magazine examining gender tropes in film, television, and comics, Sarkeesian turned

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222  Handbook on gender and violence her attention to video games. She reached out for financial support from followers and subscribers on Kickstarter for this purpose by asking followers for a total of US$6,000 to create a series on ‘Tropes vs. Women in Video Games’. This series was meant to ‘explore, analyze and deconstruct some of the most common tropes and stereotypes of the female characters in games’ (Sarkeesian 2012). Her goal was to identify the limited roles of women in digital games, including their being featured as ‘damsels in distress’, ‘sexy sidekicks’, and ‘rewards’. She wanted to translate her previous work on film and television to critique stereotypical female characters’ roles in video games. The project logically extended from her already existing work. The backlash to her initiative (not even her completed work), however, spoke volumes about the troubling consequences of being a woman in a male-­dominated space. The Kickstarter campaign became the starting point of the now-­infamous online harassment that Sarkeesian faced from thousands of anonymous abusers in response to the campaign. By the time the campaign closed, Sarkeesian’s blog and Wikipedia page had been hacked, with pornographic images replacing her pictures. Sexual and racial slurs replaced meaningful content. Harassers attempted to remove her YouTube videos by flagging them as porn or as terrorist propaganda. She received death threats and rape threats, and was subjected to verbal abuse and hate speech. More critically still, her personal information was released online. The abusers went so far as to create an online version of burning an effigy in video game form, which they titled ‘Beat up Anita Sarkeesian’. Players were encouraged to physically abuse Sarkeesian by clicking on an image of her and watching it change with each subsequent click. Her effigy would become more and more bloody and battered until the screen turned completely red. Sarkeesian documented much of the harassment online on her website, feministfrequency.com. She shared it in order to bring awareness to the cyber mob tactics of abusers online and to the systemic levels of bullying to which she was subject. Her story was picked up and shared by the popular press (Alexander 2012; Carter 2012; Kain 2012; Lewis 2012). Despite the persistent attempts to undermine the project by abusers online, her Kickstarter campaign was able to raise over $158,982 in financial support from 6,968 backers. The added funding gave her the opportunity to expand the original project, hire a team to help develop it, and deliver a much higher-­quality product than had been originally planned. It was the controversy around the project in the end that had attracted such support for her cause of pushing for more female representation in gaming. However, despite the success of her first Kickstarter campaign, Sarkeesian is still the target of harassment for her work. She receives daily rape and death threats on online platforms such as Twitter.

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Gender violence online  ­223 Zoë Quinn and the Birth of Gamergate Gamergate is often considered to be the more prominent incident shining light onto the problems of online misogyny by highlighting the disproportionately negative online experience that women face. In 2013, independent game designer Zoë Quinn released a free game called Depression Quest: a text-­based game delving into the story of young adult’s struggle with depression. Depression Quest, though critically acclaimed, also attracted disapproval from critics. Some argued that video games were not meant to take on such dark subject matter, or that the game lacked the traditional visual interface of a video game, being text-­based. Others, especially those who would become more intimately implicated in Gamergate, claimed that the game had received an amount of coverage that was disproportionate to its quality. Quinn’s game sparked a debate that became about what is or is not considered gaming, and whether or not certain people belonged in that world. At the same time, it revealed signs of a much darker side of the online world. The attacks on Quinn escalated when, in mid-­August 2014, Eron Gjoni published a series of libellous blog posts detailing his version of his relationship and subsequent break-­up with Quinn. In the post, Gjoni reveals intimate details of their interactions, along with screenshots of their conversations that he used to prove his claims about what occurred between them. The posts discredited Quinn’s accomplishments by accusing her of cheating on Gjoni with several men in the gaming industry, ostensibly to get ahead in her career. One of the men falsely named in these posts was Nathan Grayson, a journalist for Kotaku, a popular website for video game-­related news/articles. Gjoni pointedly accused Quinn of sleeping with Grayson in order to secure favourable reviews for her game, Depression Quest. Kotaku editor-­in-­chief Stephen Tolio soon disproved the claim that any sort of favouritism or preferred treatment had been afforded to Quinn, but by then the conversation had taken on a life of its own. The targeted harassment against Quinn and the associated fight for video game journalism ethics was officially named #Gamergate when actor Adam Baldwin tweeted using the hashtag. The hashtag inspired arguments that gaming journalists were too connected to the gaming industry, that they worked actively with the industry to promote a social justice agenda based on games’ cultural/social aspects instead of their technical and play features. The hashtag was also used to harass women and minorities who worked in game development or gaming critique. This appropriation of the hashtag, which was meant to flag the suffering that Quinn experienced as a result of libellous misstatements, attempted to

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224  Handbook on gender and violence undermine female involvement in the gaming industry. Abusers targeted Quinn’s gender to disrupt the positive claims made by her and her allies. These claims were replaced with a narrative of masculine insecurity in a traditionally male-­dominated space. As in Helen’s case, it was Zoë Quinn, not Nathan Grayson, who became the victim of death threats and harassment as a result of the misuse of the #Gamergate hashtag. It was her address and phone number that were made public. The threats had become so palpable and intense that she was forced to move from her home. When Anita Sarkeesian spoke out against the harassment of Quinn, she faced yet another wave of backlash and was also forced to leave her home. Female gaming journalist Jenn Frank and game designer Mattie Brice announced their withdrawal from the industry over the resulting harassment they received. Whether or not these women became central figures of Gamergate, suffice to say the list of women affected is long, extensive, and continues to grow. ­Gamergate – ­despite the political implications that affixing ‘gate’ is always meant to ­evoke – ­is not about video games or the video game industry writ large. It is not about journalistic integrity or objectivity, despite what some might argue. It is a manifestation of the deep-­seated toxic masculine, patriarchal attitudes that motivate much of the gendered violence online. It is revelatory of a much more complicated system that promotes hateful attitudes and behaviours towards women. It is important to note, however, that although both women, Sarkeesian and Quinn, experienced harassment in relation to the gaming industry, my focus on video games is not meant to imply that the industry is particularly problematic. Online gender violence is ubiquitous, and what happens in and around this one industry is really symptomatic of much deeper social difficulties. The experiences of Sarkeesian and Quinn, however, are emblematic of the type of harassment that women face in attempting to exist in male-­dominated spaces. It was their experience with Gamergate that brought a lot more mainstream media attention to the existence of gendered violence online.

KEY FEATURES OF ACADEMIC DEBATE Gamergate is often erroneously thought of as one of the main catalysts that attracted interest in gender violence online. Before Gamergate, gender violence online was often thought of as an experience that was specific to certain spaces or to certain genres. Authors writing on online harassment of women made people aware of specifically problematic spheres. Certain sectors, like the video game industry, garnered more attention for attracting and fostering online gendered forms of harassment. Jenson

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Gender violence online  ­225 and de Castell (2013), for example, focused their work specifically on the harassment of women in online gaming spaces and the gaming industry more widely. Other authors used Gamergate to bring to light the fact that women face very specific, targeted forms of harassment often dismissed as part of the typical online experience. Initial publications on the subject identified specific factors that could be blamed for the emergence of this behaviour online. They proposed that decreasing harassment of women online would be achieved by addressing those specific factors. Anonymity (Stoeffel 2014), technical affordances, structures, and policies of online platforms (Jeong 2015; Massanari 2017) were often identified as some of the main reasons for what was happening to women online. Other authors blamed specific groups, such as online trolls (Buckels et al. 2014), or argued about the inadequacy of legal frameworks (Citron 2014). Nevertheless, while all of these are certainly contributing factors, other scholars have disputed the utility of these reactionary approaches. Recent work aims instead to further explore the importance of distinguishing the online harassment that women face as an experience outside the more conventional conceptions of online harassment. Such an approach stands in stark contrast to a view that simply explains online harassment as an extension of bullying or the consequence of a confluence of specific factors. In working to differentiate gendered violence online from offline lived experience, many researchers have attempted to name the experience and outline the elements that define and differentiate it from bullying. Feminist scholars have made various attempts to create specific terms, each stemming from a different aspect of the experience. Some of the most commonly referred to and used terms include ‘gendertrolling’ (Mantilla 2013), ‘e-­bile’ (Jane 2014) and ‘cybersexism’ (Poland 2016). I discuss each briefly in turn. Mantilla builds on Whitney Phillips’ (2012) concept of ‘trolling’, which the latter defines as ‘disrupt[ing] a conversation or entire community by posting incendiary statements or stupid questions onto a discussion board [. . .] for [the troll’s] own amusement, or because he or she was genuinely quarrelsome, abrasive personality’. Mantilla coined the term ‘gendertrolling’ to describe the misogynist variant of trolling. She argues that, unlike t­ rolling – w ­ hich could simply be to annoy a specific t­arget – g­ endertrolling also expresses the sincere beliefs held by trolls. Gendertrolling is distinct because it is more destructive to its victims. It features high levels of participation, often coordinated, between numerous people who collectively use gender-­based insults, vicious language, credible threats, unusual intensity, scope, and longevity of attacks, and who react harshly against women speaking out. Mantilla argues that gendertrolling, akin to street and sexual harassment, is about the systematic targeting of women that is meant to push them away from occupying

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226  Handbook on gender and violence public space. Naming the phenomenon, therefore, makes it known and easier to identify. It doesn’t allow for the experience to be dismissed, and instead encourages us to understand and find strategies to address the misogyny head on. Emma A. Jane (2014, p. 531), alternatively, adopts the term ‘e-­bile’ to describe ‘the extravagant invective, the sexualized threats of violence, and the recreational nastiness that have come to constitute a dominant tenor of Internet discourse’. Jane proposes the usage of the term as way to more accurately capture the specific type of online vitriol that goes beyond bile being categorized as ‘sexually explicit’ or ‘offensive’. Gendered e-­ often relies on gender stereotypes to demean and threaten victims through speech-­ acts. E-­ bile directed at women often strives to paint them as unintelligent, hysterical, or ­unattractive – ­all stereotypes that have historically been used to marginalize half of the population. The comments are often accompanied by threats and/or fantasies of violent sex acts that are often framed as a way to discipline and correct behaviour. Jane outlines that comments along the lines of ‘what you need is a good [insert graphic sexual act] to set you right’ appear regularly. Female victims are often simultaneously insulted for being too unattractive for male attention and for being ‘hypersexual sluts’, inviting sexual attention or sexual attacks (2014, p. 534). E-­bile directed at men often attacks their masculinity. The comments insult and feminize men as a way to imply that, because they are closer to being women, they are somehow lesser humans. Unlike other types of derogatory writing online, e-­bile directed against women has a distinctive gendered dimension, i.e., it is not ‘neutrally’ rude or hateful. Many of the comments reify an older discursive tradition where one insists that women are inferior and that their primary function is to provide sexual gratification for men. More disturbing is the fact that these comments have become predictable and almost generic, not for lack of imagination but because they have been so widespread. The ubiquity of these comments, despite various attempts to end the discourse, means that more needs to be done to understand the underlying structures that inspire these writings (Jane 2014). Bailey Poland (2016, p. 3) uses the term ‘cybersexism’ to more broadly define the ‘expression of prejudice, privilege, and power in online spaces and through technology as a medium’. Using the term cybersexism means taking a more encompassing approach to understanding the harassment and abuse aimed at women. Poland argues that cybersexism aims to create, enforce, and normalize male dominance in online spaces. At the crux of her argument is the idea that there is a clear link between offline beliefs and the sexist behaviours that occur online, making cybersexism an online manifestation of those beliefs. Understanding cybersexism, therefore, begins

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Gender violence online  ­227 with understanding how sexism works in offline spaces. The attitudes and actions that are expressed online are not exclusive to the online realm. What the online realm provides is anonymity. Though Poland focuses her work on what is occurring online, the term is not limited to the verbal and graphic expression against women online. Cybersexism also appears in more subtle ways. Most smartphones, for example, are too large for the average woman’s hands. Health and fitness apps disregard menstruation or, even if it is taken into account, it is for the purposes of reproduction. The delineation between men and women in relation to technology is not confined to negative online interactions. Both online and offline worlds are characterized by the existing societal and structural conventions underlying gender and the role that women should have in the world. Though academic descriptors vary, they share the same underlying concept: developing a more comprehensive understanding of gender violence requires connecting online behaviour to the structural sexism and violence against women that exists offline. Banet-­Weiser and Miltner (2016, p. 171) refer to this as the ‘structuring nature of misogyny’. Attributing these online behaviours to singular or specific factors distracts from the deeply embedded mentality of misogyny that is part of the everyday social fabric. Weiser and Miltner use the term ‘networked misogyny’ as a way to emphasize the importance of understanding that online harassment of women does not stem from a singular location. The experience of women online is influenced by myriad factors that might seem unrelated, but that actually play against one another. For example, Weiser and Miltner argue that the rise of popular misogyny in the form of Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) and Pick-­Up Artists (PUA) can be traced to the rise of popular feminism movements like the hashtags of #bringbackourgirls or the empowerment campaigns that assured girls and women that confidence and its expression were the keys to overcoming structural or societal obstacles. Pamela Turton-­Turner (2013, p.  1) identifies the relationship between the visual semiotics of misogyny and free speech in cyberspace, stating that the ‘intrinsic mechanism of sexual power play informing gender violence in the “virtual” world, is embedded in “real” world language’. In other words, the emergence of sexually driven hate speech and violence towards women online is present in popular culture more generally. Instead of pointing to singular targets, understanding gendered violence online needs to assess all forms of patriarchy as unique pieces of the same puzzle. This approach best reflects the fact that online misogyny should not be interpreted as singular or isolated to specific areas of the Internet. What is also important to note is that many of the authors writing on topics related to gender violence and online harassment speak from

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228  Handbook on gender and violence personal experience. Far from being simple researchers looking into a phenomenon, they are often also victims themselves and speak from the power of surviving their victimization. Jill Filipovic (2007) outlined the details of her own experience with online harassment on the website AutoAdmit (now a largely unmoderated law school message board) that began during her first year of law school. Though Filipovic had experienced harassment from being an online feminist blogger, the harassment that she faced on AutoAdmit went beyond comments from anonymous online commenters. Users on the platform again shared personal details of her life: posting pictures, descriptions of her boyfriend, sightings of her on campus, and other unsettling information that brought her offline life into jarring contact with online personas. When she asked for her personal information to be removed from the website, responses shifted the blame onto her as the victim. The owners of AutoAdmit contested that women who posted their photos on the Internet could not possibly expect to have their privacy respected.

CONCLUSION I opened this chapter with the story of Helen because I want to show that in even seemingly banal and everyday interactions, women face different standards online. While much of the research discussed here refers to obvious examples of women stepping into male-­dominated spaces online, the reality is that, for many women, just the experience of being online can be traumatic. Misogyny online, just like offline, does not always have to operate in obvious ways. Understanding gender violence online is complex. One of the greatest challenges to gaining insight into the phenomenon is, paradoxically, trying to identify the reasons for its existence. The problem is that gender violence does not come from a singular source. It is difficult for scholars to establish an authoritative account of the events that mark its emergence. Gamergate, thus, only brought what was already prevalent to light. Gender violence and online misogyny are symptoms of social ills that replicate absent concerted disruption. They are symptoms of a society that clings to embedded patriarchal understandings of the world where women are only allowed to occupy certain spaces. Debbie Ging’s (2017) work on the ‘manosphere’, for example, considers how specific online spaces enable self-­described ‘beta males’ to weaponize misogyny and racism in an attempt to protect these spaces by keeping them white and male. It is when women start to not just appear, but to demand space that pushback occurs.

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Gender violence online  ­229 This chapter has set out to provide a snapshot of current research relating to gender violence online. One of the greatest social challenges in writing about gender violence or online misogyny has been to define it as its own type of experience and phenomenon. Online spaces have, of course, unique ­factors – ­like technological affordances, anonymity, and ­algorithms – ­that make the misogyny different from that which is experienced in real life; but curing these individual symptoms does nothing for the patient. The Internet is a gendered space that reflects the everyday biases that structure everyday life. Acknowledging this simple fact in our scholarship allows us to build upon the works that I have reviewed here toward a more generative discourse that seeks out women’s voices in spaces that too often willingly embrace mob rule.

REFERENCES Alexander, L. (2012) ‘Opinion: in the sexism discussion, let’s look at game culture’, Gamasutra, 16 July, accessed 4 May 2018 at https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174145/Opinion_​ In_​the_​sexism_​discussion_​lets_​look_​at_​game_​culture.php. Amnesty International (2018) ‘#ToxicTwitter: violence and abuse against women online’, accessed at https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ACT3080702018ENGLISH. PDF. Banet-­Weiser, S. and K.M. Miltner (2016) ‘#MasculinitySoFragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny’, Feminist Media Studies, 16 (1), 171–174. Buckels, E.E., P.D. Trapnell and D.L. Paulhus (2014) ‘Trolls just want to have fun’, Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 97–102. Carter, C. (2012) ‘A response to some arguments in Anita Sarkeesian’s interview’, accessed 4 May 2018 at https://www.destructoid.com/a-­response-­to-­some-­arguments-­in-­anita-­ sarkeesian-­s-interview-­230570.phtml. Citron, D.K. (2014), Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Daniels, J. (2009) ‘Cloaked websites: propaganda, cyber-­racism and epistemology in the digital era’, New Media and Society, 11 (5), 659–683. Duggan, M. (2017) ‘Online harassment 2017’, Pew Research Center, 11 July, accessed 19 November 2018 at http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-­harassment-­2017/. Fagan, K. (2018) ‘The woman in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence: she says she’s been “shamed, insulted, and harassed” since the story went viral and asks for her privacy’, accessed 13 May 2018 at https://www.businessinsider.com/planebae-­saga-­woman-­privacy-­ anonymity-­2018-­7. Filipovic, J. (2007) ‘Blogging while female: how internet misogyny parallels real-­world harassment responding to internet harassment’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 19, 295–304. FRA (2014) Violence Against Women: An EU-Wide Survey, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Ging, D. (2017) ‘Alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere’, Men and Masculinities, https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17706401. Jane, E.A. (2014) ‘“Your [sic] a ugly, whorish, slut” ’, Feminist Media Studies, 14 (4), 531–546. Jenson, J. and S. de Castell (2013) ‘Tipping points: marginality, misogyny and videogames’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29 (2), accessed 20 November 2018 at http://journal. jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/474. Jeong, S. (2015) The Internet of Garbage, Forbes e-­books.

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230  Handbook on gender and violence Kain, E. (2012) ‘On Anita Sarkeesian, sexism in video games, and why we need to have the conversation’, accessed 4 May 2018 at https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/13/ on-­anita-­sarkeesian-­sexism-­in-­video-­games-­and-­why-­we-­need-­to-­have-­the-­conversation-­ even-­if-­it-­feeds-­the-­trolls/. Lenhard, A., M. Ybarra, K. Zickuhr and M. Price-­Feeney (2016) Online Harassment, Digital Abuse, and Cyberstalking in America, New York: Data and Society Research Institute. Lewis, H. (2012) ‘Anita Sarkeesian and the gamification of misogyny’, accessed 4 May 2018 at https://www.newstatesman.com/helen-­lewis/2012/12/anita-­sarkeesian-­and-­gami fication-­misogyny. Mantilla, K. (2013) ‘Gendertrolling: misogyny adapts to new media’, Feminist Studies, 39 (2), 563–570. Marwick, A.E. and R. Caplan (2018) ‘Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment’, Feminist Media Studies, 18 (4), 543–559. Massanari, A. (2017) ‘#Gamergate and The Fappening: how Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures’, New Media and Society, 19 (3), 329–346. Poland, B. (2016) Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online, Lincoln, NB: Potomac Books. Sarkeesian, A. (2012) ‘Tropes vs. women in video games’, accessed 4 May 2018 at https:// www.kickstarter.com/projects/566429325/tropes-­vs-­women-­in-­video-­games. Stoeffel, K. (2014) ‘Women pay the price for the internet’s culture of anonymity’, accessed 4 May 2018 at https://www.thecut.com/2014/08/women-­pay-­the-­price-­for-­online-­anonym ity.html. Turton-­Turner, P. (2013) ‘Villainous avatars: the visual semiotics of misogyny and free speech in cyberspace’, Forum on Public Policy, 18. United Nations (1995) Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, accessed 19 February 2019 at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/pdf/BDPfA%​20E.pdf.

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17. Gender and violence in news media and photography Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison

Questions of gender permeate all aspects of media coverage of violence. Wars and the militarized practices that sustain them are deeply gendered, and so is press coverage of them. Rape and other forms of sexual violence make the news on a regular basis. But the links between gender and violence go beyond the obvious: they range from dramatic to seemingly mundane; they often remain invisible in social structures and institutions that shape everyday society and politics. Advertising campaigns, for instance, are often based on highly stereotypical gender representations. The identities and practices that they construct and uphold are inevitably linked to daily practices of exclusion and violence. In short, the links between gender, violence and the media are so pervasive and omnipresent that it is impossible to examine them comprehensively here. We are thus unable to cover all key issues and scholarly contributions. We illustrate the issues at stake in one concrete example. The purpose of our chapter is to explore the links between gender and violence in photographic representations of humanitarian crises. We examine their deeply gendered nature. Whether they relate to war, famines or natural disasters, images of suffering often replicate gender stereotypes in highly problematic ways. Almost all disaster media coverage prominently features images of women and children in deep distress. They are depicted as emotional and passive, as if they have no agency and are only waiting for men to rescue them. We then discuss the broader implications of these visual patterns by drawing on pioneering feminist scholars such as Jean Bethke Elshtain and Cynthia Enloe. Their scholarly contributions, as well as those of others, show how such gender stereotypes feed into and perpetuate deeply entrenched gendered narratives of global politics. Through such narratives, women’s political roles and agency are erased or, at best, limited by the singular depiction of women as vulnerable, dependent and powerless (see also Sassen 2002; Shepherd 2017). In a final step, we show how these narratives, which are a form of structural violence, can be challenged through various alternative visual representations. The resulting feminist aesthetic encourages us, quite literally, to view the world differently. Seeing, in this sense, is 231

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232  Handbook on gender and violence a form of agency: an active engagement with politics, for e­ stablished – ­and highly ­gendered – m ­ odels of international relations can ultimately only change when we and our aesthetic sensibilities do.1

THE BROAD SPECTRE OF GENDER AND VIOLENCE Feminist scholars have for a long time been writing about the links between gender and violence. An obvious example is how practices of war are inevitably gendered in multiple ways. In her pioneering book Women and War, Jean Bethke Elshtain drew a picture of opposing yet mutually reinforcing gender images. She labelled these gender ideals the ‘just warrior and beautiful soul’ (1987, p. 3). For Elshtain, the ‘just warrior’ metaphor captures male identity as it has been inscribed through discourses of ‘armed civil virtue’. The just warrior is ‘a figure central to the story of war and politics in the West’: a figure bound by honour and implicated in violence. The ‘beautiful soul’ is, likewise, a time-­honoured and established metaphor for female identity: the woman who waits at home and often exhorts men to war by honouring them for their deeds. The political consequences here are clear: women are keepers of the home and family; men, the defenders of the public realm, the people, the power, the state (Elshtain 1994, pp. 109, 114). Male/female binaries are, for feminists, a chief vehicle through which global political life has been constituted. Foremost in this construction is that sovereign statehood is founded upon and sustained by ideas and images of masculinized power and dignity versus feminized sacrifice (Enloe 1989, p.  197; Weber 1995). This is also why Elshtain (1987) stresses that this gendered dichotomy has shaped men’s and women’s self-­understandings and actions in relation to war and peace. Moreover, since ‘just warriors’ are the protectors of the state, the state itself is seen as ‘manly’ (Hooper 2001): it is ‘male-­defined and male-­dominated’ (Youngs 2004, p.  81). Women are, in this light, cast merely as bystanders in the international political order. As the very opposite of traditional masculine power and subjectivity, women are situated outside of global politics. These linkages between gender and violence are exemplified in how practices of militarization are imbued with stereotypical, ‘traditional’ masculine values. Scholars here speak of ‘militarized masculinities’, and stress that they are part of broader societal values that shape collective 1   When pursuing this line of inquiry, we draw upon and expand previous work we have conducted on this issue (most notably, Bleiker et al. 2014; Hutchison and Bleiker 2012; Hutchison and Bleiker 2015; Leet and Bleiker 2013).

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Gender and violence in news media and photography  ­233 attitudes and policy formation (see Enloe 2000, pp. 1–34, 289). This is why Linda Åhäll, Laura Shepherd, Annick Wibben and other feminist scholars highlight the need to theorize how militarized masculinities permeate all ­levels – ­from the everyday to foreign policies, from the clothes we wear and the films we watch, to the national anthems we rehearse and the security policies we deem urgent and compelling (Åhäll 2016, p.  165; Shepherd 2018; Wibben 2018). While militarism appears in different forms in different contexts, there are certain parallels one can observe across time and space (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012, pp. 1–18; Stavrianakis and Stern 2018, p.  4; Mabee and Vucetic 2018). One of them has to do with how militaristic ways of thinking become elevated to the prime and seemingly most reasonable and compelling manner to address security issues. The result is that certain individuals, and the values they espouse, are given greater authority to comment ­on – ­and take decisions a­ bout – ­questions of national security. This hinders both adequate scholarly understanding and the search for innovative policy solutions (Belkin 2012, p. 4; Åhäll 2016, p. 160; see also Åhäll and Shepherd 2012). Even the promotion of dialogue and democracy cannot necessarily eliminate these everyday forms of gendered violence. Catherine Eschle, for instance, stresses that there is a long history of women being marginalized by the type of dialogical practices that are operating within democratic ideas and institutions. Attempts to establish a consensus-­oriented and globally anchored framework for dialogue thus also risk replicating the same processes of exclusion on a larger scale (Eschle 2002, p.  316; Eschle 2005, p.  1742). Eschle points out that this scepticism is particularly strong among feminists from the developing world, who reject the idea that women around the globe share enough experiences to make a common, global position possible or even desirable (Eschle 2002, p. 329; see also Banerjee and Shamnam 2006; Basu et al. 2001; Mohanty 1998). When looking at the links between gender and violence it is thus important to examine not only overt and obvious forms of gendered violence, but also broader discursive processes that render some ­people – a­ nd their gender ­identities – ­legitimate and others not. Examining such forms of structural violence allows us to see how gender is a key part of everyday practices that reproduce boundaries of inclusion/exclusion as well as the various types of violence that ensue (Shepherd 2012, pp. 8–9).

MEDIA COVERAGE OF HUMANITARIAN CRISES In this chapter we focus on one particular form of gendered violence: that associated with humanitarian crisis. We examine, in particular,

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234  Handbook on gender and violence ­ hotographic representations of such crises in the media and how they are p linked to questions of gender, power and violence. Media images play an important role in conveying the meaning of humanitarian crises to distant audiences. By drawing attention to violence and human suffering, images can also mobilize political action. A common refrain among humanitarian activists is thus the urgent need to visualize the unspeakable, to diffuse it through various media outlets, and to rally the global community in a way that generates political action. Scholars largely confirm these patterns. They speak of a visual iconography of humanitarian crises, and point out that images are essential for audiences to feel for and subsequently respond to those in need. As such, crisis imagery is imbued with a specific representational aesthetic: it is designed to pull a viewer in, tug on our heartstrings and, through an often sublime horror, entice a viewer to look again (see Campbell 2011; and, for a general discussion on the role of images, see Bleiker 2018). We illustrate the issues at stake by focusing on the politics of photographs. Photographs offer unique insights. At a time when we are saturated with information stemming from multiple media sources, photographs remain influential for their ability to capture social and political issues in succinct and mesmerizing ways. They serve as ‘visual quotations’ (Sontag 2003, p. 22). Some scholars go as far as stressing that photographs are so effective in recalling political events that they often become ‘primary markers’ themselves (Zelizer 2002, p. 699). This is to say that over time an event is recognized publicly not primarily by its political content but by its photographic representation. The representation then becomes content itself. Consider a very well-­ known example of an iconic photograph that has come to stand for the humanitarian crisis it depicted: Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-­winning Vietnam War image of 1972. It depicts nine-­year-­ old Kim Phuc, naked, badly burned and fleeing from her South Vietnam village after it was napalmed. At the time this photograph directed public gaze to the atrocities committed against innocent civilians. It transformed public and political perceptions of the war, so much so that it contributed to further eroding the war’s legitimacy (Hariman and Lucaites 2003). In fact, many decades later the photograph still stands as a metaphorical representation of the Vietnam War and the suffering it brought.

GENDER STEREOTYPES IN PHOTOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS OF HUMANITARIAN CRISES Unlike most other social and political phenomena, where women’s roles are often under-­represented, crisis imagery is one realm where repre-

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Gender and violence in news media and photography  ­235 sentations of women tend to outnumber those of men. Indeed, through dominant crisis imagery women are brought into focus in a highly visible manner. A case in point is the example just mentioned of the photograph of Kim Phuc, which has come to visually define our collective memory of the Vietnam War. The visual focus on women in disaster settings has much to do with their perceived ability to communicate human tragedy and need. Photographs often zoom in close on people in distress. Women are thought to provide a humanizing face for what is often large-­scale, distant and de-­humanizing disaster. So recognizable are women in times of crisis that some contend they have come to be seen as the ‘ideal’ or ‘universal disaster victim’ (Dogra 2011; Enarson and Meyreles 2004, p.  49). As such, images of women enduring hardship are said to have become ‘standardized’ (Briggs 2003, p. 179) or ‘conventionalized’ (Malkki 1996, p. 388) representations of catastrophe. As Kate Manzo (2008) puts it, women have become ‘humanitarian icons’: globally identifiable symbols capable of raising humanitarian awareness and sympathy. But what kind of gendered political dynamics are at play in such depictions of humanitarian crises? How do these dynamics shape the political and ethical issues at stake? Dominant crisis images resonate with and replicate instantly recognizable gender stereotypes. Women are presented not only in a range of customarily female social roles – such as that of a caregiver – but also and all too often as ‘tearful, beleaguered, and overwhelmed’, as ‘struck down’ and paralysed by catastrophe (Enarson and Meyreles 2004, p. 49). Frequently, women are used to depict processes of mourning, distress, hardship and suffering: their eyes will be downcast or searching religiously for the sky; their hands will be on their head; they will kneel or crouch, or seem somehow physically diminished; they will stare up into the camera, their distress clearly visible on their faces. At best, they will seek others’ help or be trying to care for or feed children (see Briggs 2003; Childs 2006; Dogra 2011; Enarson 2006; Fordham 1998, p. 128; Strüver 2007). Characteristic here as well is that crisis imagery tends to place women in a domestic (private rather than public) home-­life setting (Childs 2006, p. 205). The result is a set of societal discourses that can be seen as a form of structural violence: they designate gendered role distributions that force men and women into power relations that are both political and exploitative.

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HUMANITARIAN IMAGERY AND THE MOTHER– CHILD METAPHOR Arguably the most classic – as well as stereotypical and readily i­ dentifiable – gendered humanitarian symbol is the image of the mother and child. Indeed, so commonplace and powerful are images of women together with children in disaster/humanitarian aid discourses that some scholars contend that the mother-­and-­child image has come to be understood as an international ‘symbol of distress’, as a marker of charity and humanitarianism (Manzo 2008, pp. 649–651). The image shown in Figure 17.1 is from the 2004 Asian tsunami, which was one of the most devastating natural catastrophes of recent times. The tsunami claimed more than 275,000 lives and left 1 billion people homeless. The photograph represents a visual theme that was very common in the worldwide media coverage of the disaster: it depicts a woman and child as victims and a Western rescue/aid worker providing assistance. In many instances, victims were portrayed in a more desperate, emotional and

Source:  Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 17.1 US Navy Lieutenant Commander Loring Issaac Perry takes a moment to comfort an Indonesian woman and her child who lost everything they had during the tsunami in the city of Meulaboh on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia

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Gender and violence in news media and photography  ­237 needy state than is visible in this photograph. Still, the visual patterns are clear. ­Such – ­and other, more ­dramatic – i­ mages played a key role in mobilizing support for the relief and reconstruction effort. They demonstrated the need for and positive impact of aid. In fact, the humanitarian response to the tsunami was as unprecedented as its scale of destruction. These images also entrench gender stereotypes and, in doing so, constitute a form of structural violence: they enable and constrain social relations based on arbitrarily assigned gender norms. They present women as fragile, powerless and submissive. A benevolent male Western rescue worker provides both assistance and solace. He is in charge and has the ability to deliver. Note too, that in the official description of the photograph the US Lieutenant Commander has a name, whereas the woman/ child victims remain nameless. One has to visually assume that they are reliant upon the distribution of foreign aid. Although this was indeed the case at that dramatic moment, one could have presented them in different ways ­too – a­ s pursuing a reconstruction activity or as helping Western aid workers to distribute aid among them (see Hutchison 2014; Hutchison 2016, pp. 183–210). Much of the emotional and cultural symbolism of the mother-­and-­child image emerges from the customary notion of motherhood, specifically that motherhood is a female role (see Åhäll 2012; Briggs 2003, pp. 183–184). As Liisa Malkki explains (1996, p.  388), the image of mother and child presents something that goes to the heart of humanity and is essential to all cultures, a ‘sentimentalized, composite figure – at once feminine and maternal, childlike and innocent’. But there is more to this visual pattern, as Malkki knows: there is also a lack of power and a cry for help to those who have the ability to deliver. The gendered dimensions of such crisis imagery are readily apparent. Women are represented in a manner that taps into conventional gender stereotypes. Significant here is that women are portrayed as passive – powerless and prone to the circumstances surrounding them. Women are shown not as active agents but as vulnerable and needy victims, devoid of the capacity and agency to help themselves. Women and women’s social roles after disaster are thus typecast; women are presented in a singular light that highlights and links a traditional familial domesticity with a sense of fragility and vulnerability. Implicated here as well are conventional notions of women as incapacitated and powerless in times of turmoil and grief, which prompts further established perceptions of women as dependent upon others for rescue and survival.

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THE LONG VISUAL HISTORY OF THE WOMAN– CHILD METAPHOR AND ITS POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE Gender stereotypes are based on deeply entrenched visual patterns. They are often so old and so engrained that we no longer recognize their subjective and problematic nature. Consider dress codes for men and women. We a­ ll – ­mostly – adhere to them. Few men would, for instance, dress in a skirt when they go to work in a bank. Doing so would violate social codes that are widely accepted. But there is nothing objective about the respective dress codes. They have emerged at a particular time in history, and have been around so long that they have become accepted as normal, even natural. The same is the case with the mother–child metaphor. It is a stereotype that goes back to the very beginnings of historical narratives. One of many examples is the visual prominence in Christian art of the Madonna and Child (Figure 17.2), often in the form of the pietà: the Madonna mourning the loss of her child. The pietà is so widely depicted and recognized that it is now a powerful, symbolic visual metaphor; it has become an icon of compassion and grief (Cohen 2001, pp.  178–181; Dogra 2011, p. 336; Zarzycka 2012). But of course, like any metaphor, the Madonna and Child is based on very particular religious, cultural and, not least, gendered assumptions about the world. We find this visual woman–child metaphor in countless historical instances. It is often used to depict the violence associated with humanitarian crises. Take one example of many: a widely circulated iconic HIV/ AIDS photograph taken in 1986 by Ed Hooper. It depicts a Ugandan woman, Florence, and her child, Ssengabi, sitting outside their home in Gwanda, Uganda (see Hooper 1990, p. 170). When the photograph was taken both Florence and Ssengabi were visibly ill. Taken during the early period of Western public awareness about HIV/AIDS, this photograph provided a ‘face’ that could symbolize the crisis in Africa. It was subsequently published widely in the international media, including Newsweek and two years later in the Washington Post. The Hooper photograph illustrates how an image can have a tremendous impact on raising global awareness of a pressing humanitarian issue. But the very p ­ rominence – a­ nd ­success – ­of this photograph also illustrates the deeply political aspects involved in crisis photography. While humanitarian emergencies tend to be complex in origin and nature, such stereotypical images compress these complexities into a schematic, readily identifiable picture. They ­simplify – ­and supposedly humanize − the situation for distant audiences. The objective here is to simultaneously convey

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Source:  Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Figure 17.2 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child in a Landscape c.1480/1485, Ralph and Mary Booth Collection 1946.19.1

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240  Handbook on gender and violence the personal details of an individual life and, in doing so, provide enough context to allow viewers to generalize widely about the nature and impact of the crisis. The plight of Florence and her child thus comes to stand for the far more complex and far more political ‘HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa’. But here too, Florence and Ssengabi are depicted passively, as if they were unable to do anything but wait for death. They are seen in one function only, as sufferers. Indeed, Florence and Ssengabi are entirely defined by their suffering. But this was, of course, not their only identity, even though they were facing imminent death. One could just as well have presented them in different ways, such as being integrated into their surroundings and pursuing social roles that highlight their agency (see Bleiker and Kay 2007). These gender stereotypes and the forms of structural violence associated with them both disable and enable certain forms of politics. While forcing many women into particular and often oppressive social relations, it is arguably through these very gendered stereotypes – i.e. through the implied sense of female passivity, dependence and ever-­present emotionality – that such imagery so readily mobilizes humanitarian compassions. It has been said that through such frames disaster is in effect ‘feminized’: the excessive use of feminine gender stereotypes shapes how viewers come to consider the respective humanitarian situation more generally (Kelleher 1997; Sassen 2002). Distant disaster is consequently perceived through a gendered lens: women come to represent all disaster victims, who then also become perceived of with a corresponding sense of stricken powerlessness. The apparent fragility and helplessness of women prompts viewers to bring into play a host of preconceived ideas about how all disaster victims would think, feel and act – the dominant interpretation of which would be to assume both the inability of survivors to cope and consequently the necessity of outside assistance. Dominant crisis imagery thus presents a significant paradox – one that highlights how gender constructions are subsumed, complicit in and reproduced through discourses of humanitarian disaster. On one hand, it may be precisely because such imagery is inherently gendered that it can mobilize compassion, political will and necessary aid (Braumann 1993). Research has also found that employing stereotypical feminine frames is often rationalized through the idea that some representation for women, even if stereotypical, is better than none at all (for a summary of this position, see Carpenter 2005). But, and on the other hand, such imagery relies upon and replicates a reductionist, one-­dimensional perspective of women’s social roles and agency. Indeed, through such singular, excessively feminine stereotyping female agency is stereotypical and very limited, whittled down to an established and simplistic gender cliché: women are

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Gender and violence in news media and photography  ­241 typecast as emotionally fragile, vulnerable and at the same time helpless, powerless and perpetually needy. The result is a clear form of structural violence that both restrains possibilities for women and enables a political discourse that legitimizes both unequal gender relations and a form of neo-­colonial politics of humanitarian assistance.

TOWARDS A FEMINIST POLITICAL AESTHETIC There are two ways in which feminist politics can and have broken through these gender stereotypes and the forms of structural violence that they generate and entrench. First is the need to recognize and problematize deeply entrenched gender patterns. Second is the effort to provide alternative aesthetic options. We briefly touch upon both of these strategies. For decades, feminist scholars have fought hard to expose and interrogate the types of gender constructions highlighted in the previous section. Feminist international relations scholarship began by challenging the assumption that global politics is gender neutral. The respective scholars situated gender front and centre in the reproduction of global politics as a practice and discipline. They sought to show that ‘gender makes the world go round’ (Enloe 1989, p.  1) – that not merely is the personal political, but moreover that ‘the personal is international’ (Enloe 1989, p.  195). Significant for feminist scholars is therefore that the gendered dynamics of prevailing political aesthetics – such as the crisis imagery we examined – are not merely marginalizing and subjugating women but are also part of larger gendered patterns and mind-­sets that shape and constrain how we think about global politics. Even when they contain no open violence, these gendered norms legitimize a form of structural violence based on highly unequal social structures and relations. Gender i­nequalities – t­ogether with the structural and overt violence that e­ nsues – a­ re then furthered embedded within and help structure global political relations. Visual representations are a powerful mechanism through which traditional gender roles and ideals have been (and continue to be) constructed. Consider again our examination of crisis imagery. We demonstrated how an overwhelming focus on feminized representational frames depicts women through a singular and stereotypical lens that ultimately renders them passive – as helpless caregivers and victims. We then drew out that this is significant for women and how we think about women’s roles and potentials in so far that ensuing meanings continue in a long history of limiting female political agency. Powerful and ‘seductive’ gender ideals that confine and regulate how both men and women consider their possible political actions are thus mobilized through aesthetic frames. Cynthia

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242  Handbook on gender and violence Enloe explains that feminized imagery recreates the myth that ‘only men, not women or children, have been imagined as capable of the sort of public decisiveness international politics is presumed to require’ (1989, p. 4). Feminized political imagery therefore not only produces reductionist understandings of female political capacity but also, and in doing so, reinforces the mind-­set that global politics is a realm where conventional ‘hard’ male forms of power must prevail (Cohn 1987). This marginalization or relegation of women in the political realm can be seen too as a form of violence. Foremost, it is a structural violence insofar as women’s roles are limited and essentially obfuscated through tightly defined and gendered political roles. However, it is also precisely by relegating the roles of women that global politics continues to be perceived as a realm of stereotypically ‘masculine’ understandings and actions, which tend also to be associated with overt forms of violence, such as the use of military force. These gendered dynamics are of course part of larger trends of imaging women. Prevailing historic imagery of women in both war and peace-­time typically stereotypes women in ways that marginalize and often de-­politicize their social involvement (see MacDonald et al. 1987). Historically, the world of art too has revolved around a masculine ideal, leading to the proliferation of a masculine gaze (Korsmeyer 2004, p. 6). Women became the subjects of men’s watchful eyes and tastes. Rey Chow (1992, p.  105) has suggested that the appropriation of female bodies through the predominant masculine mind-­set and framing is one way through which women are rendered especially vulnerable and helpless. They are ‘consigned to visuality’, reduced to the stereotypes that have become so entrenched that they are naturalized. Images of masculine power and action versus feminine passivity and inaction have over time come to be considered as truths rather than the ‘deeply encoded [. . .] symbolic constructions’ that they are (Elshtain 1994, p. 110). Feminist scholars have sought therefore to uncover the gendered assumptions and social dynamics that are proliferated in the realm of the everyday, from TV programmes to newspaper ads and websites (see Shepherd 2013; Zalewski 2013; Griffin 2015). For some, traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity may no longer seem so present, so powerful or even so normal. Perhaps some consider that gender ideals have been done away with altogether, and that women in particular are now free to be as they like. After all, women today don military fatigues; women can also go to war and fight. But such an apparent reversal or ‘solution’ to the construction of gender identities and roles is not always viewed as evidence of women’s emancipation. That both sexes now engage in battle can rather be seen as illustrative of just how powerful and seductive masculinized narratives of power and war have

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Gender and violence in news media and photography  ­243 become (Elshtain 1987, p. 8; Elshtain 1994, p. 111; Enloe 1988). Simply put, the symbolism of war – what it means culturally and politically to possess superior military might – has meant that war has become interesting, thrilling even, to the extent that women seek to incorporate some of the so-­called ‘just warrior’ into their ‘beautiful soul’. But even here the reality is far more complex. The ‘shocking’ images of US Army reserve soldier Lynndie England, for instance, as well as the heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch demonstrate the continuing influence of the age-­old fear that women and female sexuality can be used as a threatening interrogation tool or weapon (Oliver 2007, p. 5). This is precisely when structural violence is at its most powerful: when the social relations that underpin unequal gender relations are so widely accepted as common sense that they are no longer seen as the arbitrarily

Note:  This is not the actual photograph that Aliaa Elmahdy posted on her blog. It is a graffiti representation of the photograph and a portrayal of Samira Ibrahim, who launched a lawsuit against the Egyptian Army for conducting ‘virginity checks’ on protesters. Source:  Gigi Ibrahim, 29 November 2011, flikr Creative Commons, https://www.flickr. com/photos/50037840@N02/6428302739.

Figure 17.3  Women in the revolution graffiti

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244  Handbook on gender and violence constructed power relations they are. Because they are all around us, visual representations play a key role in establishing, masking and entrenching these forms of structural violence. All is not lost, though. Since aesthetics have helped make global politics, even as gendered a political realm as it may now be, aesthetics can also help break down gendered patterns and mind-­sets. There are numerous feminist activists who have embarked on innovative and influential aesthetic engagements with gender stereotypes. Consider an example from the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt that took place between 2010 and 2012. One of the most remarkable episodes occurred when a young woman blogger called Aliaa Elmahdy posted a nude photograph of herself on her blog (depicted in Figure 17.3). She did so to protest against gender discrimination in Egypt and called for more personal freedom, includcum-­ public act of defiance caused ing sexual autonomy. Her private-­ extensive public protests and unsettled the country’s gender assumptions. Elmahdy’s visual act of dissent challenges numerous religious, ideological and political norms.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have explored the links between gender, violence and media images. We revealed how visual representations of v­iolence – ­defined very broadly from overt to everyday p ­ henomena – a­ re a powerful mechanism through which men and women have come to understand their political capacity, agency and actions. These visual representations are forms of structural violence insofar as they are linked to power relations and forms of societal and political exclusion. They touch on all aspects of our lives, from TV shows to dress codes, from advertising campaigns for perfumes to the organization of national celebrations and military parades. We illustrated the issues at stake with regard to one realm: photographic representations of humanitarian crises. Taking the mother–child metaphor as an example, we highlighted both the effective and the highly problematic nature of deeply entrenched gender stereotypes. Women and children are ‘good’ victims. They generate empathy in viewers, and thus enable humanitarian action. But the very same depictions also entrench highly problematic gender stereotypes. Women are seen as highly emotional, passive, unable to help themselves and thus reliant on the rescue and support of rational men. The power relations that ensue from these visual representations are a form of structural violence that force women into particular social roles and legitimize forms of domination based on

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Gender and violence in news media and photography  ­245 both gendered and neo-­colonial values. Visual representations are particularly powerful because they are all around us and shape what we ­see – ­and ­not – a­ bout the world. While deeply entrenched, such stereotypes have, of course, not remained unchallenged. Feminist scholarship has not only exposed and critiqued these and related gender assumptions; it has also revealed how they lie at the very heart of global power relations. Likewise, feminist activists have embarked on numerous campaigns to raise awareness of gender stereotypes and break through them. It is in this sense that photographic ­representations – ­and aesthetic practices more b ­ roadly – a­ re paradoxically both an essential part of gender discrimination and an equally essential part of overcoming them.

REFERENCES Åhäll, L. (2012) ‘Motherhood, myth and gendered agency in political violence’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14 (1), 103–120. Åhäll, L. (2016) ‘The dance of militarisation: a feminist security studies take on “the political” ’, Critical Studies on Security, 4 (2), 154–168. Åhäll, L. and L.J. Shepherd (eds) (2012) Gender, Agency and Political Violence, London: Routledge. Banerjee, P. and M. Shamnam (2006) ‘Ten years after Beijing’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8 (3), 430–437. Basu, A., I. Grewal, C. Kaplan and L. Malkki (2001) ‘Editorial: globalization and gender’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26 (4), 943–948. Belkin, A. (2012) Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bleiker, R. (ed.) (2018) Visual Global Politics, London: Routledge. Bleiker, R. and A. Kay (2007) ‘Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: pluralist photography and local empowerment’, International Studies Quarterly, 51 (1), 139–163. Bleiker, R., E. Hutchison and D. Campbell (2014) ‘Imaging catastrophe: the politics of representing humanitarian crises’ in M. Acuto (ed.) Negotiating Relief: The Dialectics of Humanitarian Space, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 47–60. Braumann, R. (1993) ‘When suffering makes a good story’ in F. Jean (ed.) Life, Death and Aid: The Médicins Sans Frontières Report on World Crisis Intervention, London: Routledge. Briggs, L. (2003) ‘Mother, child, race, nation: the visual iconography of rescue and the politics of transnational and transracial adoption’, Gender and History, 15 (2), 179–200. Campbell, D. (2011) ‘The iconography of famine’ in G. Gidley et al. (eds) Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs in Crisis, London: Reaktion. Carpenter, R.C. (2005) ‘Women, children and other vulnerable groups: gender, strategic frames and the protection of civilians as a transnational issue’, International Studies Quarterly, 49 (2), 295–334. Childs, M. (2006) ‘Not through women’s eyes: photo-­essays and the construction of a gendered tsunami disaster’, Disaster Prevention and Management, 15 (1), 202–212. Chow, R. (1992) ‘Postmodern automatons’ in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge. Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity. Cohn, C. (1987) ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12 (4), 687–718.

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246  Handbook on gender and violence Dogra, N. (2011) ‘The mixed metaphor of “third world women”: gendered representations by international development NGOs’, Third World Quarterly, 32 (2), 333–348. Elshtain, J.B. (1987) Women and War, New York: Basic Books. Elshtain, J.B. (1994) ‘Thinking about women and international violence’ in P.R. Beckman and F. D’Amico (eds) Women, Gender and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies and Prospects, Westport: Bergin & Garvey. Enarson, E. (2006) ‘Women and girls last? Averting the second post-­Katrina disaster’ in Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, New York: Social Science Research Council. Enarson, E. and L. Meyreles (2004) ‘International perspectives on gender and disaster’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 24 (10–11), 49–93. Enloe, C. (1988) Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives, London: Pandora. Enloe, C. (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, C. (2000) Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Berkeley: University of California Press. Eschle, C. (2002) ‘Engendering global democracy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4 (3), 315–341. Eschle, C. (2005) ‘“Skeleton women”: feminism and the antiglobalization movement’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (3), 1741–1770. Fordham, M.H. (1998) ‘Making women visible in disasters: problematizing the private domain’, Disasters, 22 (2), 126–143. Griffin, P. (2015) Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why Women are in Refrigerators and Other Stories, London: Routledge. Hariman, J. and J.L. Lucaites (2003) ‘Public identity and collective memory in U.S. iconic photography: the image of accidental napalm’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20 (1), 35–66. Hooper, C. (2001) Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics, New York: Columbia University Press. Hooper, E. (1990) Slim: A Reporter’s Own Story of HIV/AIDS in East Africa, London: Bodley Head. Hutchison, E. (2014) ‘A global politics of pity? Disaster imagery and the emotional construction of solidarity after the 2004 Asian tsunami’, International Political Sociology, 8 (1), 1–19. Hutchison, E. (2016) Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchison, E. and R. Bleiker (2012) ‘Ungendering the links between emotions and violence’ in L. Åhäll and L.J. Shepherd (eds) Gender, Agency and Political Violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 151–168. Hutchison, E. and R. Bleiker (2015) ‘Art, aesthetics and emotionality’ in L.J. Shepherd (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics (2nd edn), London: Routledge, pp. 349–360. Kelleher, M. (1997) The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Korsmeyer, C. (2004) Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction, New York and London: Routledge. Leet, M. and R. Bleiker (2013) ‘Between consensus and deconstruction: a feminist reading of dialogue’ in J. Browne (ed.) Dialogue, Politics and Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 120–145. Mabee, B. and S. Vucetic (2018) ‘Varieties of militarism: towards a typology’, Security Dialogue, 49 (1–2), 99–103. MacDonald, S., P. Holden and S. Ardener (eds) (1987) Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Malkki, L. (1996) ‘Speechless emissaries: refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11 (3), 377–404.

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Gender and violence in news media and photography  ­247 Manzo, K. (2008) ‘Imaging humanitarianism: NGO identity and the iconography of childhood’, Antipode 40 (4), 632–657. Mohanty, C.T. (1998) ‘Feminists encounters: locating the politics of experience’ in A. Phillips (ed.) Feminism and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 254–272. Oliver, K. (2007) Women and Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media, New York: Columbia University Press. Sassen, S. (2002) ‘Women’s burden: counter geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival’, Nordic Journal of International Law, 71 (2), 255–274. Shepherd, L.J. (2012) ‘Introduction: rethinking gender, agency and political violence’ in L. Åhäll and L.J. Shepherd (eds) Gender, Agency and Political Violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–17. Shepherd, L.J. (2013) Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories, New York: Routledge. Shepherd, L.J. (2017) Gender, UN Peacebuilding, the Politics of Space: Locating Legitimacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shepherd, L.J. (2018) ‘Militarization’ in R. Bleiker (ed.) Visual Global Politics, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 209–214. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stavrianakis, A. and J. Selby (eds) (2012) Militarization and International Relations in the 21st Century, London: Routledge. Stavrianakis, A. and M. Stern (2018) ‘Militarism and security: dialogue, possibilities and limits’, Security Dialogue, 49 (1–2), 3–18. Strüver, A. (2007) ‘The production of geopolitical and gendered images through global aid organisations’, Geopolitics, 12 (4), 680–703. Weber, C. (1995) Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wibben, A.T.R. (2018) ‘Why we need to study (US) militarism: a critical feminist lens’, Security Dialogue, 49 (1–2), 136–148. Youngs, G. (2004) ‘Feminist international relations: a contradiction in terms? Or: why women and gender are essential to understanding the world “we” live in’, International Affairs, 80 (1), 75–87. Zalewski, M. (2013) Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse, New York: Routledge. Zarzycka, M. (2012) ‘Madonnas of warfare, angels of poverty: cutting through press photographs’, Photographies, 5 (1), 71–85. Zelizer, B. (2002) ‘Finding aids to the past: bearing personal witness to traumatic public events’, Media, Culture and Society, 24 (5), 697–714.

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PART III CONTEXTS

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18. Transnational perspectives on gender violence: opportunities and challenges

Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson, Amber Lusvardi and Laurel Weldon

For feminist activists who seek to raise awareness and spark action against gender violence, the transnational realm has been both a resource and a source of influence. Indeed, addressing such violence has been both a motivation and a basis for transnational organizing as well as an outcome or effect of transnational organizing. But transnational organizing on violence against women (VAW) also raises several theoretical and practical tensions in feminism. Scholars of global feminism have argued that the transnational realm offers unique political opportunities for feminists (Ferree and Tripp 2006; Friedman 2003). Indeed, the creation of transnational feminist networks (Moghadam 2000; see also Friedman 2003) has allowed feminists to participate in global politics in a new ­way – ­as individuals drawn to particular issues, rather than as national representatives of particular countries or even as civil servants in intergovernmental organizations (Tripp 2006). For those working to raise awareness and spark collective action to end violence, the transnational arena has been particularly valuable (Friedman 2003; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Tripp 2006; Weldon 2006). Activists have ­used – ­even ­hijacked – ­intergovernmental conferences on human rights and other topics to highlight VAW (Friedman 1995; Snyder 2006; Tripp 2006). They have used international fora to develop international institutions and norms on VAW (Htun and Weldon 2012, 2018; Weldon 2006), norms which are then used by activists working in domestic contexts to pressure their governments to take action (Htun and Weldon 2012, 2018; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Activists that are stymied by opposition at ­home – ­religious, corporate, or just t­ raditionalist – ­have sometimes been able to leverage this international pressure to force, or encourage, more official attention to violence against women or other issues (Ayoub 2015; Htun and Weldon 2018). As feminist activists have made gains in transnational organizing against violence, their goals and motivations have been the subject of controversy. Some of the major debates, questions, and ambiguities have included questions about the way that institutions and official rhetoric 249

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250  Handbook on gender and violence of ­intergovernmental feminism translate to the various contexts where it is applied. Scholars and activists have also asked questions about the effectiveness and radicalism of transnational organizing against violence. Has the growing popularity of ‘investing in women’ undercut the radical potential of transnational organization on violence? More generally, does feminist analysis lose its critical edge as it becomes ‘mainstreamed’ (Alvarez 2000; Ellerby 2017)? How has the global movement against gender violence addressed issues of difference? Has the movement against violence become the handmaiden of neoliberalism, as some critics allege (Fraser 2013)? These questions are not necessarily separate, as the movement’s ability to integrate difference has implications for movement effectiveness (Montoya 2013; Weldon 2006).

TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM ON GENDER VIOLENCE Transnational activist networks (Alvarez 2000; Alvarez et al. 2003; Beckman 2001; Fraser 1987; Keck and Sikkink 1998) – and especially transnational feminist networks (Moghadam 2000) have been central to the transnational movement on violence against women. Both international ­conferences – s­uch as the UN conferences on women, and other UN conferences of the ­1990s – ­and the networks and publications that were established during the processes leading up to these conferences contributed to efforts to define the problem of violence against women as well as its success in getting on the international agenda (Fraser 1987; Snyder 2006). But these conferences would not have had the transformative effect they did without women’s autonomous organizing, without women’s intentional efforts to reshape and redirect these conferences to feminist ends (Tripp 2006; Weldon 2006). The tensions that have arisen in the struggles between movement and global institutions have prompted several debates and tensions, which we describe below.

ESSENTIALISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY: DECOLONIZING GLOBAL ACTIVISM ON GENDER VIOLENCE Feminist action and scholarship increasingly is focused on addressing how women’s experiences with injustice, and particularly violence, are shaped not only by gender but also by race, sexual orientation, and immigration status (Elman 2007; Montoya 2013, 2016). This work both builds on and

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Transnational perspectives on gender violence  ­251 responds to feminist critiques of the global women’s movement, particularly in the universalization of the concept of gender inequality by women from the global North, which erases local women’s histories and oppression and finding ways within their own contexts of battling that oppression (Morgan 1996), and erases the added consideration of racial-, ethnic-, and sexuality-­based discrimination. ‘Paradoxically, the very attempt to universalize feminism makes it more exclusionary’ (Basu 1995, p. 19). As Mohanty (2003) writes, feminists working on violence have taken their own locations as reference points, lumping ‘Third World Women’ into a single category and seeing them primarily as victims, rather than as agents in their own right. From the Western reference point, the global South looks far more uniform than it is. Grappling with the tremendous variation across the global South requires less arrogance from the Northern feminists (Ackerly 2014; Tripp 2006), and requires a genuine engagement with the innovative ideas and experiences a feminism ‘without borders’ offers. Indeed, the differences between feminists from the global ‘North’ and feminists from the global ‘South’ were not just tensions resulting from different perspectives on violence; they reflected the problems that Northern dominance created for global feminists. Northern feminists wanted to address gender injustice through a ‘discrimination’ frame, while Southern feminists wanted to address it through a ‘development’ frame. This was partly a reflection of the privileged position of those who could conceive of gender issues as being separable from questions of development, of national self-­determination, of their very survival in refugee camps or through civil wars. In taking such a perspective, many feminists were adopting a colonial stance (Mohanty 2003; Narayan 1998). This difference was a problem of dominance, and it was not until Southern women became more powerful and influential in movement debates that a global consensus emerged. Whether or not this shows that the subaltern can indeed speak to some degree (Spivak 1998), it does show that greater involvement by Southern women in the global movement against gender violence made that movement stronger and more effective (Tripp 2006; Weldon 2006). The universalizing elements of global feminism also constitute an ongoing challenge for contemporary feminists who seek to take an intersectional approach to organizing against violence (Mohanty 2003; Montoya 2013; Townsend-­Bell 2012). Political intersectionality requires that we see ‘women’ as potential political coalitions, comprised of groups riven not only by gender but also by race, class and sexuality (Crenshaw 2005; Mohanty 2003). Building these coalitions requires attending to the context-­specific, distinctive experiences of racialized women, poor women, working-­class women, and sexual minorities.

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252  Handbook on gender and violence Some transnational organizing on violence (or even on other related issues such as domestic work) has been able to overcome this obstacle by using more specifically-­focused groups or caucuses as building blocks (Swider 2006; Weldon 2006). As noted, the international conferences functioned as important discursive spaces for the transnational feminist movement. Fraser (1987, p.  13) notes the transformative effect of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) meetings at international conferences, particularly in terms of how the experience of the meeting enables participants to ‘learn that while they may have political differences, there are common meeting grounds on specific issues which momentarily or forever transcend political differences’ (cf. Weldon 2006). Both the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentros conferences and the UN World Conferences on Women created spaces for regional and even North–South coalitions between feminist organizations. However, some sweeping generalizations from Western feminists about the nature of a shared oppression of all women caused tensions with women in the developing world (Basu 1995). The Encuentros created opportunities for black and lesbian feminists to challenge the heterosexism and racism they experienced within their own local movements through the establishment of the network of Latin American Feminists. The participation of the Afro-­Latin American and Afro-­Caribbean American network in the Fifth Encuentro encouraged Haitian-­born women to organize during the Eighth Encuentro in the Dominican Republic (Alvarez 2000; Alvarez et al. 2003; Beckman 2001). Activists organizing against violence transnationally needed not only to address the contextual, group-­specific forms of violence that women experience. They also had to avoid setting off particular forms of violence as being particularly distinctive or special, which can intentionally or inadvertently play into colonial discourses of ‘saving brown women from brown men’, in the words of Gayatri Spivak (1988, p. 50). In some cases, the use of non-­universal language can contribute to the ‘othering’ of marginalized groups and misleading essentialism (Elman 2007; Montoya 2013; Okin 1999). But essentialism can be a temptation for organizing as ­well – ­essentialist rhetoric can seem to be a powerful mobilizing tool when women respond to calls that emphasize their maternal experiences or instincts, or their femininity and vulnerability as victims (Rupp and Taylor 1999). Essentialism remains a problem, in spite of its apparent power in some circumstances, because the treatment of gender as separate from other forms of oppression limits our ability to address women’s inequality (Elman 2007; Okin 1999). Particularly, the treatment of minority groups as essentially masculine leads to focusing on the differences between the ways

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Transnational perspectives on gender violence  ­253 masculinity is presented between the dominant and non-­dominant groups (Elman 2007; Okin 1999). This essentializes minority groups in a way that prevents addressing minority women’s experiences, particularly with gendered violence within the private sphere (Elman 2007; Hall 2015; Okin 1999). Likewise, the focus on particular forms of violence against women as cultural violence supports the view of particular marginalized groups as inherently backward (Hall 2015; Montoya 2013). The focus on cultural violence also obscures violence within the dominant culture and limits the space for solidarity with the women who are victims of these forms of ­violence – ­for example honor crimes being used to limit immigration as opposed to a way to provide resources for women (Hall 2015). Focusing on cultural differences can itself represent a colonial stance (Narayan 1998), relegating some women to a ‘death by culture’ when courts and other authorities excuse male violence against women by men from minority or immigrant communities because they view such violence as being culturally ‘typical’ or ‘normative’, and therefore excusable in some sense (Narayan 1998; Song 2007). The view of violence against women as being ubiquitous or typical in a particular context can limit official responses to the needs of women who experience that violence (Montoya 2016). These debates among both scholars and activists over the definition of violence against women have enabled the development of more inclusive conceptualizations of the very idea of ‘violence against women’ (Hall 2015; Montoya 2013; Weldon 2006). One of the most important developments has been the recognition of the relationship between violence against women and structural forms of violence, such as racism (Hall 2015; Montoya 2016). When articulating what a sufficiently intersectional definition of violence against women should be, Montoya (2013) argues that an intersectional feminist approach to addressing violence against women recognizes that it is a human rights issue, is a manifestation of gender inequality, takes many forms and occurs in many locations, is a universal and global issue, and requires an intersectional approach. The inclusive definition of violence against women enables activists to address a wide range of experiences that constitute violence both in the public and private sphere across cultural contexts, recognizing both the distinctiveness and universality of the way violence manifests (Montoya 2013). Importantly, these debates are ongoing. In a study of the European Commission-­sanctioned programs STOP and the DAPHNE Initiative, Elman (2007) finds that through the framing of differences in sex work, as choice or forced, the European Union (EU) has limited the discursive space to address how sex work constitutes a form of exploitation both when women are trafficked and when they are not. Organizations that maintain this distinction are more likely to secure funding and gain public

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254  Handbook on gender and violence attention, limiting the ability of the movement on violence against women to counteract these claims (Elman 2007). Moreover, there are increasing calls for feminist activists to eschew intersectional organizing, which some dismiss as ‘identity politics’, and affirm the powerful, if essentialist, identities that have been at the basis of prior efforts at transnational organizing (Lilla 2016; Rupp and Taylor 1999). Essentialist identities are powerful, as noted, and feminists have sometimes exploited maternalist rhetoric and essentialist approaches to violence against women to build solidarity (Rupp and Taylor 1999). Particularly in the current era of global, authoritarian backlash against feminist progress, some might argue, feminists should employ any arrow in their quiver to prevent backsliding. As we have pointed out above, however, such an approach sets limits to the effectiveness of organizing against violence for all women.

THE CHALLENGES OF FUNDING AND NEOLIBERAL CO-­OPTATION This leads us to another major critique of the contemporary transnational women’s movement and the movement on violence against women: namely, that it is increasingly dependent on funders who limit its power and blunt its radical edge. The lack of funding for independent women’s organizations, and the focus on groups that work within existing paradigms, can limit the potential of the movement, as demonstrated through the limitations of work on violence against women in the EU (Arutyanova and Clark 2013; Elman 2007; Hall 2015). This has fed into a broader critique that global action on violence has lacked a transformative edge (Ellerby 2017). Both Elman (2007) and Montoya (2013) use the DAPHNE program in the EU to examine the ways that dependence on particular types of funding shapes the movement on violence against women in Europe. Overall, the results are mixed. On one side, DAPHNE created incentives for building transnational partnerships within Europe around the issue of violence against women (Montoya 2013). Montoya (2013, p. 192) demonstrates that the program succeeded in building dense networks addressing VAW across 28 countries. Yet the criteria used to determine whether organizations should be funded by the DAPHNE Initiative was difficult for smaller grassroots organizations, and it tended to privilege the more professionalized organizations where the women’s movement was more institutionalized (Montoya 2013). Likewise, DAPHNE was vulnerable, due to the discursive assumptions within the program (in part as a result

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Transnational perspectives on gender violence  ­255 of its focus on trafficking from outside the EU), to changes in leadership within the EU moving program initiatives away from being explicitly feminist (Elman 2007; Montoya 2013). Hall (2015) similarly argues that problematic trends related to funding are undercutting organizing against violence. Decreases in funding due to austerity initiatives, combined with funding mandates from states that require organizations to be ‘non-­political’ in their advocacy, severely limit the space for transformative political action by funded groups. They also lead to declines in real services, such as women’s shelters. For this reason, Hall emphasizes the importance of anti-­violence activism at the grassroots as the future of the movement against gender violence. These critiques amplify a broader critique of contemporary feminists, one that argues that the radical edge of feminism has been dulled as feminists have been co-­opted into ‘leaning in’ or otherwise separating questions of gender from class issues, focusing on identity politics and non-­transformative ‘gender’ issues instead of issues of fundamental transformation (Ellerby 2017; Fraser 2013; Lilla 2016). International institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which have been targets of transnational activist networks in the past, have now begun to tout their gender equality credentials, pointing to the ways that they ‘invest in women’ and emphasizing the costs of violence against women. For those working to mainstream gender in these institutions, it makes sense to emphasize the ways that it is more profitable and efficient to end gender violence and further gender equality. These actors have thus co-­opted some of the language of the feminist movement to put the focus on the economy and the workforce over equality (Ellerby 2017; Fraser 2013; Hozić and True 2016). In turn, modern feminist movements have failed to critique a system that disadvantages women to instead push for entrepreneurship and meritocracy, for women’s representation in corridors of the powerful (Fraser 2013). Of course, seeing violence as an issue of ‘identity politics’ and not a class issue is itself an abandonment of feminist analysis, as many of these critics would no doubt recognize (Fraser 2013; Young 1990). Indeed, focusing on the issue of violence against women and its linkages to structural violence provides a potential avenue for thinking more critically about the relationship between the feminist movement and neoliberalism (True 2012). Work on violence against women recognizes that identity politics and structural violence in the form of neoliberal economics are connected (Montoya 2013, 2016). Montoya demonstrates the linkages between transnational neoliberal economics and the exploitation of women’s bodies through her treatment of the ‘DSK Affair’. For Montoya (2016, p. 147), by paying attention to the ‘actual identities of the actors’ – Dominique

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256  Handbook on gender and violence Strauss-­Kahn, the then IMF director and a contender for the 2012 French election, and Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean migrant and domestic ­worker – ­we are able to see ‘connections between the micro-­level examples of power asymmetries [. . .] and the macro-­level examples found in the global political economy’. Diallo’s location in the hotel room when Strauss-­Kahn allegedly assaults her is in many ways a reflection of the history of Guinea, its relationship to France and the IMF, which created incentives for Diallo to leave her home as an asylum seeker (Montoya 2016). Likewise, Diallo’s struggle to gain asylum in the US creates inconsistencies in her overall story that are used to discredit her by portraying her as a less-­than-­ideal victim (Montoya 2016). Violence against women illustrates the ways that the question of gender/race/class identity cannot be separated from material issues of work, wages and, indeed, survival itself. The supposed dichotomy between questions of ‘identity politics’ (often presented as a thinly veiled critique of feminist and anti-­racist work, often offered as part of an argument for a return to more simple, class-­based politics and analyses) and ‘real’ transformative, material issues dissolves under scrutiny. More broadly, critiques of neoliberalism and its relationship to contemporary feminism are incomplete without a gendered, raced, and classed analysis of the current political order, including violence against women (Fraser 2013; Walby 2011). Likewise, without denying the important limits funders can place on organizing, it is important not to overstate the impact of funding sources. Both activists and NGOs can be strategic in their relationship with funders. Feminist organizations have responded to the current political climate by professionalizing, engaging with a range of funders, and increasingly providing services due to the retreat of the state (Alvarez 1998, 2009; Roy 2015). However, these responses to changing contexts do not necessarily indicate an end to efforts for transformative change. NGOs may be here to stay, but they are not static (Alvarez 2009). NGOs have adjusted priorities, built networks, and contributed to knowledge-­building projects that support and sustain feminist movements. In some contexts, such as India, this move towards NGO-­ization may have limited the room for transformative change, yet has also allowed for increased participation by some women who cannot participate in the movement without a steady income (Roy 2015). Last, returning to the DAPHNE example, it is clear that feminist leadership mattered in terms of the implementation of DAPHNE, and there is evidence that organizations used the program to fund their work on violence against women despite efforts to steer the program in other directions (Montoya 2013).

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Transnational perspectives on gender violence  ­257

DOES TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM MAKE A DIFFERENCE? Women’s transnational activism has made a tremendous difference in the area of violence against women. In the first place, such activism led to the development of international norms and other ­institutions – ­formal and ­informal – r­ equiring national governments to act on violence (Friedman 1995; Htun and Weldon 2018; Walby 2011; Weldon 2006). Second, this activism provided a supplement to the efforts of domestic activists seeking to address violence in particular national contexts. Finally, it seems likely that this activism and policy change is behind the attitudinal changes we see in the area of violence against women (Raymond et al. 2014). For example, the proportion of Europeans who thought domestic violence against women should be considered a crime grew between 1999 and 2010. As late as 1999, the Eurobarometer survey found that as many as one in three Europeans thought violence against women should probably not be considered a crime. By 2010, the majority of people in Europe thought domestic violence was a serious issue: 84 percent found it unacceptable and proposed it should always be punishable by law (European Commission 2010). These attitudes represent significant change. In terms of rates of violence itself, disentangling the degree to which trends in reported violence reflect increased awareness and reporting to policy or changes in underlying rates is quite difficult, though that has not stopped some critics from making claims that policy changes (which mostly have occurred after the mid-­1990s) have not affected rates based on data gathered before the policies in question were enacted (Ellerby 2017). The general poor quality of data on this question notwithstanding, there may be an empirical basis for optimism about the impact of feminism and feminist policies on actual rates of violence against women. In some of the places with longstanding activism and the most comprehensive policy responses conforming to UN recommendations, intimate violence may finally be declining to some degree. For example, in C ­ anada – w ­ here longstanding activism and comprehensive policies address VAW, at least relative to other national governments (Htun and Weldon 2018; Weldon 2002) – there may be a slight decline in intimate partner homicides against women. This statistic is less vulnerable to reporting issues, as homicides are more likely to be recorded than, say, sexual assault, which are usually unreported to the police. Declining femicides in some other countries may similarly reflect the impact of feminist activism and policies. These considerations lead us to conclude that transnational feminist activism on violence has made a significant difference to the fight for gender justice.

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258  Handbook on gender and violence

TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST ACTIVISM: WANING STRENGTH IN THE CONTEXT OF BACKLASH Most data suggests, however, that transnational feminist activism may have hit its zenith in the mid-­1990s, and the rate of transnational feminist organizing is slowing. Data from various editions of the Yearbook of International Organizations (ranging from 1975 to 2015) suggests that the number of Women’s International NGOs (WINGOS) is declining or increasing very slowly compared to past decades. While the first UN Decade for Women (1975–1985) was characterized by a 57 percent growth in such organization and the period 1985–1995 saw an even greater increase (62 percent), the most recent decade (2005–2015) shows only a 5 percent growth rate (or even, depending on how one counts organizations, a 4 percent decline). This is happening in a context when many countries still have very few or no women’s organizations and international funding for women (for example through overseas development assistance, or ODA) declined 20 percent. Funding from the US government for women’s issues similarly declined, and was not offset by smaller increases from the UK and Sweden in 2008–2011 (Arutyanova and Clark 2013). This declining activity and funding may reflect the lack of a World Conference on Women. This waning strength is further exacerbated by a global backlash against feminist activism and what critics call ‘gender ideology’. The Trump administration may be the most prominent example, with its efforts to remove the word ‘gender’ from UN documents (Borger 2018). But the rise of sexist and racist populism and authoritarianism in several contexts also has a gendered element, and part of this effort is rolling back feminist successes. One example is the backlash against the school curriculum on sexuality, for example, efforts to roll back curricular changes in Peru, in the campaign titled Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas (‘Don’t mess with my kids’); similar campaigns are taking place in Colombia, Mexico, France and Poland.

PROSPECTS FOR RENEWED ACTIVISM AGAINST VIOLENCE: DIGITAL ACTIVISM AND THE WOMEN’S MARCH As we consider the future of transnational activism against violence, we cannot fail to mention the stunning impact of the #MeToo movement, and what it suggests about the potential of digital activism as an avenue for transnational feminist organizing. In 2017, a movement to make sexual harassment and assault more visible and to demand account-

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Transnational perspectives on gender violence  ­259 ability for sexual violence resulted in punitive consequences for powerful men in cultural industries, including film, television, radio, and theater (Weldon 2019). Beginning with the phrase coined by Tarana Burke, the #MeToo campaign reached the technology field (companies such as Uber), advertising and other industries as well (Kramer 2017; Weldon 2019). In academia, professors in disciplines of Philosophy, Astronomy, Education, Political Science and Geology have been publicly accused of sexual harassment (Brown 2017; Kramer 2017; Mervis 2017; Remnick 2016). Indeed, as the #MeToo campaign spread to politics, office-­holders in the US ­Congress – ­on both sides of the ­aisle – ­were accused of violations from sexual assault to groping. Results included the resignation of the ‘Dean of the House’, John Conyers, the longest-­serving member of the House, as well as calls for a review of how the House handles complaints of workplace harassment. A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced an Act to improve the process of complaints, called the Me Too Congress Act, and new training for members has been mandated (Rhodan 2017). The movement is not confined to the United States. The #MeToo hashtag surfaced, in different languages and incarnations, in more than a dozen countries. In Francophone Canada, the movement used the hashtag #MoiAussi, while in France it used #BalanceTonPorc. Indian participants used both English and Hindi variants, while across the Middle East the phrase was translated into both Arabic and Hebrew. Sexual harassment allegations were raised with respect to dozens of members of the governing Conservative Party in the British Parliament, and ‘Me Too Moments’ have resulted in sexual harassment complaints and resignations and other sanctions in the European and Canadian Parliaments as well (Castle 2017; Schreuer 2017). In Canada, new guidelines for sexual harassment were adopted in response to the movement (Bill C-­65). This movement has led some observers to celebrate the fact that the era of silent acceptance of the sexual exploitation of women appears to be over, and men in positions of power are no longer able to claim immunity from sexual harassment (e.g. Barnes 2017; Klein 2017), while others have worried that the movement has ‘gone too far’. Whatever one’s assessment of the #MeToo movement, it cannot be denied that it has been remarkably effective in giving women more agency to speak up against their attackers, and that it has involved primarily online activism, something that has often been seen by both scholarly and popular commentators as ‘not real activism’. It also points to the broad appeal of feminist organizing against violence, and the continued importance of this issue for building transnational feminist solidarity. A similar observation can be made about the Women’s March, inspired in part as a response to the election of US President Trump in spite of

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260  Handbook on gender and violence recordings where he bragged of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ and celebrated the impunity he enjoyed as a celebrity who engaged in such sexual aggression against women. The Women’s March was the largest single-­day protest in US history, including not only 400 marches in the US but also more than 160 marches outside the US, involving protesters from some 80 countries (Chenoweth and Pressman 2017). This march was at once essentialist in its affirmation of the gender identity ‘woman’ but also widely cited as an example of intersectional solidarity, an example of how to build coalitions across axes of race, class, sexuality and the like (Heaney 2019). The most prominent symbols of the Women’s March showed images of women of color, and prominent goals and statements of values emphasized that ‘Love is Love’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ as priorities of the marchers. The success of the organizers and the broad, transnational appeal of the movement make it impossible to conclude that transnational feminist organizing is likely to continue to ebb. How should we encourage more organizing and activism to ensure continued progress in the transnational fight against gender violence? Organizers need more material support, and this may suggest that another focusing event, such as a potential Fifth UN World Conference on Women, will provide the needed pressure for governments and other institutions to present their progress and be called to account by the world’s women and their allies. Activists have feared that such a conference would provide more potential for rollbacks of prior progress than opportunities for new advances; but with the declining vitality of transnational organizing and the clear continued demand for transnational action and coordination, the Conference may provide the needed organizing focus for activists as much as opponents of feminism. Regional conferences may offer another possible organizing focus. Conferences such as the Encuentros that brought together Latin American and Caribbean feminists created opportunities for activists to engage in feminist debates as well as develop solidarities across borders that enabled a feeling of belonging despite hostility towards feminism within their local contexts (Alvarez 2000). Regional Encuentros enabled the development of an ‘imagined Latin American feminist community’ and were the sites where the boundaries of who counted as a part of this community were developed and reformed throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Alvarez 2000). As an experience, international and regional conferences contributed to the development of feminist identities and solidarities that supported feminist organizing locally, regionally and internationally. Literature on online networked protest suggests these can be ephemeral without deepening the connections (González-­Bailón and Wang 2016; Tufekci 2017). While movements can grab international attention using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, these platforms are also lim-

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Transnational perspectives on gender violence  ­261 ited by choices the companies themselves make in terms of staffing and algorithms aimed at increasing profit (Tufekci 2017). However, new technology could enable deeper relationships to form between organizations if another conference was held. At a time when it is recognized that global coordination is necessary to address major issues, such as summits for climate change or Sustainable Development Goals, the absence of a fifth UN World Conference on Women is notable. Indeed, an entire new generation of young feminists have been denied the chance to organize and exchange ideas on this massive scale (Goetz and Sandler 2017).

CONCLUSION Current literature on transnational organizing against gender violence emphasizes the successes of intersectional solidarity. Similarly, a broader literature on transnational dimensions of gender violence points to the importance of avoiding a singular approach to such violence, and emphasizes the ways that neo-­imperialism, heterosexism, racism and sexism are intertwined in shaping violence. These insights undergird current successes in transnational organizing against violence, from the Women’s March to the 16 days of activism against gender violence (25 November–10 December) observed by women all over the world each year. This chapter has pointed to current tensions emanating from this approach and its attendant success. Critics point to the deradicalizing effects of mainstreaming, neoliberalism and so-­called ‘identity politics’, and question the impact of past campaigns and policy successes. We argue that in spite of each of these criticisms having a grain of truth, the transnational arena has been and continues to be a potential source of influence for activists. We suggest that in the current climate of backlash and growing opposition to gender justice, anti-­violence activism cannot afford to avoid the transnational, and must recognize that the personal continues to be the international, as Enloe (2014) famously argued.

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Transnational perspectives on gender violence  ­263 Hozić, A.A. and J. True (2016) Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crisis, New York: Oxford University Press. Htun, M. and L. Weldon (2012) ‘The civic origins of progressive policy change: combating violence against women in global perspective, 1975–2005’, American Political Science Review, 106 (3), 548–569. Htun, M. and L. Weldon (2018) The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights around the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keck, M.E. and K. Sikkink (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Klein, E. (2017) ‘Harvey Weinstein, Milo Yiannopoulos, and the era of unleashing’, Vox, 6 October, accessed at https://www.vox.com/policy-­ and-­ politics/2017/10/6/16435424/ harvey-­weinstein-­milo-­yiannopoulos-­breitbart. Kramer, M. (2017) ‘The insidious problem of workplace harassment extends way beyond Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood’, accessed November 2017 at http://mashable.com/2017/ 10/11/sexual-­harassment-­assault-­by-­industry-­harvey-­weinstein/#ZVSINSsT8qqQ. Lilla, M. (2016) ‘The end of identity liberalism’, New York Times, 18 November, https://nyti. ms/2eNgOdZ. Mervis, J. (2017) ‘Study thyself: political scientists assess extent of sexual harassment at their annual meeting’, ScienceMag, 23 February, accessed at https://www.sciencemag. org/news/2017/02/study-­thyself-­political-­scientists-­assess-­extent-­sexual-­harassment-­their-­ annual-­meeting. Moghadam, V.M. (2000) ‘Transnational feminist networks: collective action in an era of globalization’, International Sociology, 15 (1), 57–85. Mohanty, C.T. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Montoya, C. (2013) From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montoya, C. (2016) ‘Exploits and exploitations: a micro and macro analysis of the “DSK Affair” ’ in A.A. Hozic and J. True (eds) Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 146–165. Morgan, R. (1996) Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, New York: The Feminist Press at City University of New York. Narayan, U. (1998) ‘Essence of culture and a sense of history: a feminist critique of cultural essentialism’, Hypatia, 13 (2), 86–106. Okin, Susan Moller (1999) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Raymond, L., L. Weldon, D. Kelly, X.B. Arriaga and A.M. Clark (2014) ‘Making change: norm-­based strategies for institutional change to address intractable problems’, Political Research Quarterly, 67 (1), 197–211. Remnick, N. (2016) ‘After a professor is cleared of sexual harassment, critics fear “cultural silence” at Yale’, New York Times, 8 July, accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/ nyregion/a-­yale-­professor-­is-­cleared-­of-­sexual-­harassment-­but-­concerns-­linger.html. Rhodan, M. (2017) ‘Congress used $84,000 of taxpayer money to settle a sexual harassment claim’, Time Magazine, 1 December, accessed at https://time.com/5045238/congress-­sexual-­ harassment-­settlements/. Roy, S. (2015) ‘The Indian women’s movement: within and beyond NGOization’, Journal of South Asian Development, 10 (1), 96–117. Rupp, L. and V. Taylor (1999) ‘Forging feminist identity in an international movement: a collective identity approach to twentieth-­century feminism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 24 (2), 363. Schreuer, M. (2017) ‘A #MeToo moment for the European Parliament’, New York Times, 25 October, accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/world/europe/european-­ parliament-­weinstein-­harassment.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&modul e=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article. Snyder, M. (2006) ‘Unlikely godmother: the UN and the global women’s movement’ in

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264  Handbook on gender and violence M.M. Ferree and A.M. Tripp (eds) Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, New York: New York University Press, pp. 24–50. Song, S. (2007) Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in R.C. Morris (ed.) Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, New York: Columbia University Press. Swider, S. (2006) ‘Working women of the world unite? Labor organizing and transnational gender solidarity among domestic workers in Hong Kong’ in M.M. Ferree and A.M. Tripp (eds) Global Feminisms: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, New York: New York University Press, pp. 110–140. Townsend-­Bell, E.E. (2012) ‘Writing the way to feminism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38 (1), 127–151. Tripp, A.M. (2006) ‘The evolution of transnational feminisms: consensus, conflict, and new dynamics’ in M.M. Ferree and A.M. Tripp (eds) Global Feminisms: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, New York: New York University Press, pp. 51–77. True, J. (2012) The Political Economy of Violence against Women, New York: Oxford University Press. Tufekci, Z. (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, New Haven: Yale University Press. Walby, S. (2011) The Future of Feminism, Cambridge: Polity. Weldon, L. (2002) Protest, Policy, and the Problem of Violence Against Women: A CrossNational Comparison, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press. Weldon, L. (2006) ‘Inclusion, solidarity, and social movements: the global movement against gender violence’, Perspectives on Politics, 4 (1), 55–74. Weldon, L. (2019) ‘Power, exclusion and empowerment: Feminist innovation in political science’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 72, 127–136. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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19.  Intimate partner violence Jo Spangaro

Domestic or intimate partner violence is prevalent globally, occurring on a continuum from low-­level coercion to lethal predatory behaviour, affecting 1 in 3 women (WHO et al. 2013). This chapter provides a broad outline of key research findings, particularly regarding prevalence, impacts and evidence for interventions. This is followed by a discussion of how intimate partner violence emerged as a body of practice and research, with an overview of the study of, and activism against, gendered violence. Key academic debates are reviewed, including those around gender symmetry, causal factors, meaningful outcome measures for interventions and engaging ethical research practice. The World Health Organization (WHO) provides a clear and succinct starting point, defining intimate partner violence as: ‘a pattern of behaviour by a current or former intimate partner causing physical, sexual or psychological harm which may include physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and/or controlling behaviours’ (WHO 2013).

PREVALENCE OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE Researchers recognize that prevalence findings vary considerably, dependent on: relationship to abuser; time frame of abuse, with past 12 months and lifetime (since adulthood, typically determined to start at age 15) being the most common time frames used; inclusion of non-­physical forms of violence and sexual violence; instrument/s used; sampling frame, country and region; means of data capture (face-­to-­face/online/other written tool); and setting. These factors all contribute to varying rates. The UN multi-­ country studies, first on women’s and then on men’s experiences, have been the most significant efforts to date to overcome the impact of diverse variables, using a single methodology to simultaneously measure prevalence in multiple countries (Fulu et al. 2013; WHO et al. 2013). As reported above, these studies establish that 1 in 3 women are affected by intimate partner violence. The men’s multi-­country study echoed the findings on prevalence against women, with 33 per cent of the men sampled admitting to the use of physical or sexual violence against a partner (Fulu et al. 2013, p. 29). This validation makes this one of the most robust ­findings in the field. 265

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266  Handbook on gender and violence Prevalence research has also established that partner abuse tends to be ongoing (World Health Organization et al. 2013) and involve coercive control, a concept which illuminates how many perpetrators control their partners without ever landing a blow (Stark 2007). No less than those who are physically abused, women who experience emotional abuse and threats live in fear, and may be at great risk. Usefully, prevalence research has also identified specific populations that experience abuse disproportionately, including: Indigenous women (Perry 2004; Trocmé et al. 2010; Willis 2011); younger women, with highest rates among women aged 18–45 (García-­Moreno et al. 2005) and women aged 26–30 years most at risk (Rivara et al. 2009); women living in rural settings (Dillon et al. 2015; WHO et al. 2013); and women with disabilities (Crowe 2013; Dowse et al. 2016; Mitra et al. 2012). Impacts of Intimate Partner Violence The negative impacts of intimate partner violence are now well understood. Apart from the risk of being killed, with intimate partners committing at least 1 in 7 homicides globally, extensive research has established that, in Australia at least, intimate partner violence is the leading contributor to ill-­health and premature death in women aged 18–44 years (Ayre et al. 2016). Negative impacts are not restricted to injury, but encompass a broad range of impacts including: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

higher rates of chronic pain, gastrointestinal and gynaecological problems, depression and anxiety (Rivara et al. 2007); levels of mental health functioning directly associated with the length of exposure to abuse (Bonomi et al. 2006); 1.5 times the risk of contracting HIV (World Health Organization et al. 2013); threefold risk of self-­harm (Boyle et al. 2006); twice the risk of preventing access to contraception (Williams et al. 2008); 16 per cent greater chance of a low birthweight baby than non-­ abused women (García-­Moreno et al. 2005).

In addition, a considerable body of research has established the deleterious effects on children of living with intimate partner violence (Øverlien 2010), including: emotional and behavioural difficulties (Gartland et al. 2014); a threefold rate of conduct disorders (Meltzer et al. 2009); and increased exposure to the presence of other lifetime adversities (Holt et al. 2008).

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RESPONSES TO INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE Intimate partner violence is complex, as are service responses, which are provided by law enforcement, child protection agencies, courts, prisons, health services, schools and a range of other human service agencies. This makes measuring the impact of interventions challenging, as women who experience ­abuse – ­and the ­perpetrators – ­may simultaneously receive intervention by multiple agencies. Recent work using complexity t­heory – ­an approach which focuses on understanding the patterns of interaction between system elements at different levels and ­times – ­is a valuable contribution to research into intimate partner violence (Gear et al. 2018). A review of reviews for the World Bank which synthesized the findings of 66 systematic reviews on effectiveness of 290 interventions to reduce or prevent intimate partner violence reported promising results from healthy relationship group programmes for young people, advocacy and psychosocial support for women, and early childhood home visiting programmes (Arango et al. 2014). On the other hand, meta-­analyses have not provided strong evidence for the effectiveness of batterer intervention programmes (Arango et al. 2014). One review team noted that the evidence base was heavily skewed towards the global North, with over 70 per cent of the impact evaluations conducted in seven high-­income countries. From lowand middle-­income countries there was some evidence for group training for men and livelihood programmes for women incorporating micro-­ finance and skills training (Arango et al. 2014). Multi-­sectoral interventions or community coordinated responses have also been tested in many jurisdictions, following recognition of the multiplicity of responding agencies. These range from ‘one stop shops’ where women access a range of s­ ervices – w ­ hich may include health, legal advice and ­advocacy – ­to integrated planning mechanisms where key agency representatives meet to coordinate interventions for high-­risk individuals. One review of this type of intervention found that, even with coordinated responses, access to services remains problematic for many marginalized women (Shorey et al. 2014). A review of international evidence found promising examples, including the Multi-­Agency Risk Assessment Conferences in Wales, with active leadership and robust governance being required to ensure effectiveness of these mechanisms (Spangaro et al. 2010).

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ORIGINS OF CURRENT THINKING Activism preceded the extensive research on the nature, prevalence, impacts and interventions for intimate partner violence. As with many issues that affect women, this work followed awareness generated by the women’s movement in the 1970s. Feminists argued that patriarchal concepts of male dominance, and the ownership of women, promote conditions enabling sexual and intimate partner violence to flourish (Bograd 1984; Dobash and Dobash 1979; Kelly 1988). Intimate partner violence was one of the earliest forms of gendered violence to be widely discussed, though attention t­o – ­and action ­on – ­sexual violence (within and outside intimate relationships), childhood sexual abuse and other forms of gendered violence experienced by women of colour also stemmed from the women’s movement. During the 1970s, domestic violence (as it was generally termed) was predominantly conceived of as a crime against heterosexual married women, comprising physical ­violence – ­battering or beating were commonly referenced. The ‘domestic’ part of ‘domestic violence’, often deployed as a descriptor by police and policymakers, served to trivialize or render the violence as inconsequential, despite the many deaths which resulted then and now. Concurrently, through efforts of global women’s movements, sexual violence became prominent (see, for example, Brownmiller 1975); reflecting the times, this was understood to primarily be a problem for adult women, committed by unknown men. The spheres of intimate partner violence and sexual violence were distinct and not assumed to overlap, with sexual violence conceptualized principally as a crime perpetrated by strangers, whereas intimate partner violence was associated with (mostly) married women. Further work through the 1980s resulted in growing awareness of the incidence of sexual violence as a form of intimate partner violence, as well as the inclusion of children, men and those in same-­sex relationships as targets of sexual violence. The women’s movement continued to play a pivotal role in shining a light on the extent of violence experienced, extending, for example, to the sexual abuse of children (Waldby 1985).

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE VS INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE Globally, the term ‘domestic violence’ first entered human rights provisions in 1980, when safeguarding against its occurrence became an obligation of member states (United Nations 1980). ‘Battering’ and ‘wife abuse’ were other terms in use at that time. Apart from trivializing this form of

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Intimate partner violence  ­269 abuse, the term ‘domestic violence’ renders perpetrators invisible. In some jurisdictions it also encompasses abuse occurring in a range of household relationships, including abuse of elderly people and parents by adult offspring. While these are undoubtedly of concern, they are less common, less lethal and have different dynamics to abuse between intimate partners, and accordingly, different solutions. The term ‘intimate partner violence’ appeared in the World Health Organization’s first report on violence in 2002, which documented the nature and extent of: intimate partner violence; sexual violence; elder abuse; child abuse and neglect; youth violence; collective violence and self-­directed violence (Krug et al. 2002). Similar in essence to the current WHO definition, intimate partner violence was defined as: Any behaviour within an intimate relationship that causes physical, psychological or sexual harm to those in the relationship, including:   Acts of physical a­ ggression – ­such as slapping, hitting, kicking and beating.   Psychological ­ abuse – ­ such as intimidation, constant belittling and humiliating.   Forced intercourse and other forms of sexual coercion.  Various controlling ­behaviours – ­such as isolating a person from their family and friends, monitoring their movements, and restricting their access to information or assistance. (Krug et al. 2002, p. 89)

This definition recognized the overlap with sexual violence, as well as rendering coercion and control visible as explicit forms of abuse. Since then the term ‘intimate partner violence’ has been widely adopted by ­researchers, likely due to its specificity. Usage varies across countries and regions, with ‘domestic violence’ often used in Europe, the UK and Australia, and ‘intimate partner violence’ tending to be used in North America and Africa, and by multilateral agencies. Not uncommonly, those in policy domains continue to use the term ‘domestic violence’, sometimes in reflection of the remit of policy responses encompassing all those in a household. ‘Partner abuse’ and ‘partner violence’ are also commonly used terms. It is generally widely accepted that these terms include abuse in same-­sex relationships (Holt et al. 2008). In its work on violence, the WHO has a track record of distinguishing different forms of violence as well as exploring overlaps. For example, the major multi-­country study on women’s experiences of violence was the first study to report intimate partner violence as well as non-­partner sexual violence. This move recognized overlaps as well as the need to identify both aggregated and disaggregated forms of violence (WHO et al. 2013). Valuable research has now documented other kinds of overlaps. For example, robust research has established that sexual abuse is both experienced and committed by children and young people (Finkelhor

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270  Handbook on gender and violence et al. 2014); a review of available studies estimates that half of parental incest offenders also use violence against the child’s mother (Bancroft et al. 2012). Another unifying feature of much of the violence committed globally is the fact that women shoulder the burden of most sexual and intimate partner violence, with men most commonly the perpetrators of serious abuse (García-­Moreno et al. 2005; Gerstenberger and Williams 2013; Tjaden and Thoennes 2000), although these findings continue to be debated, as discussed below.

‘GENDER-­BASED VIOLENCE’ AND ‘VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN’ With recognition of the gendered nature of violence, along with visibility of the overlap in types of abuse, has come widespread adoption of the terms ‘gender-­based violence’ and ‘violence against women’. The UN defined ‘violence against women’ in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women as: Any act of gender-­based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. (United Nations 1993)

The two terms are often used interchangeably (Ellsberg and Heise 2005), particularly by the UN and development agencies. The Inter-­ Agency Standing Committee (IASC), which oversees coordination on global humanitarian assistance, describes ‘gender-­based violence’ as ‘an umbrella term for any harmful act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and that is based on socially ascribed (gender) differences between males and females’ (IASC 2005, p.  7). Sexual and intimate partner violence is explicitly included in this definition, as are other forms of abuse, including sexual coercion, trafficking, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and honour killings. Used by a range of other agencies, this term recognizes that abuse stems from women’s subordinate status in society in relation to men (Ellsberg and Heise 2005); however it also explicitly includes ‘men and boys as potential victims of gender-­based violence, especially sexual violence’ (IASC 2005, p. 7). While this definition is ­useful – ­particularly in its recognition of a range of coercive practices that harm women and ­girls – i­t blurs what is in scope for research, policy and interventions. It is not clear, for example, whether physical abuse of children is included, and in what circumstances. Children are known to experience physical abuse

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Intimate partner violence  ­271 in the context of intimate partner violence, as well as be adversely affected by exposure to violence committed against their mothers (Fantuzzo and Fusco 2007; Thiara and Humphreys 2015). A further question raised by the term ‘gender-­based violence’ is the extent to which it includes hate crimes committed because of a person’s sexual orientation or minority gender identity.

KEY ACADEMIC DEBATES IN RELATION TO INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE Three areas remain frequently debated within the academic literature: (i) gender symmetry; (ii) causal factors; and (iii) meaningful outcome measures for intervention research. Gender Symmetry Ongoing debate continues about the gender symmetry of intimate partner ­violence – t­hat is, the extent to which women are victimized disproportionately to men, who are conversely over-­represented as perpetrators. This debate is essentially framed around two diverse conceptualizations of intimate partner violence: a gendered or feminist understanding, which identifies men as more likely than women to perpetrate violence against an intimate partner due to unequal power relations; and the family conflict conceptualization of violence, which focuses on discrete physical acts of aggression (Walsh et al. 2015). Early support for gender symmetry came from studies employing the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), a tool that asks detailed questions about 18 forms of verbal and physical aggression by partners (Straus 1979). Becoming the most common tool for estimating physical abuse experienced by women (De Keseredy and Schwartz 1998), data collected using the CTS typically report men and women as equally violent (Allen et al. 2008; Chan 2011; De Keseredy and Schwartz 1998). A later version of the tool differentiated between minor and severe levels of each scale, and added measures of sexual coercion (Straus et al. 1996). Reference to fear of the partner however, which is integral to many women’s experiences of abuse, remains a major gap. Exploration of controlling behaviours and injury are also missing from the CTS (Hester 2013; Taft et al. 2001), and a review of studies using the CTS identified a trend for under-­reporting perpetration by men (Chan 2011). Although men also experience serious effects, including homicide, from intimate partner violence, the evidence consistently indicates significantly higher rates of injury, long-­term morbidity and mortality for women than men (Black et

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272  Handbook on gender and violence al. 2011; Bonomi et al. 2009; Coker et al. 2000; García-­Moreno et al. 2006; Kothari et al. 2015), with women being six times more likely to be killed by a partner than men (Stöckl et al. 2013). Research findings identify gendered differences in how physical aggression is deployed, with men more likely to repeatedly assault, employ more serious violence and aim for control, whereas women are more likely to use violence in self-­defence (De Keseredy and Schwartz 1998; Walsh et al. 2015). The use of alternative prevalence tools, such as the Composite Abuse Scale (Hegarty et al. 2005), now widely used in place of the CTS, have helped correct these gaps (Gartland et al. 2014; MacMillan et al., 2006; Salom et al. 2015; Sohal et al. 2007; Zhang et al. 2010). Causal Factors in Intimate Partner Violence Related to gender symmetry, the second prevailing debate revolves around causation of intimate partner violence. Some argue that violence against women is supported by patriarchal attitudes, with others focusing on individual stress pathology, social or cultural factors. The landmark ecological framework for gendered violence constructed by Lori Heise (1998) has been useful, arguing for multiple levels of influence at the level of individual, familial, community, cultural and societal factors. More recently, the United Nations multi-­country study has made a contribution to this debate: for the study, 10,000 men from six countries (Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea) were interviewed about perpetration and experiences of sexual and intimate partner violence (Fulu et al. 2013). The rates of intimate partner violence perpetration varied across countries, but consistently tracked prevailing gender inequality and acceptance of violent masculinity norms by country. Perpetration was also strongly associated with controlling behaviour, transactional sex and having multiple sexual partners. The study’s authors suggested the existence of a complex interplay of causal factors at the individual, community, societal and cultural levels. An intersectional understanding of causality in the context of pervasive gender inequality is useful for making sense of higher rates of abuse among populations where aggravating factors are at play, for example forced migration and colonisation. The findings of the multi-­country study are reinforced by a review of 66 surveys from 44 countries by Heise and Kotsadam (2015) which found that gender-­related factors at the national and subnational levels predicted prevalence of physical and sexual partner violence. The review found that several factors were especially predictive of the geographical distribution of partner violence, including: norms related to men’s authority over women; social justification for, and nor-

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Intimate partner violence  ­273 malisation of, wife beating; and the extent to which laws disadvantage women compared with men in terms of access to property. Outcomes to be Measured in Research A third debate relates to measuring what works to prevent or reduce intimate partner violence. Many researchers and policy advisors at national and global levels are rightly preoccupied with this question. Reducing the incidence and prevalence of acts of aggression is clearly the paramount objective for interventions. Two challenges exist, when reduced abuse is the key measure of the success of interventions. Firstly, reducing abuse is solely within the control of offenders, and is thus outside the control of interventions directed at the victims of violence. Retaining this as a goal in victim interventions reinforces the idea that women are responsible for the abuse they experience. As a corollary of this problem, major interventions that have aimed to reduce incidents of abuse and measured this outcome have not, for the most part, succeeded (Arango et al. 2014). This is the case for interventions focused on women who are experiencing abuse, though it is also largely true of interventions addressing men, either through treatment or diversion (Arango et al. 2014). The resulting debate about the best indicators for success of interventions has arisen from a pattern of studies finding limited impact on abuse perpetration (Curry et al. 2006; Koziol-­McLain et al. 2010; MacMillan et al. 2009; McFarlane et al. 2002). Further factors identified in these studies contribute to challenges in measuring this outcome, including: low rates of recruitment among women who experience abuse; the need for long-­ term follow-­up to capture this outcome; and high rates of drop-­out from follow-­up studies among women who are experiencing abuse. As a result, particularly in health intervention research, many researchers have concluded that securing reduced abuse as an outcome of interventions lacks feasibility in the medium term (Hamberger et al. 2015; O’Campo et al. 2011; Spangaro et al. 2009). Instead, alternative outcomes have been identified and used, including: safety and safety planning; patients’ sense of being supported by service providers; readiness for change; social support; and self-­esteem and self-­efficacy (Hamberger et al. 2015; Kendall et al. 2008; O’Doherty et al. 2014; Taft et al. 2015). Recognizing the challenges of measuring changes to perpetration and victimization, there is nonetheless an argument to retain these outcome measures as the fundamental test of impact in this sphere.

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274  Handbook on gender and violence Keeping Women Safe as Participants in Research An important question addressed relatively early by researchers in this field was how to ensure the safety of women participating in the studies. This concern arose from feminist researchers, particularly those working in public health settings, identifying that, unlike research on other widespread social problems, even the discussion of experiences of intimate partner violence could bring risks to study participants, as well as unintended psychological or emotional impacts. Much research employs household surveys to determine the prevalence of a given condition or problem, acknowledging that many conditions go unrecognized, with reports or presentations not reflecting the true scale. In the case of violence against women, it was recognized early on that reports to police or service providers represent only the tip of the iceberg. Early foundational work still heavily relied on today are the guidelines published by the WHO’s Gender and Women’s Health Department, titled Putting Women First: Ethical and Safety Recommendations for Research on Domestic Violence against Women (Watts et al. 2001). These guidelines articulate the need for safety of respondents, protection of confidentiality, training and support of research teams, and referral to support for women where needs are identified through research interviews. Specific guidance is included on dealing with the presence of potential or actual offenders when conducting telephone or face-­to-­face interviews, in order to mask their purpose so that women are not put at risk from being known to have discussed their abuse experiences. A recent refinement addresses intervention studies building in guidance for safe, repeat follow-­up of study participants who may be subject to ongoing abuse (Hartmann and Krishnan 2016).

CONCLUSION Intimate partner or domestic violence is a pervasive and gendered global problem with significant costs and impacts which are not limited to direct victims. First put on the map by the women’s movement, considerable policy, practice and research work has been undertaken in the past 40 years. As a result, the extent, nature and impacts are well understood. While debates remain, particularly in relation to appropriate interventions and outcome measures to determine effectiveness, there is broad consensus on many key issues. Concerted efforts on the part of researchers to include women’s voices in studies and to protect their safety and privacy have contributed to a strong body of research from which women-­centred responses continue to be shaped.

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REFERENCES Allen, C., S. Swan and C. Raghavan (2008) ‘Gender symmetry, sexism, and intimate partner violence’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 24 (11), 1–19. Arango, D., M. Morton, F. Gennari, S. Kiplesund and M. Ellsberg (2014) Interventions to Prevent or Reduce Violence against Women and Girls: A Systematic Review of Reviews, Washington, DC: World Bank. Ayre, J., M. On, K. Webster, M. Gourley and L. Moon (2016) Examination of the Burden of Disease of Intimate Partner Violence against Women in 2011: Final Report, Sydney: Australian National Research Organization on Women’s Safety (ANROWS). Bancroft, L., J.G. Silverman and D. Ritchie (2012) The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics (2nd edn), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Black, M.C., K.C. Basile, M.J. Breiding, S.G. Smith, M.L. Walters, M.T. Merrick and M.R. Stevens (2011) The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report, Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Bograd, M. (1984) ‘Family systems approaches to wife battering: a feminist critique’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 54 (4), 558–568. Bonomi, A., M. Anderson, R. Reid, F. Rivara, D. Carrell and R. Thompson (2009) ‘Medical and psychosocial diagnoses in women with a history of intimate partner violence’, Archives of Internal Medicine, 169 (18), 1692–1697. Bonomi, A., R. Thompson, M. Anderson, R. Reid, D. Carrell, J. Dimer and F. Rivara (2006) ‘Intimate partner violence and women’s physical, mental, and social functioning’, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 30 (6), 458–466. Boyle, A., P. Jones and S. Lloyd (2006) ‘The association between domestic violence and self harm in emergency medicine patients’, Emergency Medicine Journal, 23 (8), 604–607. Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, New York: Simon & Schuster. Chan, K.L. (2011) ‘Gender differences in self-­reports of intimate partner violence: a review’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16 (2), 167–175. Coker, A., S. Smith, L. Bethea, M. King and R. McKeown (2000) ‘Physical health consequences of physical and psychological intimate partner violence’, Archives of Family Medicine, 9 (5), 451–457. Crowe, T.V. (2013) ‘Intimate partner violence in the deaf community’, Journal of the American Deafness and Rehabilitation Association, 46 (2), 71–84. Curry, M., L. Durham, L. Bullock, T. Bloom and J. Davis (2006) ‘Nurse case management for pregnant women experiencing or at risk for abuse’, Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic and Neonatal Nursing, 35 (2), 181–192. De Keseredy, W. and M. Schwartz (1998) ‘Measuring the extent of woman abuse in intimate heterosexual relationships: a critique of the conflict tactics scale’, VAWnet Applied Research Forum, February, accessed at http://vawnet.org/sites/default/files/materials/ files/2016-­09/AR_​Ctscrit_​0.pdf. Dillon, G., R. Hussain and D. Loxton (2015) ‘Intimate partner violence in the young cohort of the Australian longitudinal study on women’s health: urban/rural comparison and demographic associations’, Advances in Mental Health, 13 (1), 18–29. Dobash, E. and R. Dobash (1979) Violence Against Wives: A Case Against the Patriarchy, New York: Free Press. Dowse, L., K. Soldatic, J. Spangaro and G. van Toorn (2016) ‘Mind the gap: the extent of violence against women with disabilities in Australia’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 51 (3), 341–359. Ellsberg, M. and L. Heise (2005) Researching Violence Against Women: A Practical Guide for Researchers and Activists, Geneva: World Health Organization. Fantuzzo, J. and R. Fusco (2007) ‘Children’s direct sensory exposure to substantiated domestic violence crimes’, Violence and Victims 22 (2), 158–171. Finkelhor, D., M. Shattuck, H. Turner and S. Hamby (2014) ‘The lifetime prevalence of

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276  Handbook on gender and violence child sexual abuse and sexual assault assessed in late adolescence’, Journal of Child and Adolescent Health, 55 (3) 329–333. Fulu, E., X. Warner, S. Miedema, R. Jewkes, T. Roselli and J. Lang (2013) Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women and How Can We Prevent It? Quantitative Findings from the United Nations Multi-Country Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok: UNDP, UNFPA, UN Women and UNV. García-­Moreno, C., H. Jansen, M. Ellsberg, L. Heise and C. Watts (2005) WHO MultiCountry Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women: Initial Results on Prevalence, Health Outcomes and Women’s Responses, Geneva: World Health Organization. García-­Moreno, C., H.A. Jansen, M. Ellsberg, L. Heise and C. Watts (2006) ‘Prevalence of intimate partner violence: findings from the WHO multi-­country study on women’s health and domestic violence’, The Lancet, 368 (9543), 1260–1269. Gartland, D., H. Woolhouse, F. Mensah, K. Hegarty, H. Hiscock and S. Brown (2014) ‘The case for early intervention to reduce the impact of intimate partner abuse on child outcomes: results of an Australian cohort of first-­time mothers’, Birth, 41 (4), 374–383. Gear, C., E. Eppel and J. Koziol-­McLain (2018) ‘Advancing complexity theory as a qualitative research methodology’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17, 1–10. Gerstenberger, C. and K. Williams (2013) ‘Gender and intimate partner violence: does dual arrest reveal gender symmetry or asymmetry?’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 28 (8), 1561–1578. Hamberger, L., K. Rhodes and J. Brown (2015) ‘Screening and intervention for intimate level programs’, partner violence in healthcare settings: creating sustainable system-­ Journal of Women’s Health, 24 (1), 86–91. Hartmann, M. and S. Krishnan (2016) Ethical and Safety Recommendations for Intervention Research on Violence against Women: Building on Lessons from the WHO Publication ‘Putting women first: ethical and safety recommendations for research on domestic violence against women’, Geneva: World Health Organization. Hegarty, K., R. Bush and M. Sheehan (2005) ‘The composite abuse scale: further development and assessment of reliability and validity of a multidimensional partner abuse measure in clinical settings’, Violence and Victims, 20 (5) 529–547. Heise, L. (1998) ‘Violence against women: an integrated, ecological framework’, Violence Against Women, 4 (3), 262–290. Heise, L. and A. Kotsadam (2015) ‘Cross-­national and multilevel correlates of partner violence: an analysis of data from population-­based surveys’, Lancet Global Health, 3 332–340. Hester, M. (2013) ‘Who does what to whom? Gender and domestic violence perpetrators in English police records’, European Journal of Criminology, 10 (5), 623–637. Holt, S., H. Buckley and S. Whelan, S. (2008) ‘The impact of exposure to domestic violence on children and young people: a review of the literature’, Child Abuse and Neglect, 32 (8) 797–810. Agency Standing Committee (IASC) (2005) Guidelines for Gender-Based Violence Inter-­ Interventions in Humanitarian Settings: Focusing on Prevention of and Response to Sexual Violence in Emergencies, New York: Inter-­Agency Standing Committee. Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence, Cambridge: Polity. Kendall, J., M.T. Pelucio, J. Casaletto, K.P. Thompson, S. Barnes, E. Pettit and M. Aldrich (2008) ‘Impact of emergency department intimate partner violence intervention’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 24 (2), 280–306. Kothari, C., T. Rohs, S. Davidson, R. Kothari, C. Klein, A. Koestner, M.I. DeBoer, R. Cox and K. Kutzko (2015) ‘Emergency department visits and injury hospitalizations for female and male victims and perpetrators of intimate partner violence’, Advances in Emergency Medicine, 1–11, http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/502703. Koziol-­McLain, J., N. Garrett, J. Fanslow, I. Hassall, T. Dobbs, T. Henare-­Toka and V. Lovell (2010) ‘A randomized controlled trial of a brief emergency department intimate partner violence screening intervention’, Annals of Emergency Medicine, 56 (4), 413–423.

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Intimate partner violence  ­277 Krug, E. G., L. Dahlberg, J.A. Mercy, A.B. Zwi and R. Lozano (eds) (2002) World Report on Violence and Health, Geneva: World Health Organization. MacMillan, H., C. Wathen, E. Jamieson, M. Boyle, H. Shannon, M. Ford-­Gilboe [. . .] McNutt, L. (2009) ‘Screening for intimate partner violence in health care settings: A randomized trial’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 302 (5), 493–501. MacMillan, H.L., C.N. Wathen, E. Jamieson, M. Boyle, L.-A. McNutt, A. Worster [. . .] M. Webb (2006) ‘Approaches to screening for intimate partner violence in health care settings: a randomized trial’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 296 (5), 530–536. McFarlane, J., A. Malecha, J. Gist, K. Watson, E. Batten, I. Hall and S. Smith (2002) ‘An intervention to increase safety behaviours of abused women: results of a randomised clinical trial’, Nursing Research, 51 (6), 347–354. Meltzer, H., L. Doos, P. Vostanis, T. Ford and R. Goodman (2009) ‘The mental health of children who witness domestic violence’, Child and Family Social Work, 14 (4), 491–501. Mitra, M., S.E. Manning and E. Lu (2012) ‘Physical abuse around the time of pregnancy among women with disabilities’, Maternal and Child Health Journal, 16 (4), 802–806. O’Campo, P., M. Kirst, C. Tsamis, C. Chambers and F. Ahmad (2011) ‘Implementing successful intimate partner violence screening programs in health care settings: evidence generated from a realist informed systematic review’, Social Science and Medicine, 72, 855–866. O’Doherty, L., H. MacMillan, G. Feder, A. Taft, A. Taket and K. Hegarty (2014) ‘Selecting outcomes for intimate partner violence intervention trials: overview and recommendations’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 19 (6), 663–672. Øverlien, C. (2010) ‘Children exposed to domestic violence: conclusions from the literature and challenges ahead’, Journal of Social Work, 10 (1), 80–97. Perry, S. (2004) American Indians and Crime: A BJS Statistical Profile 1992–2002 Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. Rivara, F., M. Anderson, P. Fishman, A. Bonomi, R. Reid, D. Carrell and R. Thompson (2007) ‘Healthcare utilization and costs for women with a history of intimate partner violence’, American Journal of Preventive Medicine 32 (2) 89–96. Rivara, F., M. Anderson, P. Fishman, R. Reid, A. Bonomi, D. Carrell and R. Thompson (2009) ‘Age, period, and cohort effects on intimate partner violence’, Violence and Victims, 24 (5), 627–638. Salom, C., G.M. Williams, J.M. Najman and R. Alati (2015) ‘Substance use and mental health disorders are linked to different forms of intimate partner violence victimisation’, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 151, 121–127. Shorey, R., V. Tirone and G. Stuart (2014) ‘Coordinated community response components for victims of intimate partner violence: a review of the literature’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 194 (4), 363–371. Sohal, H., S. Eldridge and G. Feder (2007) ‘The sensitivity and specificity of four questions (HARK) to identify intimate partner violence: a diagnostic accuracy study in general practice’, BMC Family Practice, 8 (49), DOI: 10.1186/1471-­2296-­8-49. Spangaro, J., G. Marcus and R. Braaf (2010) ‘Understanding domestic violence and integration in the NSW context: a literature review for NSW Department of Community Services’, Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse, Sydney. Spangaro, J., A.B. Zwi and R. Poulos (2009) ‘The elusive search for definitive evidence on routine screening for intimate partner violence’, Trauma, Violence and Abuse, 10 (1), 55–68. Stark, E. (2007) Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Stöckl, H., K. Devries, A. Rotstein, N. Abrahams, J. Campbell, C. Watts and C.G. Moreno (2013) ‘The global prevalence of intimate partner homicide: a systematic review’, The Lancet, 382 (9895), 859–865. Straus, M.A. (1979) ‘Measuring intrafamily conflict and violence: the Conflict Tactics Scales’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 41, 75–88. McCoy and D.B. Sugarman (1996) ‘The revised Straus, M.A., S.L. Hamby, S. Boney-­

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278  Handbook on gender and violence Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2): development and preliminary psychometric data’, Journal of Family Issues, 17 (3), 283–316. Taft, A., K. Hegarty and M. Flood (2001) ‘Are men and women equally violent to intimate partners?’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 25 (6), 498–500. Taft, A., L. Hooker, C. Humphreys, K. Hegarty, R. Walter, C. Adams [. . .] R. Small (2015) ‘Maternal and child health nurse screening and care for mothers experiencing domestic violence (MOVE): a cluster randomised trial’, BMC Medicine, 13 (1), 150. Thiara, R. and C. Humphreys (2015) ‘Absent presence: the ongoing impact of men’s violence on the mother–child relationship’, Child and Family Social Work, 22 (1), 137–145. Tjaden, P. and N. Thoennes (2000) Extent, Nature and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence: Findings from the National Violence Against Women, Washington DC: National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trocmé, N., B. Fallon, B. MacLaurin, V. Sinha, T. Black, E. Fast [. . .] J. Holroyd (2010) Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, 2008: Major Findings, Ottawa: Public Health Agency of Canada. United Nations (1980) Report of the World Conference on Human Rights: Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, New York: United Nations. United Nations (1993) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, accessed 13 September 2014 at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm. Waldby, C. (1985) Breaking the Silence: A Report Based upon the Findings of the Women Against Incest Phone-in Survey, Haberfield, NSW: Dympna House. Walsh, J., J. Spangaro and K. Soldatic (2015) ‘Global understandings of domestic violence’, Nursing and Health Sciences, 17 (1), 1–4. Watts, C., L. Heise, M. Ellsberg and C. Garcia Moreno (2001) Putting Women First: Ethical and Safety Recommendations for Research on Domestic Violence against Women, Geneva: World Health Organization. Williams, C., U. Larsen and L. McCloskey (2008) ‘Intimate partner violence and women’s contraceptive use’, Violence Against Women, 14 (12), 1382–1396. Willis, M. (2011) ‘Non-­disclosure of violence in Australian Indigenous communities’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No. 405, Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. World Health Organization (WHO) (2013) Responding to Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Violence against Women: WHO Clinical and Policy Guidelines, Geneva: World Health Organization. World Health Organization (WHO), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and South African Medical Research Council (2013) Global and Regional Estimates of Violence against Women: Prevalence and Health Effects of Intimate Partner Violence and Non-Partner Sexual Violence, Geneva: World Health Organization. Zhang, Y.-l., Zhang, Y.-l., Y. He and N. Liu (2010) ‘Introduction of common domestic violence assessment tools’, Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology, 18 (3), 320–322.

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20. Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda Sara Meger

The United Nations Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has become the dominant international legal and discursive framework for addressing gendered violence in international relations. The UN made its first great strides towards recognizing violence against women as an issue of international security in its landmark Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women and Peace and Security’. While previous declarations, covenants and treaties made by various UN bodies treated the issue of gender and violence through the prism of rights, Resolution 1325 was the first time that mass, systematic and conflict-­related forms of violence were considered for their gendered effects and determined as an obstacle to achieving international peace and security. For many, the securitization of gendered violence through Resolution 1325 and the subsequent resolutions that now make up the WPS agenda has been a decisive win, elevating to the ‘high politics’ of security the long-­ expressed concerns that the effects of war, armed conflict, mass violence and other forms of international insecurity have distinctly gendered effects on men and women. The culmination of decades of lobbying by feminist and women’s groups, SCR 1325 was passed on 31 October 2000, and included broad provisions for both the structural reorganization of the UN system as a whole and for the adoption of a gender lens through which to evaluate conflict, post-­conflict, and other security threats (McLeod 2012). While notable for providing an international framework by which to apply a gender perspective to issues of international security, the success of SCR 1325 and subsequent WPS resolutions has been debated by feminists. This chapter critically examines the WPS agenda’s understandings of gender and violence and the implications that this understanding has had on not only responding to forms of internationally significant violence (such as, for example, armed conflict and terrorism), but also its unintended effects on structural, cultural, and economic forms of violence against women. In particular, this chapter focuses on how certain, specific interpretations of SCR 1325 and the subsequent resolutions that now make up the WPS agenda have limited the radical early potential of WPS 279

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280  Handbook on gender and violence and have produced the unintended consequence of further marginalizing from the international agenda the multiple and pressing forms of insecurity that affect women today across the world.

VIOLENCE IN THE WPS AGENDA Women’s experiences of armed conflict and other forms of insecurity in global politics first appeared on the international agenda after sustained pressure from feminists and women’s groups throughout the twentieth century to recognize that ‘looking at security from the perspective of women alters the definition of what security is’ (Smith 2005, p.  48). Feminist scholarship began to challenge conventional perspectives on security and the exclusive focus on state-­centric security concerns, instead focusing on the lived, everyday experiences of women and men, with special attention paid to the consequences of international, national, individual, and structural forms and causes of (in)security. Noting that women and girls experience different forms and different rates of violence during times of crisis, instability, and conflict, it was this application of a feminist perspective on issues to do with security that produced the first UN Security Council resolution on Women, Peace and S ­ ecurity – S ­ CR 1325. Resolution 1325 Adopted unanimously on 31 October 2000 by the Security Council, Resolution 1325 was groundbreaking for its framing of women’s experiences of war and armed conflict as relevant for international peace and security. The principles first expressed in SCR 1325 are now commonly grouped into four key pillars constituting the WPS agenda: prevention, participation, protection, and relief and recovery (UN Women 2011). Notably, the resolution calls for changes not only in the practices of international security, but also in social and political structures as well as societal and institutional attitudes. Despite this broad understanding of the structural, cultural, and institutional determinants of women’s experiences of insecurity, the concept of ‘violence’ employed in Resolution 1325 obscures cultural, structural, and institutional forms of violence. Violence is only mentioned in the original WPS resolution twice, in paragraphs 10 and 11, wherein the Security Council calls on ‘all parties to armed conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-­based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, and all other forms of violence in situations of

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Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda  ­281 armed conflict’, and emphasizes the responsibility of member states ‘to put an end to impunity and prosecute those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, including those relating to sexual and other violence against women and girls’ (UN Security Council 2000). The scope of violence understood in the resolution is narrow, focused on overt acts of physical violence that constitute a ‘grave abuse’ and violation of international humanitarian law. Other provisions of the resolution, however, tacitly recognize various ways in which women’s social, political, and cultural positions in conflict-­affected societies reproduced various forms of structural and cultural inequalities; and, broadly interpreted, these provisions may be conceived as efforts to address the structural violences (Galtung 1969, 1990) that make women uniquely vulnerable in armed conflict. Informed by feminist peace activism, Resolution 1325 in many ways reflected the perspective that ‘gender power relations are significant among the causes of war, and transformative change in how we “live” gender can be a significant resource for peace’ (Cockburn 2013, p.  433). Yet, as the WPS agenda became operationalized and expanded with subsequent resolutions, this emancipatory agenda quickly diminished. Women’s ‘peace and security’ soon evolved to be goods provided by states, ‘thus perpetuating the very dynamics of militarism and elite-­centric security governance that the WPS agenda seeks to challenge’ (Shepherd 2016, p. 333). Subsequent Resolutions Since 2008, the UN Security Council has adopted a further eight resolutions on WPS,1 most focusing on the issue of sexual violence perpetrated in the context of armed conflict (‘conflict-­related sexual violence’, or CRSV). Resolution 1820 explicitly recognized sexual violence as a tactic of war and a threat to international peace and security, opening the possibility of an international response, including military intervention, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to instances where sexual violence is used as a weapon of war and poses a threat to international security (Meger 2012). Resolutions 1888 and 1889 consolidated this understanding of CRSV, while Resolutions 1960 and 2122 began to lay the infrastructure for institutionalizing response and prevention measures that might reduce the perpetration and impact of CRSV. Most recently, Resolution 2467 called for a survivor-­centred approach to CRSV. As such, it has been argued that the WPS agenda since the adoption of Resolution 1325 has predominantly 1   1820 (2008); 1888 (2009); 1889 (2009); 1960 (2010); 2106 (2013); 2122 (2013); 2242 (2015); and 2467 (2019).

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282  Handbook on gender and violence focused on protecting women from v­ iolence – ­specifically, protecting them from sexual violence in the context of war and armed conflict. This has come at the expense of the other ‘pillars’ of the WPS agenda as originally outlined in Resolution 1325, especially women’s participation in global policymaking and efforts to address causes of violence and insecurity. In spite of the radical potential of SCR 1325 to effect structural changes that women’s civil society organizations had hoped would fundamentally shift the causes of war, armed conflict, violence, and instability, the narrow focus on ‘protection’ has had serious implications for how ‘gender’ and ‘violence’ are understood within UN WPS infrastructure. Most significantly, feminists have pointed to how the exclusive focus on protection of women from CRSV has, perhaps inadvertently, further marginalized efforts to increase women’s participation in global institutions as active agents of conflict resolution (Hendricks 2015; Kreft 2017). The positioning of women and girls as primarily victims of conflict, rather than participants or political actors, has reified stereotypes regarding men’s and women’s roles in conflict-­affected and post-­conflict societies, which can undermine post-­conflict efforts to reform structural hierarchies, including gender relations. Others have noted how the definition of what constitutes a ‘gender-­ based violence’ relevant to international security may also inadvertently marginalize other pressing issues of women’s security, including reproductive rights and access to abortion services (Thomson and Pierson 2018). The passage of SCR 2242 in October 2015 marked the 15th anniversary of the WPS agenda, and saw an eighth resolution added to the WPS agenda. Responding to calls from SCR 2122 for a report on progress in implementing the measures of 1325, the UN Secretary-­General released the results of the Global Study on the implementation of 1325. A key tenet of both SCR 2242 and the Global Study was the emphasis placed on the participation and leadership of women’s organizations in countering terrorism and violent extremism (CT/CVE). The Global Study and SCR 2242 both emphatically called for integrating women’s participation and empowerment as a core strategy in countering terrorism and violent extremism (UN Women 2015), a priority that was further consolidated in the Secretary-­General’s Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, presented to the General Assembly in 2016. Thus, while this resolution and further UN instruments that have included a gender perspective on the issue of violent extremism explicitly recognize an expanded role for women in ­violence – ­as not just victims or passive civilians affected, but also as active agents of war and violent ­extremism – ­the shift in focus to this new form of violence ‘brings with it real risks of creating greater insecurity and gender essentialism in the management of war, conflict and security for women’ (Ní Aoláin 2016, p. 276).

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Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda  ­283 Securitizing Sexual Violence in the WPS Agenda Despite the arguments long made by feminists that gender-­based violence, including sexual violence, both ‘precedes and survives conflict, which creates a continuum of violence’ (Boesten and Fisher 2012, p.  1), over the course of its development, the Women, Peace and Security agenda has adopted a limited understanding of violence and narrowly focused almost exclusively on ‘conflict-­related sexual violence’ as the sole form of gendered violence capable of affecting ‘security’. In recent years, a number of feminists have addressed the consequences of this assumption and the impact that the ‘securitization’ of sexual violence has had on our understandings of ‘gender’, ‘violence’ and the WPS agenda (Boesten 2017; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013; Meger 2016). Since the early 1990s, in response to the highly visible perpetration of mass sexual violence in the genocidal conflicts of the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the international community has engaged in a coordinated effort at documenting CRSV. As the issue gained prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s due to humanitarian, civil society, and journalistic reports on rates of sexual violence particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the UN responded with a series of subsequent resolutions and humanitarian guidelines developed to address CRSV as a weapon of war. The sudden and sustained attention on this particular form of gendered violence, however, has come at the expense of situating this violence within the broader context of sexual violence perpetrated in so-­called times of ‘peace’ as well as other forms of violence that are both gendered in their determinants and in their effects. Thus, feminists have argued that the hyper-­visibility of sexual violence as the seemingly sole form of gendered violence that has an impact on international security has limited the analytical utility of a ‘gender lens’ in international security more than it has reflected an adoption of a feminist framework and ethic to understandings of and responses to war, armed conflict, and other forms of international security (Buss 2009, 2014). An unintended, albeit serious, consequence of the elevation of CRSV has been the corresponding invisibility of gender-­based violence perpetrated by intimate partners, in homes and in private relations, which is c­ onsidered – ­due to its designation as ‘private’ – somehow apolitical (Meger 2016). The tendency to focus on CRSV has resulted in a neglect of the increased risk of other forms of gender-­based violence that also correspond with armed conflict. Despite evidence that intimate partner violence (IPV) and intimate partner sexual violence also increase significantly during times of instability (Østby 2016) – not to mention structural forms of insecurity, including economic insecurity and political inequality (Brysk and Mehta

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284  Handbook on gender and violence 2017) – the securitization of sexual violence under the WPS agenda has not, to date, provided the basis for taking seriously the gendered effects and experiences of armed conflict, crisis, and insecurity, and has in many ways reproduced institutional and discursive frames that create not only a de facto hierarchy of ‘violence’ but also can be implicated in the reproduction of gendered stereotypes that prevent a focus on the gendered social and political structures that determine what forms of violence are effective. As such, it has also been implicated in furthering the logics of militarism, which ‘manifests in the construction of an elite-­centric security politics, populated by minority world “security experts” engaged in “making war safe for women” ’ (Shepherd 2016, p. 325).

FROM PROTECTION OF WOMEN TO PROTECTION FROM WOMEN: WPS AND COMBATING VIOLENT EXTREMISM Since the adoption of SCR 1325, the development of the WPS agenda has been divergent and highly contested. Many feminists have noted with concern the practical bifurcation of the agenda into two parallel, and rarely integrated, concerns: protection versus participation, with ‘protection’ afforded greater attention and institutional support within the UN and other agents of global governance. This prioritization of ‘protecting’ women in times of conflict and insecurity has problematically both relied upon and reinforced gendered logics of protection that reproduce stereotypical ideas of women as passive, weak, and victims, in need of saving by rational, heroic, and militarized men (Young 2003). Not only has the practical application of the WPS agenda narrowed in scope to focus primarily on women’s protection; the resolutions that collectively make up the WPS agenda have also largely interpreted ‘conflict’ and types of conflict relevant to the WPS mandate rather narrowly (McLeod 2011). Not only the resolutions themselves, but also the series of National Action Plans (NAPs) developed towards the realization of the goals of the WPS agenda have tended ‘to reproduce a world in which problems occur “elsewhere”, but solutions can be found “here” ’, which is ‘profoundly divergent from the foundation of the WPS agenda as a civil society project that takes seriously the expertise and experiences of women and women’s organizations in the pursuit of peace and security’ (Shepherd 2016, p. 325). Until the passage of SCR 2242 in 2015, the scope of the WPS agenda was limited to conventional armed conflicts and sexualized forms of violence perpetrated therein. The recent expansion of ‘conflicts’ under SCR

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Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda  ­285 2242 to include acts of terrorism and counter-­terrorism represents the first time since Resolution 1325 that the agenda has once again somewhat widened. However, while the definition of conflict may have expanded, the forms of violence considered relevant to the WPS agenda and of pressing concern to women and girls worldwide remain problematically narrow. In fact, it was largely due to the deliberate and targeted use of sexual and gender-­based violence by violent extremist groups such as Islamic State (ISIS) and Boko Haram that the WPS agenda evolved from SCR 2122 to 2242. Such groups have been known to institutionalize sexual slavery, kidnappings of young girls, and forced marriages as part and parcel of wider misogynist agendas that involve or call for severe forms of violence against women and the imposition of strict regulations on women’s movement, dress, employment, and religion (Chowdhury Fink and Davidian 2017). Yet the move to incorporate CVE into the WPS agenda has largely focused on women’s roles in preventing radicalization and extremism, further instrumentalizing women’s security towards conventionally statist priorities. Key stakeholders in the implementation of both CVE and WPS measures have tended to operate in a way that seeks to fit women and their concerns into existing militarized prerogatives for addressing international security, rather than considering the social conditions that make such insecurities possible. In this way, the incorporation of gender into the CVE agenda may further represent how gender and gender-­based violence have become securitized through the WPS agenda. The politics of securitization is a useful lens through which to consider the potentially negative implications of the development of the WPS agenda and its understandings of both ‘gender’ and ‘violence’. ‘Securitization’ is a concept developed by a group of scholars who theorized that, far from being a stable ontological object, ‘security’ is a discursive concept. From this framework, it is understood that those issues which become relevant to security actors, and placed on the security agenda, must first be discursively constructed as ‘security threats’. Thus, the concept of ‘securitization’ describes the process by which an otherwise political issue comes to be elevated to the realm of ‘security’, and as such detached from the normal political processes of the state and beyond the reach of democratic processes (Buzan et al. 1998). Once an issue is designated as a ‘security’ concern, the extraordinary measures employed by the relevant security actors in response have tended to rely on state-­centric, conventional, and hence quite militarized means of mitigating the threat. Feminists have thus shown how, far from being a human-­centred and emancipatory project, securitization has tended to reinforce state power and exacerbate issues of human security, including as a response to climate change (Detraz and

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286  Handbook on gender and violence Betsill 2009), refugees and migration (O’Leary 2008; Summerfield 2007), and sexual violence (Meger 2016). Since 2001, the UN Security Council, and the international community more widely, has incrementally securitized ‘terrorism’ and ‘violent extremism’ as the most pressing threats to international security today. In 2015, it ‘mainstreamed’ gender into its counter-­terrorist regime both through the passage of SCR 2242 and in the calls of the UN Counter-­ Terrorism Committee to consider within the regime: the use of sexual violence by terrorist organizations; the trafficking and trade in women by terrorist organizations; and the role that w ­ omen – e­ specially ­mothers – ­play in preventing radicalization (UN Security Council 2015). What has not been systematically addressed in this paradigm are the multiple ways that terrorist groups use highly gendered narratives in their recruitment campaigns to bolster their appeal both to men and women, and how such narratives resonate with their target audiences. For example, ISIS’s recruitment narrative relies on hyper-­masculinized and violently militarized motifs, portraying their jihadists as ‘real men’ who are rewarded for their service with promises of a home, monthly allowance, and a wife (Chowdhury Fink and Davidian 2017). The reliance on conventional gender norms and exploitation of gendered anxieties regarding the capacity to fulfil said norms are critical to understanding the appeal of extremist groups. Yet, within the CVE frameworks, gender remains narrowly understood as relevant only to ‘women’, and the interest in gender instrumental to the security of states. For example, in 2017, the United States passed the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Act, making it one of only two countries in the world to create a legal obligation to address issues raised by SCR 1325 and subsequent resolutions. While the WPS Act recognizes women not only as victims of violence and armed conflict, it remains reliant on gendered language and assumptions about women’s roles in society to frame their capacity for participation. The WPS Act (Sec. 2) states that women have ‘achieved significant success in moderating violent extremism; countering terrorism; resolving disputes through nonviolent mediation and negotiation; and stabilizing societies by enhancing the effectiveness of security services, peacekeeping efforts, institutions, and decision-­making processes’. Similarly, the initial version of the United Kingdom’s anti-­radicalization initiative, Prevent, under the UK’s counter-­ terrorism strategy, recognized women as vital resources in their counter-­ terrorist efforts due to their position ‘at the heart not only of their communities but also of their families’ (UK Government 2008, p.  17). A number of strategies at the national and global level around the world have similarly tended to view women and girls in a way that maintains

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Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda  ­287 gender ­stereotypes – a­ s wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of terrorists or as victims of terrorist violence. Thus, not unlike the earlier resolutions in the WPS agenda, SCR 2242 adopts a very limited understanding of ‘security’, maintaining the state as its central referent object, and constructs women within the counter-­ terrorism framework as either ‘wicked purveyors of extremist violence or virtuous saviours of sons, husbands and communities’ (Ní Aoláin 2016, p. 282). Yet, compared with the securitization of sexual violence, it is notable that Security Council resolutions relating to terrorism (SCR 1368 and 1373) included mandatory requirements for compliance of member states, and as such form legally binding international obligations. The measures affirmed by this new security regime have had far-­reaching implications for human rights, including the rights of women. Following Ní Aoláin, this chapter examines the potential negative effect of harnessing the WPS agenda to broader trends of securitization taking place in global politics. Since these trends have been increasingly tied to nationalist and militarist ambitions of states, framed to justify war and invoke the power of war to justify a growing breadth of military action, it raises questions about the extent to which feminists should continue to support the achievement of women’s rights and security through the WPS agenda. Rather than rendering the global security regime developed to combat the threat of terrorism a ‘gender-­friendly’ space, global policy on terrorism and counterterrorism ‘show[s] the continued dominance of a masculine paradigm in those arenas central to international security’ (Ní Aoláin 2016, p. 281). The remainder of this chapter focuses on a case study that exemplifies some of the unintended negative consequences of ‘securitizing gender’ under the WPS agenda, specifically through counter-­terrorism measures adopted in response to the threat of Islamic State.

SECURITIZING WOMEN IN THE WPS AGENDA In July 2018, thousands of women were being held in Iraq and Syria on terrorism-­related charges on accusations of links to Islamic State. Known as ‘jihadi brides’ or ‘sexual jihadis’, these women are being denied basic provisions of human rights and facing punishment based on the mere suspicion of their links to IS militants. Facing death sentences for their links to terrorism, the implementation of CVE measures in these cases has exacerbated gendered abuses. Captured in 2017, many of the women are being held in detention camps in legal and political limbo as their home countries refuse to repatriate

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288  Handbook on gender and violence them, fearing the spread of radical Islamism. While many of the women are from neighbouring Gulf States, a number also come from Western countries, including Germany, France, Russia, and the United States. Others have already been charged with terrorism-­related offences and are now facing 10-­minute death sentence trials under the Iraqi judicial system (Coker and Hassan 2018). Accused of entering the country illegally and supporting ISIS by living in the caliphate, the thousands of women are facing punishments to the full extent of counter-­terrorism laws in Iraq. Iraqi officials speaking to the New York Times explained: ‘These Islamic State criminals committed crimes against humanity and against our people in Iraq, in Mosul and Salahuddin and Anbar, everywhere,’ said Gen. Yahya Rasool, the spokesman for the Iraqi joint operations command. ‘To be loyal to the blood of the victims and to be loyal to the Iraqi people, criminals must receive the death penalty, a punishment that would deter them  and those who sympathize with them.’ (Quoted in Coker and Hassan 2018)

According to critics, one of the most egregious outcomes of these women being swept up in the counter-­terror proceedings is that it has also impeded political will to investigate gender-­based crimes perpetrated by ISIS, including the systematic use of forced marriage, sexual slavery, and strict curtailments of women’s rights. News reports suggest that the lives of jihadi brides were strictly monitored and controlled, with women facing harsh punishments if they behaved in a way considered un-­Islamic. The example of jihadi brides underscores the tensions between the two available subject positions of women in armed conflict. The narratives of these women as dangerous terrorists are premised on the fact that their active participation in violence runs counter to the idealized feminine role we expect of women, ultimately characterizing them as gender deviant. On the other hand, to characterize them solely as unwitting or unwilling victims, subject to the will of their male protectors and guardians, reinforces gendered stereotypes and denies any agency or attachment to political ideals that the women may hold. The explicitly sexual connotation associated with ‘sexual jihadis’ implies a sexual deviancy, and suggests that the women may be getting what they deserve for allowing themselves to be ‘seduced’ or ‘lured’ into ISIS in the first place by men more powerful or cleverer than themselves. Yet even where an attitudinal shift has taken place towards women who have been associated with I­ SIS – ­from seeing them only as victims to also seeing them as active agents of ­terrorism – ­the focus has remained on how to instrumentalize women towards operational effectiveness in preventing and countering terrorism and violent extremism. For example, in March

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Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda  ­289 2016 at an event on gender and CVE, the US Under-­Secretary of State, Sarah Sewall, stated that: Empowered women provide powerful antidotes to violent extremism. They are able to refute extremist narratives and nihilistic visions with independence and authenticity. Societies that respect the rights of all and fully engage the participation of all have no room for violent extremism. So women’s empowerment is not only essential for defeating violent extremism; defeating violent extremism is essential for women’s empowerment. The two go hand-­in-­hand. (Quoted in Chowdhury Fink and Davidian 2018, p. 163)

These sentiments are echoed in SCR 2242 itself, which calls for ‘the participation and leadership of women and women’s organizations in developing strategies to counter terrorism and violent extremism’. Such sentiments have sparked concern among scholars and civil society activists regarding the co-­optation of the WPS agenda in service of counter-­terrorism policy and the retention of a problematically narrow scope of concern for what constitutes ‘violence’ of relevance to international peace and security. Women’s unfeminine, unruly behaviour is interpreted as a warning sign, and thus efforts to address women’s participation in terrorism, or to empower them to join efforts in countering terrorism and violent extremism, still stem from assumptions that women are not independent, political agents. Both narratives, while exploiting stereotypical assumptions about ‘femininity’ and appropriate roles and behaviours of women in relation to violence and armed conflict, work to downplay the significance that politics may have in women’s participation in organized violence, including ­terrorism – ­much like the label of ‘terrorist’ has succeeded in securitizing, and thus de-­politicizing, the social and political grievances that lead to violence, or that make participation in a terrorist group attractive. A 2017 report issued by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) showed how reductive the ‘jihadi bride’ narrative has been, and how far it went towards constructing women in terrorist groups as passive, manipulated, and brainwashed. Contrary to this prevailing narrative, the study found that many women, particularly those coming from Western countries, were drawn by a sense of ‘empowerment’ offered by ISIS, and were thus ‘deliberately seeking to challenge both traditional and Western-­imposed gender norms, by seeking a new identity for themselves’ (quoted in Dearden 2017). The report also suggests that exclusion and marginalization from wider Western society were compelling ‘push’ factors for women to join ISIS. Yet, prevailing efforts to account for women’s role in terrorism and counter-­terrorism strategies ignore the structural social, political and economic roots of their own

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290  Handbook on gender and violence involvement, as well as the unique ways that women’s social positions may present alternative reasons or pathways for radicalization than their male counterparts. Significantly, while SCR 2242 and the focus on women in combating violent extremism does, for the first time, shift the prevailing discourse of the WPS agenda from one of protection to one of participation, the scope for participation is restricted. Women’s agency and capacity for empowerment are discussed in complete isolation from the underlying social dynamics that both shape their social, economic, and political positions and that underlie the political economic dimensions of violence, armed conflict, and terrorism in the first place. Much like other global initiatives aimed at ‘empowering’ women, the discourse is designed to ‘sell’ women’s empowerment as good for the economy (or, in this case, good for political stability) rather than as a good in and of itself. An unintended potential consequence of leveraging women as agents against terrorism and violent extremism is to instrumentalize women towards the interests of the security of the state. Under the rubric of WPS, states have increasingly placed expectations on women to engage in security practices against amorphous and omnipresent t­hreats – t­o monitor and regulate the private sphere to protect it from both external and internal threats. This dynamic is clearly exemplified in a profile of one ‘security mom’ who was interviewed by Michelle Malkin, a columnist for USA Today: Nothing matters to me right now other than the safety of my home and the survival of my homeland [. . .] I am a citizen of the United States, not the United Nations [. . .] We have educated our 4-­year-­old daughter about Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. She knows there are bad men in the world trying to kill Americans everywhere. This isn’t living in fear. This is living with reality. We drive defensively. Now, we must live defensively too. (Quoted in Grewal 2006, p. 26)

Women like Malkin have internalized the privatization of national security and take up the duty of public surveillance as part of the duties of motherhood as citizenship. The subjective experience of women as mothers under the neoliberal security state is embroiled with ideas of security. No longer are our experiences of insecurity considered as generated through broader patterns of systematic marginalizations or power inequalities, based on sex, race, or class, but rather as individualized experiences to be self-­managed through enterprising and industrious manoeuvres. Whether at war or peace, the surveillance society instituted in the name of security also has differential impacts on women and men. Both in ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’ contexts, the effects of the expansion of security

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Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda  ­291 practices and protocols through the public and private sectors of everyday life have had the effect of displacing the social wage, heightening or exacerbating women’s risk of economic, health, and physical insecurity. As a result of their lower wages, increased dependency on social welfare programmes, and needs for maternal health programmes, women have borne the cost of austerity cuts globally: according to calculations by the UK House of Commons Library, 85 per cent of all cuts have come at the expense of women (Fawcett Society 2012). Thus, in response to the omnipresent threat of terrorism and violent extremism, the militarization of both the state and the economy has come at the direct cost of welfare services, with significant implications for women’s livelihoods, wellbeing, and reproductive labour. Paradoxically, these grievances may form renewed bases for radicalization, since the security practices adopted in response to securitizing terrorism and extremism may exacerbate economic disparity, reduce democratic access and transparency, and undermine efforts of gender equality. The growing interest of policymakers in the participation of women in achieving existing security agendas through the WPS agenda has ironically meant the further perpetration of violence against women. The forms of violence that are enabled by the expanding WPS agenda are not only systemic and cultural violence against women such as those surveyed above, but also physical violence against women and girls in the form of execution for their role in violent extremism.

CONCLUSION Because international security regimes enabled through processes of securitization allow states to use extraordinary means of force to eliminate threats outside the oversight of democratic processes and civil society, the marrying of the WPS agenda to national security ­prerogatives – ­including the securitization of terrorism and violent ­extremism – ­may have quite serious implications for gender and gendered forms of violence. Gender-­ based violence and gendered vulnerabilities may not be best resolved through their formulation as acute existential threats that require such exceptional responses. As such, the WPS agenda broadly, and SCR 2242 in particular: Should not be read as a remaking of this close security space, rendering it gender-­friendly and now open to new ways of doing business; rather it might prompt critical inquiry into how the international security regime, and the states that support it, can derive legitimizing benefits from co-­opting the WPS agenda to its operating framework. (Ní Aoláin 2016, p. 281)

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292  Handbook on gender and violence Despite all the advances of recognizing and promoting a gender perspective through the development of the WPS agenda within the UN Security Council, a de facto hierarchy of issues is apparent within Security Council resolutions, made all the more notable by the subsumption of WPS to the security infrastructure of combating terrorism and violent extremism. As such, this chapter has argued that we should be critical of scripting women into pre-­existing normative frameworks for addressing violence and issues of global security. This is not to suggest that the WPS architecture provides us with nothing for advancing feminist ideals of ‘peace’ and ‘security’. Rather, SCR 1325 was remarkable for its recognition of peace and conflict as ‘exclusionary zones for women’ (Ní Aoláin 2016, p. 290), sustained not only in wars between states but also internally within states. The original purpose of the WPS agenda was in many ways profoundly emancipatory, urging the international community to ‘abolish war’ as a pathway to achieving women’s security, not to ‘make war safe for women’ or to encourage women to participate in violence (Basu and Shepherd 2018, p. 10). However, what remains elusive in the operationalization of SCR 1325, through the subsequent resolutions and development of the WPS agenda, is how to successfully implement efforts to prevent conflict and involve women in preventative conflict-­resolution processes in a way that does not reduce either the experiences of women in violence and armed conflict to gender-­based stereotypes or the agenda to one of merely ‘protecting’ women. It is perhaps the very location of the WPS agenda that makes this realization fraught. As Lee Koo explains (2016, p. 339), the structural placement of UN SCR 1325 as a Security Council Resolution challenges these feminist ideals from the beginning. As a body historically concerned with responding to international security issues via ‘masculinised and militarised programs’, the Security Council is better placed, institutionally and conceptually, to protect women in conflict than to encourage their participation in preventing conflict. Given that the values underpinning SCR 1325 in many ways challenge core premises of ‘international security’, we should perhaps not be so surprised that the original feminist intentions of the resolution have become increasingly diluted through its institutionalization.

REFERENCES Basu, S. and L.J. Shepherd (2018) ‘Prevention in pieces: representing conflict in the Women, Peace and Security agenda’, Global Affairs, 3, 1–13, DOI: 10.1080/23340460.2017.1415723.

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Gender, violence, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda  ­293 Boesten, J. (2017) ‘Of exceptions and continuities: theory and methodology in research on conflict-­related sexual violence.’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19 (4), 506–519. Boesten, J. and M. Fisher (2012) ‘Sexual violence and justice in postconflict Peru’, US Institute of Peace (USIP) Special Report 310, June, Washington, DC. Brysk, A. and A. Mehta (2017) ‘When development is not enough: structural change, conflict and gendered insecurity’, Global Society, 31 (4), 441–459. Buss, D. (2009) ‘Rethinking “rape as a weapon of war” ’, Feminist Legal Studies, 17 (2), 145–163. Buss, D. (2014) ‘Seeing sexual violence in conflict and post-­conflict societies: the limits of visibility’ in D. Buss et al. (eds) Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: International Agendas and African Contexts, New York: Routledge, pp. 3–27. Buzan, B., O. Wæver and J. de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Chowdhury Fink, N. and A. Davidian (2017) ‘Complementarity and convergence? Women, peace and security and counterterrorism’ in F. Ní Aoláin, N. Cahn, D.F. Haynes and N. Valji (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 157–170. Cockburn, C. (2013) ‘War and security, women and gender: an overview of the issues’, Gender and Development, 21 (3), 433–452. Coker, M. and F. Hassan (2018) ‘A 10-­minute trial, a death sentence: Iraqi justice for ISIS suspects’, New York Times, 17 April, accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/ world/middleeast/iraq-­isis-­trials.html. Dearden, L. (2017) ‘How Isis attracts women and girls from Europe with false offer of “empowerment” ’, The Independent, 5 August, accessed at https://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/europe/isis-­jihadi-­brides-­islamic-­state-­women-­girls-­europe-­british-­ radicalisation-­recruitment-­report-­a7878681.html. Detraz, N. and M.M. Betsill (2009) ‘Climate change and environmental security: for whom the discourse shifts’, International Studies Perspectives, 10 (3), 303–320. Eriksson Baaz, M. and M. Stern (2013) Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond. London: Zed Books. Fawcett Society (2012) ‘The impact of austerity on women’, Fawcett Society Policy Briefing, content/uploads/2013/02/The-­ March, accessed at http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/wp-­ Impact-­of-­Austerity-­on-­Women-­19th-­March-­2012.pdf. Galtung, J. (1969) ‘Violence, peace, and peace research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6 (3), 167–191. Galtung, J. (1990) ‘Cultural violence’, Journal of Peace Research, 27 (3), 291–305. Grewal, I. (2006) ‘“Security moms” in the early twentieth-century United States: the gender of security in neoliberalism’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34 (1–2), 25–39. Hendricks, C. (2015) ‘Women, peace and security in Africa’, African Security Review, 24 (4), 364–375. Kreft, A.-K. (2017) ‘The gender mainstreaming gap: Security Council Resolution 1325 and UN peacekeeping mandates’, International Peacekeeping, 24 (1), 132–158. Lee-­Koo, K. (2016) ‘Engaging UNSCR 1325 through Australia’s National Action Plan’, International Political Science Review, 37 (3), 336–349. McLeod, L. (2011) ‘Configurations of post-­conflict: impacts of representations of conflict and post-­conflict upon the (political) translations of gender security within UNSCR 1325’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13 (4), 594–611. McLeod, L. (2012) ‘Experiences, reflections and learning: feminist organizations, security discourse and SCR 1325’ in A. Kronsell and E. Svedberg (eds) Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices, New York: Routledge, pp. 135–149. Meger, S. (2012) ‘The problematic evolution of UN Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security’, E-International Relations, 1 November, accessed at https://www.e­ir.info/2012/11/01/the-­problematic-­evolution-­of-­un-­resolutions-­on-­women-­peace-­and-­ security/.

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294  Handbook on gender and violence Meger, S. (2016) ‘The fetishization of sexual violence in international security’, International Studies Quarterly, 60 (1), 149–159. Ní Aoláin, F. (2016) ‘The “war on terror” and extremism: addressing the relevance of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’, International Affairs, 92 (2), 275–291. O’Leary, A.O. (2008) ‘Close encounters of the deadly kind: gender, migration and border (in) security’, Migration Letters, 5 (2), 111–121. Østby, G. (2016) ‘Violence begets violence: armed conflict and domestic sexual violence in sub-­Saharan Africa’, Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) Working Papers 233, September, Brighton, UK. Shepherd, L.J. (2016) ‘Making war safe for women? National action plans and the militarisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’, International Political Science Review, 37 (3), 324–335. Smith, S. (2005) ‘The contested concept of security’ in K. Booth (ed.) Critical Security Studies and World Politics, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 27–62. Summerfield, G. (2007) ‘Transnational migration, gender and human security’, Development, 50 (4), 13–18. Thomson, J. and C. Pierson (2018) ‘Can abortion rights be integrated into the Women, Peace and Security agenda?’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20 (3), 350–365. UK Government (2008) The Prevent Strategy: A Guide for Local Partners in England. Stopping People Becoming or Supporting Terrorists and Violent Extremists, London: HM Government. UN Security Council (2000) Resolution 1325, accessed 18 February 2016 at http://www. un.org/womenwatch/ods/S-­RES-­1325(2000)-E.pdf. UN Security Council (2015) ‘Role of women in countering terrorism and violent extremism’, Security Council Counter-­Terrorism Committee, accessed 7 November 2018 at https:// www.un.org/sc/ctc/focus-­areas/womens-­role. UN Women (2011) ‘Strategic results framework on Women, Peace and Security 2011–2020’, July, accessed at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/ianwge/taskforces/wps/Strategic_​ Framework_​2011-­2020.pdf. UN Women (2015) Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace: A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, New York: UN Women. Young, I.M. (2003) ‘The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29 (1), 1–25.

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21.  Gender, violence and the military Joane Nagel

Gender and sexuality play a prominent role in shaping military violence, both in the course of routine military operations and in instances of ‘extralegal’ or illegal military violence. The influence of gender in shaping military culture, organization, expectations, and functioning cannot be overstated. While much research conflates the study of ‘gender’ with the study of ‘women’, the most obvious gender–military connection is with men and masculinity. As Hearn (2011, pp. 47–48) notes: The military is one of the clearest and most obvious arenas of men’s social power, violence, killing, and potential violence and killing, in their many guises [. . .] Many armies and other fighting forces of the world have been and still are armies composed exclusively of men, young men and boys [. . .] Men and militarism are so obviously coupled, that it is hard to know where to start [. . .] serious critical scrutiny.

The military has been a principal site for the production of masculinity throughout history to the present day. Increases in the number of women in the armed forces in the last few decades has had little effect on changing the military’s structure or the place of gendered violence in military operations. The growing presence of women in uniform has, however, created a new set of opportunities for gendered military violence. This chapter explores both the historical and contemporary role of men and masculinity in military violence, as well as the emerging place of women and femininity in the armed services in perpetuating and expanding military violence.

MEN, MASCULINITY, AND MILITARY VIOLENCE The military as a gendered institution predates the modern global system of sovereign states built around colonialism in the nineteenth century and the major wars of the twentieth century (Buzan and Lawson 2015). The rise of nationalism at the start of the twentieth century and the division of the world’s territory into independent states (almost all with their own militaries) is the stage upon which gendered militarism currently is enacted. The culture of nationalism is constructed to emphasize and resonate with masculine cultural themes. Terms like ‘honor’, ­‘patriotism’, ‘cowardice’, 295

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296  Handbook on gender and violence ‘bravery’, and ‘duty’ are hard to distinguish as either nationalistic or masculinist since they seem so thoroughly tied both to the nation and to manhood. The ‘microculture’ of masculinity in everyday life (independence, courage, strength) articulates very well with the demands of nationalism, particularly its militaristic side. Patriotism is a siren call few men can resist, particularly in the midst of a political ‘crisis’; if they do resist, they risk the disdain or worse of their communities and families, sometimes including their mothers. Although women have been at the forefront of conscientious objection to war and militarism (Cockburn 2007; Elster and Sorensen 2010), counter to the common stereotype of mothers attempting to hold back their sons as they march off to war, Boulding (1977, p. 167) reports that many mothers of conscientious objectors during World War II opposed the pacifism of their sons. Fear of accusations of cowardice is not the only magnet that pulls men toward patriotism, nationalism, and militarism. There is also the masculine allure of adventure. Men’s accounts of their enlistment in wars often describe their anticipation and excitement, their sense of embarking on a great adventure, their desire not to be ‘left behind’ or ‘left out’ of the grand quest that the war represents (Thorp 2016). The military and war are stages for boys to become men and for men to enact nationally appropriate masculinity according to scripts that dictate sanctioned or ‘honorable’ violence (shooting an armed enemy, protecting one’s life and the lives of one’s comrades, saving women and children). War theatres, however, very frequently are the sites of atrocities, dishonorable conduct, and violence against noncombatants, the weak, and the defenseless: Nazi concentration camps and human experiments in World War II were examples of the well-­publicized face of the massacres, mass rapes, forced labor, sexual enslavement, torture, and gratuitous killing by all sides in virtually every war and civil conflict (Zapotoczny 2017). It is not only in civil conflicts and international combat situations that legitimate and illegitimate violence occurs. Military training academies, boot camps, prisons, occupations, and even peacekeeping missions are the settings for both prescribed and proscribed uses of violence. Targets of violence are not only outsiders or civilians; they also can be insiders: hazing, targeting, ostracizing, bullying, and the sexual assault of military team members (Gibbons-­Neff 2016; Nuwer 2018). Enacting masculinity in military institutions and operations is not without its costs to the men who would, on the surface, appear to benefit from this unique opportunity to establish and prove their manhood. Kranc (2011) reports on the suicides of two Asian-­American servicemen following hazing and psychological and physical abuse by members of their own units, and he makes the connection between generally high rates of suicide

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Gender, violence and the military  ­297 among service personnel and the stresses of military operations combined with the personal diminishment of hazing (Cooper 2018). The US Department of Veterans Affairs (2016) reports that 20 veterans and active duty service members died by suicide every day in 2018 (Wentling 2018). Scholars, journalists, and professionals working with veterans report rising rates of post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among US veterans as well as civilian and military drone operators whose work removes them from the day-­to-­day of combat and warfare (Barry 2011; Gradus 2017; Press 2018; US Department of Veterans Affairs 2016).

WOMEN, FEMININITY, AND MILITARY VIOLENCE It is not only men who can pay a price for participating in gendered militarism. Women historically have been the targets of military violence, and sexual assaults against women both inside and outside of the military are so common as mostly to have gone officially unrecognized and/or unprosecuted as war crimes until quite recently (Feliciano and Green 2016; Hargreaves 2001; Saha 2009). The next sections explore the militarization of rape in war, institutionalized patterns of sexual harassment and rape within the military, and the use of women as weapons of war. Rape in War Sexual exploitation and abuse are important weapons of war, and rape is perhaps the most common component of war’s sexual arsenal. Brownmiller (1975) was among the first to catalog the routine practice of rape, especially gang rape, in war. As she and others have noted, moving or occupying armies use the rape of ‘enemy’ women and girls as both a carrot and a stick: raping local women is a spoil of war for the troops to enjoy, and rape is also a technique of terror and warfare to dominate populations and humiliate local men by sexually conquering their women. Rape in war is best understood as a transaction between men, where women are the currency used in the exchange. Sexually taking an enemy’s women amounts to gaining territory and psychological advantage. In countries around the world, rape often is defined as a polluting ­action – ­a way to soil the victim, her kin, and her nation, both actually and symbolically. Sexual warfare can extend beyond the moment of violation in situations where victims are reputationally smeared, physically mutilated, or when pregnancies or births result from sexual assaults. For instance, in 2014 hundreds of Yezidi women were imprisoned and raped by members of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) in Iraq (Ceterolli et al. 2017).

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298  Handbook on gender and violence Their sexual ­enslavement and abuse did not only serve the traditional purposes of rape in war outlined above; they also became pawns in the conflict as ISIS sought the complicity of local Sunni men in their capture, and used them as bargaining chips in the wider conflict with Kurdish Peshmerga troops and the various other groups allied with the US (Otten 2017; Tharoor 2014). Probably the best-­ known instance of rape in war is the ‘Nanking Massacre’ or ‘Rape of Nanking’ that occurred during the Japanese invasion of China in the winter and spring of 1938–1939, when Japanese soldiers raped an estimated 80,000 Chinese women and girls (Chang 1997; Yoshida 2006). This was part of Japanese wartime sexual exploits including the sexual enslavement of thousands of mainly Asian women by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. Sexual slavery in war is a variation on the theme of wartime rape. Slavery extends the tactic of rape as a short-­term strategy of a military mission into a permanent feature of military operations. The Japanese military established camps of so-­called ‘military comfort women’ (Jugun Ianfu) in Japan and other countries where Japanese troops were stationed. While there were some class Japanese women forced into sexual slavery, most mainly lower-­ of the estimated 200,000 women enslaved by the Japanese army were ethnic or national Others brought from Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines to sexually service the troops (Soh 2008; Yoshimi 2000). Watanabe reports that in such settings a woman’s worth as a sexual commodity was based on her class and her ethnicity: The Japanese Imperial Army divided comfort women into a hierarchical order according to class, race, and nationality [. . .] Korean and most other Asian women were assigned to lower-­class soldiers. Japanese and European women went to high-­ranking officers. Most of the European women were Dutch [often of mixed ancestry] who were imprisoned in a prisoner of war camp in the Netherlands East Indies. (Watanabe 1995, pp. 503–504)

The Allies were also involved in sexual violence and exploitation during the Second World War. Some of this was in the form of mass rapes, such as those committed against German women by the Soviet army (Gebhardt 2017; Ryan 1966). In other cases, sexual abuse and exploitation resulted when military personnel capitalized on the vulnerability of women who faced economic hardship, malnourishment, or starvation because of the war’s disruption of local economies and food production. Many women in occupied or liberated countries found sexual liaisons or prostitution preferable to the grim alternatives available for themselves and their dependent families. US troops also committed rapes during the war and the occupation that followed. In her examination of US Army records,

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Gender, violence and the military  ­299 Brownmiller (1975, pp.  76–77) found 947 rape convictions, not simply charges or trials of American soldiers in army general courts-­martial during the period from January 1942 to July 1947. Wartime rape did not stop at the end of the Second World War. The practice of rape in war extended into major and minor conflicts during the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first century: in civil wars, wars of independence, and military invasions, interventions, and operations in countries and regions around the world including Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Rwanda, Liberia, Kashmir, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Sexual assault against men in military conflicts also occurs, though the extent is less well-­documented. Whether perpetrated against men or women, logic of rape in war is always the same: rapes are committed by men on both sides for the familiar time-­honored ­reasons – ­to reward the troops, terrorize and humiliate the enemy, and create solidarity and protection through mutual guilt among small groups of soldiers. The growing number of women in the armed forces around the world has provided new opportunities for women to be trained in a variety of occupations associated with military o ­ perations – ­from policing to piloting, logistics to law, intelligence to information technology (IT), combat to counseling, and medical services to mechanical technicians. Most countries allow women to serve in the military (exceptions include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Mali), and a growing number of countries open combat roles to women, including most recently the United States (Kovach 2015). In the last half-­century, the US armed forces adopted two policies that increased the recruitment of women: the elimination of a 2 percent cap on women’s enlistment in the late 1960s, and the adoption of gender-­neutral recruiting policies in the 1990s (Brown 2012). The result has been a steady increase in the proportion of women serving in the US military, from 27,948 (1.1 percent) in 1970 to 213,922 (16.5 percent) in 2018 (US Department of Defense 2018). The increase in women in the US armed forces has opened the door to the deployment of gender and female sexuality as a military target, combat resource, and weapon of war. Rape within the Military Women are the targets of assault by their comrades in arms. Variously referred to as ‘military sexual trauma’, ‘military sexual assault’, ‘sexual abuse’, ‘harassment’, and ‘rape’, the sexual exploitation and targeting of mostly servicewomen by mostly servicemen is a growing and intractable problem in all branches of the US armed forces and training academies (Morral et al. 2014, 2015, 2016; Zaleski 2015). The sexual mistreatment of

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300  Handbook on gender and violence women soldiers has resulted in recurrent scandals and inquiries from the earliest days of gender integration in armed forces and military academies. For instance, in 1988, the US Department of Defense (DOD) conducted a survey of 38,000 military personnel from all branches of the armed services, and found that 64 percent of women and 17 percent of men reported at least one incident of sexual harassment during the previous year (Martindale 1990). The ‘modern era’ of public military sex scandals in the US began in 1991 when dozens of women were molested by Navy and Marine pilots at a Las Vegas Tailhook convention. The Tailhook incident was followed by a 1996 revelation that dozens of women recruits had been sexually assaulted at the Army Ordnance Center in Maryland, which was followed in 2003 by 142 women cadets’ allegations of sexual assault at the Air Force Academy. The Pentagon dutifully, but ineffectually, launched studies and task forces after each of these and other revelations of sexual misconduct. In May 2004, the Secretary of the Army released a five-­year study of sexual assault in the Army that found 4.5 percent of servicewomen reported being assaulted, and in 2005, the DOD reported 2,374 allegations of sexual assaults among armed forces personnel (US Department of Defense 2004, 2005). Rates of domestic violence were cited by some researchers as indicative of a broad culture of violence against women in the US military (Rosenthal and McDonald 2003). Nearly a decade later, the DOD was still documenting its failure to get sexual assault in the armed forces under control. A 2013 DOD study reported 3,553 sexual assault complaints in the previous nine m ­ onths – ­a nearly 50 percent increase over the same period a year earlier (Steinhauer 2013; US Commission on Civil Rights 2013). The apparent inability or unwillingness of the Pentagon to address the problem of sexual assaults against US servicewomen has become an impediment to both documenting and responding to military sexual abuse. Rates of rape and sexual assault are notoriously difficult to ascertain due to variations across time and place in defining, reporting, and classifying data. In light of the US military’s poor record of responding to its mainly women members’ sexual abuse, it is not surprising that during the early years of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the ‘Department of Veterans Affairs found nearly 75 percent of military women who said they had been assaulted did not tell their commanding officer’ (Martineau and Wiegand 2005). This reluctance to report suggests that for some time incidents of sexual harassment and rape have been much higher than reported by the Department of Defense. During the decade leading up to the Iraq war, researchers in the Department of Veterans Affairs found close to one quarter of servicewomen surveyed reported being sexually assaulted

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Gender, violence and the military  ­301 (Herdy and Moffeit 2004), and more than one-­third reported being sexually harassed (Murdoch and Nichol 1995). During the US–Iraq war, women soldiers in Iraq described a widespread atmosphere of sexual harassment and expectations of sexual availability. In a March 2005 article published in the Sacramento Bee newspaper, one of dozens of women soldiers interviewed stated: ‘I think every female [soldier in Iraq] has been sexually harassed’ (Martineau and Wiegand 2005). DOD estimates were much lower than 100 percent: between August 2002 and October 2004, 188 cases of sexual assault on military personnel were reported in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan (US Department of Defense 2004b). Sacramento Bee reporters noted that ‘the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps victims of military domestic violence and sexual assault, reported that it was contacted by 258 victims serving in the combat theater during that same time span [and] that number rose to 307 through mid-­February’ (Martineau and Wiegand 2005). Since there was no reason to believe that all women victims of sexual assault voluntarily self-­reported to the Miles Foundation, they concluded that vastly more cases went unreported. These findings were supported by a 2012 Department of Veterans Affairs survey which found that half of women deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan reported being sexually harassed and one quarter reported being sexually assaulted (Zoroya 2012). In many ways, the rape, molestation, or harassment of female soldiers is not surprising given the hypermasculine, patriarchal structure and tradition of the armed services, and in light of women’s relatively low and controversial status within them. But rape, molestation, and/or harassment are not the only ways that sexuality enters women’s military service experience. Many men and women enter into sexual relations willingly, even enthusiastically, and the intensity and camaraderie that characterize situations of danger and conflict can be powerful aphrodisiacs (see Williams and Staub 2005). In her study of pregnancy in the US armed services and its impact on military readiness, Monsen (1997) reported that during the 1991 Gulf War, ‘more than 1,200 pregnant women (out of 40,579) were evacuated from the gulf region’. Since most sex does not result in pregnancy (even accounting for the fact that some women might have been pregnant prior to shipping out), a pregnancy rate of 3 percent suggests that rates of sexual relations quite likely were considerably higher. Researchers estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of active duty women reported an unplanned pregnancy between 2008 and 2017 (Maury 2017). In settings where sexual harassment is potentially high, it is sometimes in the interest of women to form sexual alliances, to ‘hook up’ with men (or women) in order to gain support and/or to place themselves off-­limits

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302  Handbook on gender and violence to other service personnel. This is not to say that women are having sex in war zones and on military bases only out of intimidation or self-­protection. Any consideration of sexuality in the US military, however, should reference the broader context within which soldiers enter into sexual liaisons. One dimension of that context has to do with r­ ank – ­are women’s sexual partners of equal rank? – and another contextual consideration has to do with the pressures to go along to get along in an intense atmosphere in a hierarchical, male-­dominated organization where everyone is carrying a gun. Any effort to estimate women’s sexual agency in militarized settings must recognize the limits of personal power when confronting the potent, exploitative, and dangerous reality of military organizations, especially in combat. Women as Weapons of War In 2003 a series of pictures was made public of service personnel sexually abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (White et al. 2004). These pictures featured Private First Class Lynndie England and her fellow ­reservists – i­ncluding Specialist Sabrina Harman, Specialist Megan Graner – i­n a variety of poses with Ambuhl, and Specialist Charles ­ prisoners as props. Prisoners were photographed nude, bound and on leashes, forced into human piles, covered in feces, and threatened by dogs. England, Harman, and Ambuhl were pretty, young white, women whose gender and sexuality became part of a system of sexual abuse. They were not targets of sexual assault and rape, but were deployed as dominatrixes in a bizarre chronicle of torture and abuse. The mistreatment of Abu Ghraib detainees should have been anticipated. Social scientists have known for d ­ ecades – ­based on the work of Stanley Milgrim, Philip Zimbardo, Robert Jay Lifton, and Albert Bandura, among o ­ thers – t­hat people in hierarchical authority systems placed in charge of others defined as inferior or enemies are quite likely to uncritically follow orders, suspend moral judgment, and devise tactics to abuse those under their control (Schlesinger 2004, pp.  117–124). This is precisely what occurred at Abu Ghraib. What was less predictable were the ways in which servicewomen’s presence, femininity, and sexuality became added features of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. The mistreatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners by England, Ambuhl, Harman, Graner, and their fellow guards was not simply a case of human nature in action. US military intelligence personnel and contract workers advising prison staff encouraged their actions. In fact, similar programs of torture and humiliation had been underway for some time at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (also known as ‘Gitmo’), where prison-

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Gender, violence and the military  ­303 ers were made to put women’s underwear on their heads, threatened with dogs, forced to appear nude in front of women, and sexually humiliated (White 2005). In 2005 the New York Times obtained a copy of a July 2005 Pentagon report which it found ‘contained page after page of appalling descriptions of the use of women soldiers as sexual foils in interrogations’. The so-­called ‘Gitmoization’ of operations at Abu Ghraib was facilitated by Guantanamo prison commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller, who helped set up operations at Abu Ghraib (Hersh 2004). The result, according to the New York Times editorial (2005), was the ‘exploitation and debasement of women serving in the United States military’. What accounts for the American military’s obsession with Arab and Muslim men’s sexuality in these prisons? Hersh (2004) argues that US military ‘intelligence’ and conservative ‘intellectuals’ had long been enamored of a theory of Arab masculinity based on two Orientalist texts written in the mid-­1970s: Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind (1973) and Bernard Lewis’s Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (1974). The Arab Mind includes a chapter on sex that discusses the taboos associated with female sexuality and homosexuality. Hersh reported that the book became ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior’ in the months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. ‘In their discussions [. . .] two themes e­ merged – ­one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation’ (Hersh 2004). Massad (2004) concurs with this analysis, arguing that US government officials’ view of Islamic culture stresses Arab sexuality, and that the sexualized Othering of Arabs reflects a broad disdain for the people and the region that is part of an ongoing US imperial agenda of military, economic, and political domination. Massad proposed that the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib served two purposes: they were intended to blackmail prisoners who were told their families would see them; and they were trophies for US soldiers, ‘mementos for American and British soldiers to take home with them to show to their families and friends’ – a motivation that Massad interpreted as deeply racist. Massad notes the involvement of women soldiers in the Abu Ghraib torture, but he tends to depict them as simply extensions of American masculinism: another way to feminize Arab men. When we look at the pictures of Abu Ghraib, however, we see considerably more going on. The women are not simply beating or manhandling the prisoners; they are positioned in very sexual ways: dragging a detainee on a leash, pointing at a hooded prisoner’s genitals, posed with American men above them and Iraqi men below them. These images are as revealing about Americans’ sexuality and masculinity as about the presumed sexual cosmologies of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The apparent fun the Americans were having

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304  Handbook on gender and violence and the ­creative gusto with which they undertook their sport suggest that the scripts they were enacting were not only deeply racist, but also deeply familiar. The torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners of war and prisoners in general historically by mainly male guards is well-­documented. What was surprising to many who viewed the Abu Ghraib prison photos was the enlistment of women in these undertakings. This development probably had as much to do with guard demographics as with any new low in US military standards of conduct. We argue that the photographs from Abu Ghraib document an important consequence of the increased presence of women in the US military: Women’s sexuality had become a tool in an expanded military arsenal. This novel weapon capitalized on women’s assumed unique sexual power to demean and humiliate enemy men, especially Arab men. The torture at Abu Ghraib produced images of distinctly Othered men who were literally at the hands and under the power of white American women. The gendered and sexualized nature of the torture raises important questions about the Orientalist gaze that the pictures represent, especially given the fact that a specific brand of white, militarized, American female sexuality was central not only to the torture acts themselves, but also in the photos that circulated around the world. The torture at Abu Ghraib adds an important dimension to academic discussions about the Orient ‘versus’ the Occident because it serves as a militarized site where essentialized notions of Arab and Muslim gender and sexual norms were strategically exploited by the assumed sexual power and prowess of white American female soldiers (Bilgrami 2006; Buruma and Margalit 2004; Mamdani 2004). Increased military womanpower in Iraq not only provided a stable of women for sexual relations with servicemen, but also broadened the repertoire of weapons to subdue and emasculate the enemy, as in the case of Abu Ghraib prison.

CONCLUSION The connections between gender, violence, and the military are best understood as part of a system of gender ideologies, institutionalized masculinism, and a rapacious culture that consumes available resources in pursuit of its mission. Those resources include masculine values of honor, bravery, patriotism, and virility and the value of femininity for sexual relationships, abuse, and deployment against the enemy. The values of masculinity prop up military missions and push men to conform to masculinist norms. The values of femininity, while at first scorned by military authorities as dis-

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Gender, violence and the military  ­305 ruptive to cohesion and military readiness, have become useful resources in military operations. It is impossible to fully understand gender and violence in the military without recognizing the role of the military– sexual–gender complex which provides a critical libidinal infrastructure for war. This is a masculinist space in which women’s increasing presence adds to the mission by transforming their femininity into a consumable and deployable resource.

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Gender, violence and the military  ­307 Schlesinger, J.R. (2004) Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations, US Department of Defense (August), Appendix G, accessed 16 September 2018 at http://www. dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a428743.pdf. Soh, S. (2008) The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steinhauer, J. (2013) ‘Reports of military sexual assault rise sharply’, New York Times, 7 November, accessed 14 August 2015 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/reports-­of-­ military-­sexual-­assault-­rise-­sharply.html?_​r=0. Tharoor, I. (2014) ‘A U.S.-designated terrorist group is saving Yazidis and battling the Islamic State’, Washington Post, 11 August, accessed 10 September 2018 at https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/11/a-­u-s-­designated-­terrorist-­group-­is-­ saving-­yazidis-­and-­battling-­the-­islamic-­state/?utm_​term=.564334e4e9be. Thorp, C. (2016) ‘Live to tell: true stories from soldiers who made it’, Men’s Journal, 8 January, accessed 19 August 2018 at https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/live-­to-­tell-­ true-­stories-­from-­soldiers-­who-­made-­it-­home-­20160108/. US Commission on Civil Rights (2013) Sexual Assault in the Military, Military Panel [video], C-­SPAN2 (11 January), accessed 14 August 2015 at http://www.c-­span.org/video/?310331­3/sexual-­assault-­military-­military-­panel. US Department of Defense (2004) ‘Task Force report on sexual assault policies’, 27 May, accessed at http://www.ncdsv.org/images/Army_​Task​Force​Report​On​Sexual​Assault​Pol icies_​​5-­27-­2004.pdf. US Department of Defense (2005) ‘Report of the Defense Task Force on sexual harassment and violence at the military services academies’, June, accessed at http://www.sapr.mil/ public/docs/research/high_​gpo_​rrc_​tx.pdf. US Department of Defense (2018) Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military: Fiscal Year 2017, accessed 18 July 2018 at http://sapr.mil/public/docs/reports/FY17_​Annual/ DoD_​FY17_​Annual_​Report_​on_​Sexual_​Assault_​in_​the_​Military.pdf. US Department of Veterans Affairs (2016) ‘How common is PTSD?’, National Center for PTSD, 3 October, accessed 19 August 2018 at https://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/ptsd-­ overview/basics/how-­common-­is-­ptsd.asp. Watanabe, K. (1995) ‘Trafficking in women’s bodies, then and now: the issue of military “comfort women” ’, Peace and Change, 20 (4), 501–514. Wentling, N. (2018) ‘VA reveals its veteran suicide statistic included active-­duty troops’, Stars and Stripes, 21 June, accessed 19 August 2018 at https://www.military.com/daily-­ news/2018/06/21/va-­reveals-­its-­veteran-­suicide-­statistic-­included-­active-­duty-­troops.html. White, J. (2005) ‘Abu Ghraib tactics were first used at Guantanamo’, Washington Post, 14 July, accessed 15 August 2015 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-­dyn/content/arti cle/2005/07/13/AR2005071302380.html. White, J., C. Davenport and S. Higham (2004) ‘The new videos: video images amplify violence’, Washington Post, 21 May, accessed 16 September 2018 at http://www.washing tonpost.com/wp-­dyn/articles/A43785-­2004May20.html. Williams, K. and M.E. Staub (2005) Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the US Army, New York: Norton. Yoshida, T. (2006) The Making of the Rape of Nanking: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States, New York: Oxford University Press. Yoshimi, Y. (2000) Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, New York: Columbia University Press. Zaleski, K. (2015) Understanding and Treating Military Sexual Trauma, Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Zapotoczny, W. (2017) Beyond Duty: The Reasons Some Soldiers Commit Atrocities, Stroud, UK: Fonthill Media. Zoroya, G. (2015) ‘VA finds sexual assaults more common in war zones’, USA Today, 26 December, accessed 14 August 2015 at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/ 2012/12/26/va-­finds-­sexual-­assaults-­more-­common-­in-­war-­zones/1793253/.

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22. Gender and violence in post-­conflict settings Torunn Wimpelmann

Not so long ago, feminist scholars problematized prevailing security discourses for ignoring the possibility that women’s insecurity might not be resolved at the point of war’s end. Today, much attention is paid to gender violence in post-­conflict settings. In this chapter, I trace the evolution of engagement with gender and violence in post-­conflict settings. The chapter is structured into three main sections. The first section looks at patterns of gender violence in post-­conflict settings. Acknowledging the importance of feminist scholars in putting this issue on the agenda in the first place, I assess widespread popular and scholarly claims that wars and conflict lead to an increase in gender violence after the conflict ends. The second section examines the post-­conflict setting as a particular historical moment shaped by new political openings, emergent and powerful women’s movements, and the influence and resources of international aid agencies. I argue that the rise of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, with gender violence at its core, translates into very high levels of activity around such violence in post-­conflict settings. In the final section, I explore these issues through a brief discussion of two cases: Afghanistan and Liberia.

IS AN INCREASE IN GENDER VIOLENCE A LEGACY OF WAR? For some time, feminist scholars have pointed out that ‘peace’ does not necessarily mean the absence of violence for women. As stated by Marie Vlachová and Lea Biason in an oft-­cited observation: ‘while the guns are silent or the machetes temporarily laid aside, domestic and structural violence remain’ (cited in Porter 2007, p.  29). Drawing attention to this fact has effectively meant challenging masculinist discourses of security in which the sources of women’s insecurity are ignored or deemed to be ‘private’ issues. Feminists have suggested that gender violence against women might be particularly neglected in the period after an armed conflict, when militarized security discourses are dominant. Often, ‘[d]omestic violence prevention and prosecution [. . .] are not deemed worthy of urgent 308

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Gender and violence in post-­conflict settings  ­309 attention by “security” officials coping with the demands of post-­conflict reconstruction’ (Enloe 2002, p. 27). The efforts to put women’s experiences of postwar transitions on the agenda formed part of a momentous change in international security discourse, both in academic and policy terms. Since the early 1990s, the gendered dimensions of war, including women’s experience of conflict and sexual violence during war, have moved to the heart of research on conflict as well as security institutions such as the United Nations Security Council and even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This shift has done much to challenge ingrained notions that women are ‘safe at the homefront’ during war (Higonnet 1999), and has made visible complicated links between public and private sources of insecurity affecting women (Moser 2001). Within the broader literature on gender, security and conflict there is also a large body of scholarship asserting that post-­conflict situations are associated with particularly high levels of interpersonal or sexual violence against women (Meintjes et al. 2001; Giles and Hyndman 2004; Theidon 2009). Many of the accounts of increased levels of gender violence post-­ conflict center on male experiences of war and on problematic masculinities that have emerged in the context of conflict. Conflict-­related trauma and associated alcohol and substance abuse among former combatants are reported to contribute to increased levels of violence against women. Others have found that the types of masculine culture promoted in military settings are reproduced through domestic violence when fighters return to their partners (Enloe 2004). Other research suggests that the post-­conflict transition entails a loss of masculine roles, whether through unemployment or in confrontation with newly assertive spouses, causing frustration in men that is expressed in violence against their partners (Sideris 2001; Dolan 2003; Sengupta and Calo 2016). In a slight variation on the ‘masculinity in crisis’ theme, some suggest that a history of violence and dispossession leads marginalized men to assert their dominance of dependents through violence (Gqola 2015). Many of these linkages resonate as commonsensical. Accounts of war medicating on veterans struggling with trauma and new realities, self-­ alcohol and drugs, and inflicting violence on their partners and families are well known from both media reports and research in the US and the UK. In these countries, even the military itself is explicitly concerned with the mental health of its veterans, even if such concern does not directly focus on violence against women as a possible consequence (Pankhurst 2016). Another scenario that is well documented in research and grey literature is the ‘backlash’ that occurs as men returning from war attempt to reestablish their authority at home.

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310  Handbook on gender and violence Yet some have raised doubts about the analytical and empirical basis for claiming that war universally leads to increased gender violence during its aftermath. Boesten (2019) questions the possibility of clearly delineating wartime from pre-­war masculinities. This dilemma applies to understandings of gender violence during conflict as well, where it has been subject to extensive debate between those who emphasize the exceptionality of wartime gender and (in particular) sexual violence and those who stress the importance of seeing wartime abuses as rooted in and rendered meaningful by pre-­war gender relations. For instance, the effectiveness of rape as a strategy of war in order to humiliate the enemy depends on gendered constructions that cast women as the bearers of community honor. Taking the case of post-­conflict Peru as an example, Boesten argues that there is evident continuity across war and post-­war contexts. In Peru, ‘an authoritarian political culture grounded in patriarchal and racist relationships’ (2019, p. 309) has historically fueled male privileges and rendered especially indigenous women and girls vulnerable to sexual violence in war as well as peacetime. As such, the war-­time masculinities that might shape insecurity for women after the war are rooted in pre-­war gender and other social relations. Robust data underpinning claims of a link between war and a subsequent increase in gender violence is scarce. Small-­scale studies appear to confirm the relationship (Sengupta and Calo 2016; Guruge et al. 2017). However, large-­scale statistical data is not available, not even for the well-­researched populations of the US and the UK (Pankhurst, 2016). This is not surprising, because prevalence data on gender violence is notoriously unreliable in general (Merry 2016). This unreliability would be amplified in attempts to compare pre- and post-­war settings. Such societies have generally undergone dramatic transformations, affecting gender relations and often also women’s notions of themselves and of government authorities. In turn, this might significantly change women’s (and men’s) perceptions of what has happened to them, and affect their willingness and ability to report it to outsiders.

THE POST-­CONFLICT MOMENT Despite the issues related above, a pervasive sense of the post-­conflict setting as a site of increased, even rampant, violence against women continues to persist. As Aisling Swaine (2018) notes, this assertion is prevalent not only in academic literature (which she argues tends to be circular), but also among activists and the general public in the settings themselves. While not denying the possibility that many women might be experiencing

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Gender and violence in post-­conflict settings  ­311 new and increased forms of interpersonal or sexual violence, the key to a sense of unprecedented violence might also be found in the features of the post-­conflict setting as a particular historical moment. Many post-­conflict transitions are characterized by political openings enabling the renegotiation of gender and political orders. During the last three decades, these openings have been intrinsically linked to large-­scale international interventions. The end of the so-­called ‘Cold War’ saw the consolidation of an international peacebuilding regime where countries emerging out of conflict have increasingly been subjected to a standardized set of aid interventions aiming to facilitate a series of political, social and economic transformations, generally modeled on Western capitalist liberal democracies (Suhrke et al. 2017). Typically, the reforms undertaken under intentional tutelage have included dramatic changes to the political arrangements, including the promulgation of new constitutions and the holding of elections at all levels. They also include scale changes to legislation, administration, the courts and the large-­ security apparatus. In addition, post-­conflict societies have often been the site of extensive aid interventions aiming to alter gender relations and to empower women politically, socially and economically, as formalized in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Even though many such aid interventions are externally d ­ riven – w ­ ith limited, contradictory and unintended effects on local ­practices – ­they contribute to a fluid, open political field where women’s rights activists typically enjoy unprecedented leverage. Another equally important factor in accounting for the heightened focus on gender violence in post-­war contexts is the centrality of such violence to international women’s rights activism and aid programming globally. As Karen Engle (2018) argues, the turn of feminists to human rights law and discourse has enabled the framing of women’s oppression everywhere as primarily located in the lack of state protection against family and private abuse. The primary response to such ­abuse – ­articulated as ­violence – ­is criminal justice. In turn, the focus on gender violence in international women’s rights activism over the last 30 years is reflected in post-­conflict settings. As discussed in the cases of Liberia and Afghanistan below, both the local women’s rights activists and international aid organizations made violence against women a core issue in their overall work. Indeed, Aili Mari Tripp (2010) has documented that postwar countries in Africa have adopted legislation against gender-­based violence at significant higher rates than other countries. She attributes this to three factors: (1) the presence of strong women’s movements; (2) changing international norms and practices reflected in programmatic shifts within international bodies like the United Nations and among foreign donors; and (3) ­changing

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312  Handbook on gender and violence opportunity structures, such as the holding of peace talks or rewriting of constitutions, which allowed women to push their agenda.

AFGHANISTAN AND LIBERIA: CASE STUDIES With the rise of the Women, Peace and Security ­agenda – ­which has made women’s rights much more central to international post-­conflict ­interventions – ­and that agenda’s preoccupation with sexual and gender-­ based violence, there is little surprise that gender violence features so centrally in post-­conflict settings. In this section, I briefly explore how these dynamics have played out in Afghanistan and Liberia. Afghanistan While, at the time of writing, few would describe Afghanistan as ‘post-­ conflict’, the first years following the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban were comparatively peaceful. The societal landscape featured all the usual components of postwar peacebuilding: democratization; reform of the security sector and the justice apparatus; and high levels of international aid. Famously, the 2001 invasion had been justified in part by a need to liberate Afghan women, and so the focus on women’s rights was immense, even compared to other peacebuilding sites. At the same time, the new order was full of contradictions (Suhrke 2011). Many former mujahedin ­commanders – ­having fought the Soviet army and the Afghan communist government with US support in the 1980s, only to be driven from power by the T ­ aliban – w ­ ere now back in powerful positions. Several of these commanders were implicated in sexual violence during the earlier conflict. Repeated calls for accountability for these and other abuses were muted, however, running counter as they did to the present political status quo. Instead, it was more ‘ordinary’ gender violence that became the focus of women activists. Little data on its prevalence existed, apart from a widely cited small survey from 2008 which suggested that 87 percent of Afghan women had been subjected to violence (Global Rights 2008). There was no doubt that many Afghan women suffered horrendous violence at the hand of husbands, in-­laws, fathers and brothers, often in such extreme forms that it could only be described as torture. Towards the end of the decade a number of brutal rape cases also shocked the country, many involving multiple perpetrators with government links and very young girls. Less publicized, but representing large portions of the caseloads of human rights organizations, were the forced marriages of women and girls, often to men one or two generations their senior.

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Gender and violence in post-­conflict settings  ­313 As the Taliban insurgency gathered pace, reports also started to come in about stonings, lashings and executions of women (and men) accused by the Taliban and other Islamist insurgent groups of sexual crimes such as adultery. The first such case in 2010 unsettled large parts of the population (Wimpelmann 2017), but as the conflict intensified, they were mentioned in Afghan media only in passing. There were obvious ways that much of the post-­2001 gender violence could be linked to the preceding wars, and therefore to Afghanistan being a ‘post-­conflict’ country. Many of the men implicated in the rape cases broadcast on Afghan TV screens were former commanders with links to one of the warring factions from the 1980s or 1990s. Government impotence in the face of these crimes was understood by many as a symptom of the problematic ways in which the new political order was built, in part on accommodation with ‘warlords’. Some drew connections with the failure to bring about transitional justice for the sexual crimes during pre-­2001 wars with continuing sexual violence later. Less high-­ profile violence such as forced and underage marriage could also be linked to the decades of war. For instance, Deniz Kandiyoti (2009) argues that the selling of young poor girls as brides to much older men should not be understood as ‘Afghan culture’, but in the context of decades of displacement and dispossession. Likewise, the inability or disinterest of the Afghan state to intervene in even extreme cases of abuse and murder of women is not comprehensible without taking into account how years of war has weakened state capacity and produced antagonistic relations between the central state and many communities. At the same time, there are many pre-­war continuities. Although data does not exist, there are few indications that the pre-­war Afghan state took an active role in prosecuting gender violence. Like elsewhere, the Afghan state incorporated gendered constructions of women and other dependents as the inviolable honor (namus) of men as it expanded its power, meaning that interventions focused on reducing gender violence were prevented not merely by lack of capacity, but also by ideological factors. Moreover, gendered practices that invest fathers with the prerogative of giving away daughters in marriage certainly predates the war (Tapper 1991), even if the latter might have caused a brutalization of these practices. Many of the incidents of violence were characterized by complicated linkages between the personal and the political, and between war and peacetime dynamics. From the early days of the new post-­2001 order, cases of women assassinated by unknown men, typically appearing on motorbikes, have been a regular occurrence. What all these women had in common was that they were working outside their homes in positions unconventional for their gender: they were prosecutors, police officers,

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314  Handbook on gender and violence j­ournalists, or employed at foreign military bases. This, and the circumstances of their killings, meant that many understood the murders to be part of a systematic Taliban campaign to punish women who defied strict notions of seclusion or collaborated with the enemy (the two were sometimes collapsed) (Nemat 2012). However, an investigation of some of these cases suggested that many of these women had been killed by their own relatives for bringing shame upon their families (Jeong 2017). At the same time, the murders could only be understood against a broader political backdrop. Notions of shame and gendered transgressions assumed an additional dimension as women defying gendered norms were not only staining the standing of their male family members, but also their religion and homeland. In turn, high levels of insecurity facilitated a general impunity that extended to perpetrators of more personal violence. As time passed, gender violence became the centerpiece of women’s rights activism in Afghanistan. Many of the initiatives drew on templates from international aid practice. A first priority for activists working on the issue was to set up shelters; since it was virtually unheard of for women to take up residence outside of family settings, such institutions were crucial for women who needed to flee family abuse. S ­ oon – ­and in line with dominant approaches e­ lsewhere – e­ fforts became centered on criminal law. A new law on violence against women was signed into force by presidential decree, and large-­scale training and awareness programs for legal official and local communities were carried out in most part of the country. Eventually, dedicated units were set up at the police, the courts and the prosecutors to facilitate the prosecution of violence against women. As the years passed, conviction rates (to the extent that they could be established) failed to improve, despite the significant pressure exerted by Afghanistan international aid donors who, among other things, made aid disbursement conditional upon detailed reporting of law enforcement in this field. Activists and Western diplomats accused the Afghan government of lacking the will to enforce the law. However, research testified to the limits of this reasoning. In a society characterized by extreme restrictions on female autonomy, women who pressed charges against family members risked cutting off their own means of subsistence. Even if the prejudices of government officials certainly played a role, women’s practical existence continued to be shaped by patriarchal realities. Many used the new accessibility of the criminal justice system simply to negotiate a better deal within those constraints, such as obtaining a government-­ brokered pledge by an abusive husband to stop the beating (Shahabi et al. 2016). These types of dynamics were well known from other settings where criminal justice approaches came up against the gendered constraints shaping women’s actual lives (Basu 2006; Vatuk 2013).

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Gender and violence in post-­conflict settings  ­315 Liberia In 2003, Liberia emerged out of the final phase of a brutal regionalized civil war. Charles Taylor, who had ruled the country since 1997, went into exile as part of a peace settlement between his government and the two rebel movements. The conflict was rooted in unequal relations between settlers and other ethnic groups, repressive state practices and Cold War geopolitics. It had involved extensive violence against civilians: ‘tortures and atrocities committed by factions on countless occasions were sometimes brutal almost beyond belief’ (Ellis 2007, p. 146). The abuses inflicted on civilians encompassed widespread sexual violence, including rape and kidnapping of women and girls imprisoned in relations of sexual servitude by competing factions (Abramowitz and Moran 2012). Like Afghanistan, Liberia’s post-­conflict period was fundamentally shaped by international intervention. The 2003 peace accords set the stage for a wide-­ranging UN peacebuilding operation which included UN peacekeepers, a complete restructuring of the security apparatus, elections and economic and social reconstruction. Only in 2018 did the UN formally end its mission. By far the most reported and most focused-­on form of gender violence in post-­conflict Liberia has been rape (Medie 2013). Shortly after the war, statistics suggesting that 75 percent of all Liberian women and girls had been raped during the conflict started to circulate. At the same time, reports about a continuing ‘rape crisis’ started to emerge. Activists, researchers and aid officials proclaimed that rape in Liberia was ‘endemic’ (Amnesty International 2004) and ‘way off scale’ (ActionAid 2006, p. 14). When surveys suggested that most women had been assaulted by someone they knew, media and research reports concluded that the war had normalized rape and had produced a ‘hyper-­masculinity’ in men, who struggled to adapt to peacetime losses of their relevance amid high unemployment and women’s expanded roles (Jones et al. 2014). All available statistics show that rape is the most reported type of gender violence in Liberia. In 2016, more than 800 rapes were reported to the police, making it the second most reported serious crime in the country (OHCHR 2016). This followed more than a decade of sustained mobilization around sexual violence against women by Liberia’s influential women’s movement and by international organizations in the country. As a result of the lobbying of the former, Liberia enacted new rape legislation already in 2006, which made rape a non-­bailable offense, raised the age of consent to 18, expanded the definition of rape and made certain forms of rape punishable by life imprisonment (Scully 2014). With Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female elected president in Africa, as the country’s head of state, Liberia gained a position as a leader in the rapidly

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316  Handbook on gender and violence ­ roliferating international Women, Peace and Security agenda. President p Sirleaf appointed a female head of the Liberian National Police, and the UN mission worked extensively with the police force to strengthen the latter’s ability to respond to cases of gender violence. A well-­resourced Ministry of Gender and Development was established, and its Gender-­ Based Violence Secretariat sought to oversee all activities around gender violence in the country. Like in Afghanistan, specialized prosecution and court organs were set up to process cases of gender-­based and sexual violence, including a court dedicated to hearing cases of sexual violence. The changes in law and legal administration were accompanied by a plethora of initiatives by international aid organizations to address gender violence and particularly rape, involving ‘hundreds of programs, millions of dollars and thousands of man-­hours’ (Abramowitz and Moran 2012). These activities included: the establishment of shelters; training of the police and the military about gender violence; the provision of training and rape kits to local clinics; psycho-­social counselors to victims of rape and other gender violence; training of local leaders; and community-­based education and awareness-­raising programs across the country to change local norms (Abramowitz and Moran 2012). Swaine (2018) argues that it is primarily this increased focus that has led to high reporting numbers of sexual violence in post-­conflict Liberia, reinforcing the sense of its unprecedented levels. Victims now had a discourse to talk about and reassess their experiences, as well as available avenues to report claims. In turn, the postwar focus on rape was the predictable result of the attention that sexual violence received during the conflict; the lens that illuminated sexualized violence during war would continue to be applied after conflict. However, many of the accounts of sexual violence during the war were highly inaccurate. The claim that 75 percent of all Liberian women were raped during the conflict has been widely cited, included by various UN agencies and the New York Times (Cohen and Green 2012). In reality, this number represented the proportion of survivors of sexual violence who reported they had been raped in a survey conducted by the World Health Organization (Cohen and Green 2012). The fact that these widely exaggerated numbers continued to circulate might be a result of several factors: the heightened focus on war-­time sexual violence; the need for aid agencies to create a sense of unprecedented crisis; and the tendency to portray conflicts in Africa as particularly barbaric (Cohen and Green 2012). Swaine (2018, p. 209) notes that as soon as aid workers started to engage with local communities about domestic violence and not just rape, they experienced a significant increase in the number of domestic violence cases reported to them. As more attention shifted to other forms of gender violence, programs started to address these acts of violence too.

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CONCLUSION It takes little imagination to conceive how post-­conflict violence might be the site of intensified gendered violence. Traumatized combatants returning from war, socialized into the use of violence, facing unemployment and encountering a newly independent partner is a typical scenario. At the same time, there are no definite data that would prove a universal increase in prevalence rates of violence as a result of conflict. Scholars also disagree on the trajectories or causal mechanisms that would produce such an increase in violence. Much of this debate mirrors those over gender violence during war: to what extent is gender violence rooted in historical patterns of gender hierarchies, and to what extent is it a product of the experience and conditions of war? The debate is further complicated by the particular features of post-­conflict moments. Sites of unparalleled international interventions, post-­ conflict societies are normally places of significant political openings, and typically with ambitions and hopes of deep-­running change. With the ascendancy of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and with gender violence emerging as the centrepiece of international women’s rights activism, it is unsurprising that post-­conflict settings see very high interest in and activity around gender violence. Sometimes it is unclear whether such settings are experiencing unprecedented levels of gender violence, or rather new levels of awareness and reporting. Whatever the case, efforts to address gender violence in post-­ conflict settings tend to emulate approaches elsewhere in that they center on increasing criminal accountability. As such, they have also encountered similar obstacles to those seen elsewhere as women struggle to navigate the gendered practices that shape both their own lives and the workings of justice institutions.

REFERENCES Abramowitz, S. and M.H. Moran (2012) ‘International human rights, gender-­based violence and local discourses of abuse in postconflict Liberia: a problem of “culture”?’ African Studies Review, 55 (2), 119–146. ActionAid (2006) ‘Liberia: U ­ NMIL – i­nternational engagement in addressing violence against women. Recommendations for change’, accessed at https://reliefweb.int/sites/ reliefweb.int/files/resources/46DBC65DD8416EB5C125729800498F77-­Full_​Report.pdf. Amnesty International (2004) ‘Liberia: no impunity for ­rape – ­a crime against humanity and a war crime’, AI Index: AFR 34/017/2004, 14 December. Basu, S. (2006) ‘Playing off courts: the negotiation of divorce and violence in plural legal settings in Kolkata’, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 38 (52), 41–75. Boesten, J. (2019) ‘Peace for whom? Legacies of gender-­based violence in Peru’ in H. Soifer and A. Vergara (eds) Political Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Peru, Austin: University of Texas Press.

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318  Handbook on gender and violence Cohen, D.K. and A.H. Green (2012) ‘Dueling incentives: sexual violence in Liberia and the politics of human rights advocacy’, Journal of Peace Research, 49 (3), 445–458. Dolan, C. (2003) Collapsing masculinities and weak states: a case study of northern Uganda’ in F. Cleaver (ed.) Masculinities Matter: Men, Gender and Development, London: Zed Books, pp. 57–83. Ellis, S. (2007) The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, New York: New York University Press. Engle, K. (2018) ‘Feminist governance and international law: from liberal to carceral feminism’ in J. Halley, P. Kotiswaran, R. Rebouche and H. Shamir (eds) Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Enloe, C. (2004) The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press. Giles, W. and J. Hyndman (eds) (2004) Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, Oakland: University of California Press. Global Rights (2008) ‘Living with violence: a national report on domestic abuse in Afghanistan’, March 2008, accessed at https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/ www.humanitarian​response.info/files/documents/files/Living%​20with%​20Violence%​20-%​ 20A%​20National%​20Report%​20on%​20Domestic%​20Violence%​20in%​20Afghanistan%​ 2C%​20Global%​20Rights%​2C%​202008.pdf. Gqola, P.D. (2015) Rape: A South African Nightmare. Joburg: MF Books. Guruge S. et al. (2017) ‘Intimate partner violence in the post-­war context: women’s experiences and community leaders’ perceptions in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka’, PLoS ONE, 12 (3), 1–16. Higonnet, M. (1999) ‘Disciplinary views of war: feminist and gender studies’ in J.W. Chambers II (ed.) The Oxford Companion to American Military History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeong, M. (2017) ‘Diary: femicide in Kandahar’, London Review of Books, 31 August. Jones, N., J. Cooper, E. Presler-­Marshall and D. Walker (2014) ‘The fallout of rape as a weapon of war: the life-­long and intergenerational impacts of sexual violence in conflict’, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), June, accessed at https://www.odi.org/sites/odi. org.uk/files/odi-­assets/publications-­opinion-­files/8990.pdf. Kandiyoti, D. (2009) ‘The lures and perils of gender activism in Afghanistan’, the Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Medie, P.A. (2013) ‘Fighting gender-­based violence: the women’s movement and the enforcement of rape law in Liberia’, African Affairs, 112 (448), 377–397. Meintjes, S., A. Pillay and M. Turshen (eds) (2001) The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, New York: Zed Books. Merry, S.E. (2016) The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence and Sex Trafficking, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moser, C. (2001) ‘The gendered continuum of violence and conflict: an operational framework’ in C.O.N. Moser and F.C. Clark (eds) Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, London: Zed Books. Nemat, O.A. (2012) ‘Afghanistan must stop the murder of its female leaders’, The Guardian, 17 July. OHCHR (2016) ‘Addressing Impunity for Rape in Liberia’, SGBV Report, October, United Nations Human Rights/Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Pankhurst, D. (2016) ‘What is wrong with men? Revisiting violence against women in conflict and peacebuilding’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 4 (2), 180–193. Porter, E. (2007) Peacebuilding: Women in International Perspective, London: Routledge. Scully, P. (2014) ‘Development and its discontents: ending violence against women in post-­ conflict Liberia’ in D. Buss, J. Lebert, B. Rutherford, D. Sharkey and O. Aginam (eds) Sexual Violence and Conflict in Africa, London: Routledge. Sengupta, A. and M. Calo (2016) ‘Shifting gender roles: an analysis of violence against women in post-­conflict Uganda’, Development in Practice, 26 (3), 285–297.

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Gender and violence in post-­conflict settings  ­319 Shahabi, M.J., T. Wimpelmann and F. Elyasi (2016) ‘The specialized units for prosecution of violence against women in Afghanistan: shortcuts or detours to empowerment? Kabul, Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security/Chr Michelsen Institute. Sideris, Tina. (2001) ‘Rape in war and peace: social context, gender, power and identity’ in S. Meintjes, A. Pillay and M. Turshen (eds) The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation, New York: Zed Books, pp. 142–157. Suhrke, A. (2011) When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan, New York: Columbia University Press. Suhrke, A., T. Wimpelmann and I. Samset (2017) ‘Violent conflict and intervention’ in P.  Burnell, L. Rakner and V. Randall (eds) Politics in the Developing World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 197–210. Swaine, A. (2018) Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tapper, N. (1991) Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theidon, K. (2009) ‘Reconstructing masculinities: the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants in Colombia’, Human Rights Quarterly, 31 (1), 1–34. Tripp, A.M. (2010) ‘Legislating gender-­based violence in post-­conflict Africa’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 5 (3), 7–20. Vatuk, S. (2013) ‘The “women’s courts” in India: an alternative dispute resolution body for women in distress’, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 45 (1), 76–103. Wimpelmann, T. (2017) The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence and Power in Afghanistan, Oakland: University of California Press.

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23.  Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’ Paula Meth

Cities across the world exhibit varying trends and forms of gendered violence as well as significant variation in responses to these by the police, il/legal formal and informal institutions, and the populace. Cities, as critical geographical spaces, are implicated in violence, but also work to shape experiences of safety. Gendered experiences of violence and safety in cities operate at multiple overlapping s­cales – f­rom the home through to the city-­region – a­ s well as in the national and global context, which may in turn work to shape violence within particular cities. The recent #MeToo campaign reveals the multiple scales and spaces of gendered violence as well as the inherent power relations underpinning such events. This chapter opens with a discussion of the significant issue of domestic violence, which affects women across the world. This analysis reveals the significance of both the home and the surrounding urban context in shaping outcomes as well as the varying legal landscapes which often facilitate and counter domestic violence practices. The chapter also examines sexual harassment and sexual violence occurring outside of domestic or interpersonal relationships. I consider varying global trends, and reflect on the context-­specific norms and practices that shape differentiated practices such as initiatives introduced in cities to manage and reduce sexual harassment. The chapter then moves on to consider gender and violence in cyberspace, a space not necessarily tied to the city but for all urban dwellers an increasingly significant space, and certainly one which is acutely gendered. Although intersectionality informs the analyses provided thus far, a focus on the particular relationships between varying intersections of gender alongside race, masculinity, poverty and conflict is considered in relation to those who are often more vulnerable to gendered violence within cities. The chapter concludes with an analysis of recent interventions to reduce gender violence, including those put forward by the United Nations (UN) through its ‘safe cities’ programme.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Historically, work on violence within cities focused predominantly on violence that occurred within public spaces such as parks, alleyways and 320

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Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’  ­321 neighbourhoods. Feminist geographers insisted on the inclusion of the home-­space within the gaze of work on violence and cities, with Whitzman arguing that research is problematic if it only focuses on ‘public space rather than the totality of settings inhabited by women and men’ (2007, p.  2718). These calls brought this often-­ understudied space into full view. Geographers such as Rachel Pain (1997) and Gill Valentine (1989) extended the reach of critique into the home, exploring the ways in which patriarchal power and inequality worked to shape unequal and violent relationships between men and women. This field of research is still relatively small, in terms of both the number of researchers and the impact on the discipline of geography, but it is supported by and supports advocacy work and policy research documenting the distressing rates of domestic violence experienced by women across the world. The legal definition of domestic violence varies across different countries, with different legal views on whether particular practices such as rape within marriage, psychological violence and economic violence constitute domestic violence in different contexts. The United Nations notes that ‘at least 119 countries have passed laws on domestic violence [. . .] and 52 have laws on marital rape’ (UN 2015, p. 139). These global variations work alongside cultural, political, economic and social realities to shape women’s experiences of violence as well as the support they can expect from the police, family and judicial institutions. In the UK, domestic violence is defined as: Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are, or have been, intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality. The abuse can encompass, but is not limited to: psychological, physical, sexual, financial and emotional. (UK Government 2018)

This British definition is complex and wide-­ranging, including a non-­ gender specific focus, an extension to same-­sex couples, application to partners no longer together and a specific focus on children’s needs in relation to domestic violence (Matczak et al. 2011). Legal framings do not, however, necessarily equal progressive outcomes. Katherine Brickell’s work in Cambodia, for example, examines how revised and improved legal frameworks relating to domestic violence can work in principle to support women, though in practice they often fail to protect women or transform their lives. This is because, despite the presence of legal protection, there exists a ‘normative social pressure exerted on women to uphold the cultural logic of harmony and to “endure” for the sake of family unity rather than end the cycle of violence through law’ (Brickell 2016, p. 184). Brickell also notes in this piece how forced evictions in the Cambodian context are

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322  Handbook on gender and violence explicitly gendered, as they destroy homes, thereby affecting women’s lives directly, and her research encourages a wider interpretation of the idea of gendered violence in and of the home. Homes are critical spaces within cities and are commonly the site of domestic violence. Warrington (2001) points to the ways in which women are often trapped and restricted within their homes as a result of violence from partners. Women endure having their movements monitored, often in and out of the house, and some experience a shrinking of their urban worlds as controlling partners prevent them from using and engaging with the city freely. Women also risk losing their home and face homelessness because of this violence, not only because they are forced to flee violent situations but also because landlords will not tolerate the noise and damage associated with ongoing scenes of violence in their properties. Domestic violence is thus a key cause of homelessness among women (Netto et al. 2009). Vulnerable women are often forced to seek accommodation in space-­constrained shelters and women’s refuges, or other insecure locations, or return to violent partners. Homes are, however, highly variable across and within cities, tied commonly to financial inequalities, poverty, poor governance, a lack of planning and housing shortages. Given these differences, the relationship between women and home in the context of violence inevitably varies. Chant and McIlwaine (2016, p. 138) adopt a ‘gender-­slum-­urban interface’ as an analytical tool to explore gender-­based violence in slum and urban contexts. They note the excessively high levels of violence against women in poverty contexts, but also argue that women’s tolerance of violence from partners in urban contexts is comparatively lower than in rural contexts. Nevertheless, women living in slums suffer from far higher levels of violence, explained by their legal and economic relationship to the home (see Chant 2013, p. 20). Low levels of ownership or entitlement to property heighten women’s vulnerability to violence, commonly a critical issue for those residing in slum conditions (Chant and McIlwaine 2016, p. 141). Similarly, in earlier research (Meth 2003), I have questioned the way in which analyses of domestic violence rely on the assumption of a ‘formal’ home. Using the examples of women living on the streets or within informal settlements in South Africa, this work shows how domestic violence is experienced in the context of these less formal spaces, particularly through reducing the privacy element often associated with formal housing. In informal settlements where housing materialities are often simple and not durable, sound carries easily, meaning that violent incidences are often heard by neighbours. Poorly constructed homes heighten women’s vulnerability to domestic violence, but their risks from theft and rape are also heightened as break-­ins are easier in such home spaces (Chant 2013, p. 20; Meth et al. 2019).

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Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’  ­323 My more recent work with co-­researchers shows how, in contexts of poverty and contestation over ­resources – ­including in a slum colony in India and a state housing neighbourhood in South ­Africa – ­movement into formal housing from informal housing affects women’s experiences of violence because of the construction of new tensions between men and women over the housing asset (see Meth et al. 2019). New forms of violence between men and women and male and female family members can arise then as a perverse outcome of state policy designed to ease housing shortages. Such policies can also unwittingly force women in violent relationships or marriages to remain living with their abusers because of the agenda to provide housing to family units. In c­ ontrast – ­but taking a wider view in relation to ‘capability enhancement’ and indirectly supporting Chant and McIlwaine’s arguments ­above – ­Panda and Agarwal (2005) argue that the receipt of property rights (to housing and or land) in the Indian context was critical in the fight against marital violence, arguing that affordable property options would provide women with a place to go if fleeing a violent marriage. Fear of crime is tied to domestic violence in complex ways. Much research on fear of crime within cities focuses nearly exclusively on crime within public spaces. Men and women frequently, when questioned, point to different but nevertheless public spaces within cities about which they express concern and fear of crime and violence. These commonly include streets where drinking is common, gang territory, dark alleys and parks, poorly lit areas and so on. The issue of violence that occurs in public spaces and at the hands of an often-­unknown perpetrator is considered below. The failure to identify the home space as a valid site of fear of crime by all concerned is problematic, however: ‘women learn to perceive danger from strange men in public space despite the fact that statistics on rape and attack emphasise clearly that they are more at risk at home and from men they know’ (Valentine 1989, p. 386). In similar ways, female students are far more likely to suffer sexual violence from someone they know (including a friend or an acquaintance) than a stranger, with 80 per cent of all victimizations in a recent longitudinal American study of students and sexual violence being by an offender who is known to the victim and with 70 per cent of all victimizations occurring within a home (Sinozich and Langton 2014, pp. 1, 6). This slippage between where fear is identified and where violence is experienced can be explained in various ways, including as a result of the actions of the media, which sensationalizes infrequent attacks on women in public spaces while remaining silent about private forms of violence in the home. Women also suffer from shame, humiliation, fear and dependency, which all work to prevent them from reporting or acknowledging fear in relation to their homes.

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324  Handbook on gender and violence The spatial significance of home versus public space in relation to fear is extended by Rachel Pain, whose work demands a re-­examination of the scales of gendered violence through an analysis of domestic violence alongside terrorism. She compares and contrasts the experiences of domestic violence as ‘everyday terrorism’ versus global terrorism, arguing that both are ‘attempts to exert political control through fear’ (Pain 2014a, p. 1), but she notes that the latter receives disproportionate attention and resourcing. The emphasis on fear as a critical element of gendered violence is central here, recognizing that fear is shaped by various psychological and emotional practices and tactics (Pain 2014a) that work to marginalize victims, to assert particular agendas and maintain control.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND VIOLENCE The UN (2015, p. 144) defines sexual violence as ‘acts of abusive sexual contact, forced engagement in sexual acts, attempted or completed sexual acts with a woman without her consent, sexual harassment, verbal abuse and threats of a sexual nature, exposure, unwanted touching, and incest’ (see Madan and Nalla’s 2016 work on sexual harassment in Delhi for an extensive list of violent acts). Sexual violence and sexual harassment operate along a complex interlinked continuum, with Adur and Jha arguing that one end of the continuum can work as a precursor to the other: ‘Sexual harassment in public spaces is therefore the face of a “rape culture” that signals the impunity with which sexual aggressors operate’ (2018, p. 116). In Madan and Nalla’s s­ tudy – ­along a continuum of harassment from non-­verbal to verbal, and less to more s­ erious – w ­ omen’s ratings of seriousness were higher than men’s in every category (2016, p. 91), pointing to gendered difference in understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment in particular contexts (Moffett 2006). These forms of gender violence are intimately tied to overarching patriarchal structures within cities around the world, varying significantly as a function of the legal, political, cultural and social norms of particular societies. In cities and societies where violence against women is very high, a range of complex contextual factors work to shape these particular realities. In South Africa, where 1 in 3 women is raped, Helen Moffett argues that an excessive focus on race obscures a more critical analysis of gender in relation to the history of apartheid and the power relations it engendered. Describing a ‘gender civil war’ (2006, p. 129) she explains that: Some men believe that by resorting to sexual violence, they are participating in a socially approved project to keep women within certain boundaries and

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Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’  ­325 categories [… paralleling how the ‘other’ needed …] to be policed (even if this meant torture, detentions and murder) not only ‘for their own good’, but also for the ‘greater good’ of society. (Moffett 2006, p. 140)

Within India, exceptional violence against girls and women is documented across cities, with caste and poverty often shaping the experiences. Much of this violence is at the hands of family members, including husbands in the form of marital violence (Panda and Agarwal 2005), fathers, mothers and other relatives who may seek to punish girls and women for apparent transgressions. Increasingly, however, attention is paid to sexual violence that occurs in public spaces and is perpetrated by someone not intimately associated with the victim (Madan and Nalla 2016). The rape of a 23-­year-­old woman on a bus in Delhi in 2012, and her subsequent death, caused local and global outrage, resulting in a mass public outcry and demonstrations about the vulnerability of women in cities and the failures of the state and society to protect women. The incident, which is known locally as the Nirbhaya incident, ‘highlighted a growing fear of sexual violence against women in the country, particularly in public spaces’ (Madan and Nalla 2016, p.  81). In their own study, Madan and Nalla reveal that 58 per cent of their female participants had experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime (2016, p. 94). Adur and Jha (2018) note that Delhi is described as the ‘rape capital’, with higher levels of sexual violence than other Indian cities and rapidly rising rates of reported rape. Beyond India, data on rates of sexual violence is, however, limited, with the UN revealing that very few countries outside a small core actually collect data on perpetration by non-­partners. Where data is available it estimates that globally around 7 per cent of all women have suffered this form of violence (UN 2015, p. 146). Gendered violence works to reframe spaces of the cities as dangerous or frightening, and can consequently reduce women’s use of these spaces. Women may feel less able to walk down particular streets, to occupy spaces at night, to enjoy leisure spaces and practices in cities, or to make use of certain forms of transportation. This is particularly challenging for women living in informal or slum contexts, forced to leave their homes, including in the evening to access sanitation and water (Chant 2013, p. 20). Women’s cities then shrink in comparison to men’s, and girls are encouraged to engage in urban space in more conservative and cautious ways than boys: ‘This lack of trust in public spaces and public infrastructure raises issues of discrimination, spatial exclusion, and fear of victimization for women, which raises questions of human rights and civil society’ (Madan and Nalla 2016, p.  93). Everyday sexual harassment is a norm in many cities, with women having to contend with unwanted glances,

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326  Handbook on gender and violence touches and more, with little recourse to police or legal protection. In the Indian case outlined above, experiences and knowledge of sexual harassment works to undermine women’s confidence in the city. Sexual harassment and violence are not only issues in the global South, where gender inequality indicators are seemingly higher: as Adur and Jha note, ‘its prevalence is global’ (2018, p. 116). Indeed, the UN notes that, across Europe, the Netherlands has one of the highest rates of sexual violence perpetrated by a non-­partner, with 12 per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 74 having experienced non-­partner sexual violence at least once in their lives (UN 2015, p. 146). In work by Mellgren et al. in S ­ weden – ­a country considered by the UN to be one of the most gender equal in the world (2017, p. 12) – research with university students revealed that 24.4 per cent of female participants had experienced sexual harassment in the past 12 months, commonly perpetrated by a stranger (in 80 per cent of the cases) and most frequently in spaces such as clubs and restaurants (2017, pp. 8, 9). In contrast to the Indian case discussed above, where 75 per cent of all incidences occurred during the daytime (Madan and Nalla 2016), this Swedish case points to the prevalence of night-­time occurrences and alcohol as critical factors shaping students’ vulnerability. In response, the majority of their participants felt anger over these incidences, with one woman explaining: ‘I’m annoyed that it is so common nobody cares. A girl should be able to enjoy herself out without worrying about being grabbed and touched without invitation’ (Mellgren et al. 2017, p. 11). 98.5 per cent of the participants had not reported such incidents to the police (2017, p.  12). Women also tended to make various adjustments to their lives in order to reduce the possibility of harassment in the future. Some of the women believed that the incidents were not so serious, while others lacked faith in the criminal justice system. Worryingly, several women felt that such actions were so common that women had come to accept or expect them. Various interventions have been implemented throughout history and up to the present day to segregate men and women in public spaces in cities. These practices are motivated by a range of cultural issues around privacy, patriarchy, gender inequality and the control of women and their bodies, but can include a concern for reducing sexual harassment. These may include the zoning and management of women-­only public spaces (shops, swimming pools, parks, schools and beaches) as well as the provision and demarcation of women-­only transport, with the latter evident in ‘Japan, India, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates’ (Iqbal 2018, p. 2). The outcomes of these interventions are mixed and are the subject

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Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’  ­327 of much debate. In Karachi, Pakistan, Iqbal (2018) notes how women-­ only parks were not created in response to crime against women; rather, they were designed to enhance women’s privacy from a masculine world. However, she notes that their safety features are key for women, and that in enclosed parks in particular women did feel safer than in general public spaces in the city. Other interventions (or proposed interventions) relate to public education campaigns, the use of CCTV, active policing, the use of social media and the use of signage such as ‘Zero-­Tolerance Policy on Sexual Harassment’ in prominent public spaces (Madan and Nalla 2016, p. 94). In Singapore, for example, ‘no tolerance’ signs are located in metro stations and on trains. Dunckel Graglia (2016) examines the introduction of women-­only transit in Mexico City, and concludes that such interventions can work to make some women feel safer but that they also work to blame women for the violence and to view women as incapable of equal mobility compared with men. There is a greater need for political change which targets wider gendered inequalities in society and the city more broadly. In findings that parallel those in Delhi, up to 30 per cent fewer men than women in Mexico City thought that sexual harassment on public transport was serious or a problem, and men commonly blamed women for violence occurring. Women, as a result, tended to make changes to their journeys, and their attire, in order to manage harassment. In the Mexican case, changes in intervention provoked differential responses from mainly male residents. Women-­only carriages were deemed acceptable; but when the city introduced pink women-­only buses, men’s responses were very negative, feeling that the state had gone too far and that such an act made men look responsible for women’s safety. One male journalist stated: ‘Well, don’t you think that pink transportation makes us [men] look like assholes?’ (Dunckel Graglia 2016, p. 635). Clearly, societal gender norms are in need of substantial revision in order to reduce the threat of sexual harassment for women in this and other cities.

CYBERSPACE Online spaces, a critical aspect of city life and beyond, are a more recent site of gender violence. The use of email and online social media p ­ latforms – ­including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and many o ­ thers – ­to shame, harass, threaten and abuse women is increasing exponentially, and sexual abuse which is image based is commonly aimed at women (Farries and Sturm 2019). Trolling via Twitter is significantly gendered, and women in the public eye, or women who express opinions about matters

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328  Handbook on gender and violence of public discourse, are frequently targeted, usually but not always by men. Such violence is gendered not just because of the gender differences between perpetrators and victims but also because so much of it is of a sexual nature, including threats of rape. In an analysis of violence and intimacy, Rachel Pain notes that women who challenge violence publicly often risk further online aggression, arguing that these acts of aggression have real impacts and are experienced in very intimate ways. She considers very directly the spatiality of such gendered violence: ‘Online violence is a reassertion of power, but perpetrators often deny this, minimizing and de-­scaling it, and drawing on a claim commonly made of older forms of gendered violence: that its spatial context means it is not-­violence’ (Pain 2014b, p.  352). Henry and Powell (2015, p.  759) describe the need for more research on ‘technology-­facilitated sexual violence and harassment’, incorporating six forms of violence under this label: 1. the unauthorized creation and distribution of sexual images; 2. the creation and distribution (actual or threatened) of sexual assault images; 3. the use of a carriage service to procure a sexual assault; 4. online sexual harassment and cyberstalking; 5. gender-­based hate speech; and 6. virtual rape.1 They argue that the gendered nature of these harms are significant, and that harm is not simply associated with the ‘physical body’ (2015, p. 767). Responding to such ‘cybermisogyny’, Farries and Sturm employ a feminist legal geographer’s analysis to consider the role of copyright as one potential tool to manage such violence against women and to ‘help women to claim the internet as a safe and legal space’ (2018, p.  17). Here the significance of legal measures to respond to women’s vulnerability within cities and cyberspace is underscored.

USING AN INTERSECTIONAL LENS TO EXTEND ANALYSES OF GENDER, VIOLENCE AND CITIES This chapter opened with the argument that violence in cities is inherently gendered. So far, I have examined the experiences of women from across 1   ’Virtual rape’ is defined as ‘where a person’s avatar (or digital representation of themselves) is subjected to simulated sexual violence by other avatars’ (Henry and Powell 2015, p. 764).

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Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’  ­329 the globe in order to unpick the interconnections between gender, violence and cities. These accounts have made some reference to economic inequality, cultural differences and geographic factors in shaping the differential experiences of women. In this section, the idea of an intersectional analytic is used in various ways, and more explicitly, to illustrate and extend analysis of the particular vulnerabilities around gender and violence in urban spaces. This part of the chapter considers the ways in which particular groups of women, and some men, suffer heightened vulnerability to violence in urban settings because of particular intersecting factors alongside wider structural processes shaping their positions within cities. It considers the experiences of refugee women and girls, sex workers, and young black men, noting how the particular intersections of race, status, poverty, gender, and location relative to conflict and age, work to exacerbate vulnerabilities to violence in cities and to undermine the potential for redress and protection. First, in conflict contexts there are girls and women living in urban refugee camps and in host cities who are targets of sexual violence, worsened by the fact they are often living without adult males; these refugees may find themselves forced into sexual practices in order to secure food and supplies for their family (UN 2015, p. 158). Freedman (2016) shows how the closure of European borders to refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East exacerbates the vulnerabilities of women, where women are forced to pay people smugglers for their passage through sexual acts, and they are vulnerable to violence from smugglers. Women also risk sexual assault at the hands of security and policing personnel along their migratory journeys. Further, the lack of accommodation within camps across Europe means that women risk sleeping out in fields and parks, heightening their vulnerability to sexual violence. Finally, Freedman (2016, pp.  23–24) notes how constant changes to borders, resulting in changes to migration routes, result in women being anxious to reach destinations and to move quickly from place to place. This trend works to reduce women’s abilities and willingness to engage with professionals to seek support in relation to sexual violence, meaning that many or most refugee victims of sexual violence remain unsupported. Here the intersection of extreme vulnerability and desperation, loss of home and nation, contradictory absences of male authority alongside dependency on powerful (stranger) males, and continual movement through and within politically significant territorial boundaries collide to shape women and girls’ subjection to violence. Second, the vulnerability of sex workers to sexual violence is a poorly researched issue. Shaped by the uneven power relations afforded by their employment practices alongside the often weak, non-­existent or punitive legal frameworks within which they operate (Sanders 2004; Chant and

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330  Handbook on gender and violence McIlwaine, 2016, p. 147), the ability to seek protection is usually compromised. Sex workers are commonly women, and this chapter focuses on their experiences, but there is growing evidence of male sex workers who work in varying ways (on the streets, in bars or gyms, or as escorts sometimes facilitated by the Internet) and face varying consequences as a result. For example, male street sex workers are often vulnerable to violence and stigmatization compared with other male sex workers (see Minichiello et al. 2013). Female sex workers similarly work in varying ways to secure payment for sexual practices. Women operate from a variety of locations, including managed brothels, the streets, managed zones and via online platforms. In an analysis of street spaces where ‘street prostitutes’ work, Sanders notes how politicized such spaces are, with competing groups working to control the space as well as women’s actions. These geographic spaces are themselves vulnerable to removal, as ‘in an era of neoliberalism, the purification of the central city is having a profound impact on the spatiality of sex work’ (Tyner 2012, p.  113). Tyner points to the often-­forcible removal of sex workers from the streets as gentrification processes proceed, noting that revanchist city managers seek to purge such individuals (commonly women) from the streets in efforts to promote clean and family-­friendly cities. Teela Sanders’ work in Birmingham, UK, illustrates how street prostitutes are moved to different parts of the city as a result of campaigns by community groups, and notes that this displacement is not always only geographic but can also be displacement into other forms of crime (2004, p. 1712). Taking into account efforts to avoid violence, and displacement caused by community protests and police action, Sanders concludes that this can reduce risk for some women as indoor working can be safer, although: There is a strong likelihood that pushing sex markets further into an illegal and illicit economy only ostracises some of the most vulnerable women in society. Encouraging women to hide their involvement in prostitution creates difficulties for health care and support agencies to make relationships with individuals, preventing any chance of accessing drug rehabilitation. (Sanders 2004, p. 1714)

Sex workers commonly lack rights due to the persistence in many contexts of the illegality of sex work, making recourse to the law in situations of violence often impossible. Women are often dependent on drugs, and are thus in positions of vulnerability in relation to their drug dealers. Police too can engage in violence against sex workers, turn a blind eye to the violence they endure or operate in particularly punitive ways (Sanders 2004). Often because sex work by its very nature occurs in private spaces, it is very difficult for women to seek protection or support. But risks facing sex workers are broader than this, with Sanders identifying three

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Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’  ­331 key categories: risks of violence from male clients; aggression from community protestors (for example in Birmingham); and issues arising from the police. Evidence from across the UK indicates that street workers in particular experience high levels of violence (Sanders 2004, pp.  1704, 1705) and that the forms of violence are very serious. Sanders’ research with street prostitutes in Birmingham reveals that women experience rape, robbery at knife and gunpoint, kidnapping, violent beating and drugging (2004, p. 1710). Violence against sex workers does not hinge, however, on the legal landscape alone, although it does appear to be a significant factor. In Meriluoto et al.’s work in New Zealand, they note that despite the decriminalization of the sex industry in 2003, rates of violence against sex workers were still significant, although they compared favourably with contexts where sex work was criminalized, such as London. Their study points to geographic variations in experiences of violence against sex workers, with complex differences noted between cities but also between employment locations within these cities. They argue that it is likely that wider ­factors – ­such as the concentration of sex workers in spaces and the ways in which the sector is organized in the c­ ity – a­ re likely to shape some of these trends. Importantly, their study supports other studies which show that sex ­workers’ own alcohol and drug use significantly enhances their vulnerability to violence, although the authors are quick to point out that they are ‘in no way suggesting that sex workers are responsible for the violence they experience’ (Meriluoto et al. 2015, p. 314). The role of agency is evident in Sanders’ research, which points to the ways in which female sex workers use and manage space in order to reduce risk: ‘the space on which women rely to advertise, negotiate and supply commercial sex is strategically used to their advantage in order to make cash and minimise chances of harm’ (Sanders 2004, p.  1708). Women were careful to use urban spaces strategically to reduce the possibility of harm, and so avoided cul-­de-­sacs and dead-­end roads, and instead insisted on locations that have CCTV or are close to residential properties (2004, p. 1710). In this example, the intersection of gender, economic vulnerability, illegality, spatial marginality, bodily intimacy and social stigma works to position sex workers in specifically vulnerable positions within cities. A third illustration of the intersectional nature of gender and violence within cities relates to the processes that render young black or ethnic minority men particularly vulnerable to violence in cities across many parts of the world. Kopano Ratele (2016, p.  43) argues that, in South Africa, ‘urban young black men are at disproportionately higher risk of homicidal victimization than other groups’; keeping age categories constant, black men are nine times more likely to die from this violence

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332  Handbook on gender and violence compared with black women, and 17 times more likely than white men. Men suffer violence at the hands of other men, but also at the hands of the state, through the actions of the police in particular. In cities across the USA, Brazil and the UK, young black men are frequently the target of shootings and revenge attacks. The numbers of lives lost is exceptional, but so too is the number of young black men serving time in prisons for such violence (Caldeira 2000, p 112). In Teresa Caldeira’s work in São Paulo, Brazil, she charts the ways in which young black men are viewed in racial terms as less than human, and therefore dispensable. She notes that homicide victims are predominantly male, rather than female, with poor men experiencing more violence (2000, p. 126). This is a function of extensive inequality, poverty, histories of colonialism and racial division, alongside a rising criminalization of young black men by the state and the adoption of brutal forms of control. In the context of South Africa, Ratele points to a range of broader structural explanations which include a weak criminal justice system, growing up in poverty and hopelessness, an inability to see beyond violent death simply as a policing issue and a lack of political will (2016, p. 43). He also explores histories of masculinity in South Africa linking a subscription to a dominant, ruling or ‘traditional’ hegemonic masculinity with the violent and racist history of apartheid, which included police violence and the perpetuation of a racially differentiated poverty (2016, p. 44). In this example these intersections of race, age, class, poverty, colonial legacies and criminalization shape extensive levels of violence within cities towards young black men.

SAFE CITIES? GLOBAL INITIATIVES TO FOSTER URBAN SAFETY In 2010 the United Nations launched its ‘Safe Cities Free of Violence against Women and Girls’ Global Programme, followed by its ‘Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces’ flagship initiative; these were launched after a 2013 commission revealed the challenges for safety in public spaces in cities across the world (Chant and McIlwaine 2016, p. 151; UN Women 2017). The initiative works to bring a range of key organizations together to focus on developing a range of policies and tools to prevent and respond to ‘sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls across different settings’ (UN Women 2017). The initiative has four commitments that structure its actions: to identify gender-­responsive locally relevant and owned interventions; to develop and effectively implement comprehensive laws and policies to prevent and respond to sexual violence in public spaces; to encourage investments in the safety and eco-

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Gender, violence and ‘safe cities’  ­333 nomic viability of public spaces; and to change attitudes and behaviours to promote women’s and girls’ rights to enjoy public spaces free from violence (UN Women 2017). The website boasts the inclusion of 21 cities worldwide. UN initiatives are important; because of the significant resources obtained by the UN, it is able to collect data that commonly cannot be accessed by individual researchers. Adur and Jha (2018, p.  115) note, however, that few if any feminist analyses of these UN programmes have been undertaken. They seek to rectify this through a critical analysis of the application of this programme in the city of Delhi. They trace the history of the UN initiative at a global scale, noting the significant role played by women’s activism within the UN to arrive at this programme, and the ways in which debates about gender and violence worked to challenge the idea of culture as an explanation for violence, the broadening of what violence entails and a movement away from a more ‘androcentric’ interpretation of human rights (Adur and Jha 2018, p. 118). Recognizing the significance of the programme in Delhi, the authors question its conceptual basis for a number of important reasons. First, they query the heterosexist assumptions underpinning the framework, arguing that the binary of male perpetrator/female victim is problematic. They proceed to argue that the programme overlooks the often-­violent impact on men seeking to support the reduction or prevention of harassment through protecting women. Finally, they note that a more refined or meaningful intersectional framework is needed which recognizes how particular groups of women and ­men – ­including Dalits, displaced women and the urban ­poor – ­are more vulnerable (2018, pp. 119, 120). Moreover, Adur and Jha question a number of methodological features of the UN programme, and note that there are challenges in data collection and analysis as a result, including: issues of under-­reporting; blunt categorizations and unclear definitions; limited information on structural conditions; and the lack of complex and multi-­layered data, which could be gained through a qualitative/quantitative mixed approach (2018, pp. 120-­121). Bearing these critiques in mind, Adur and Jha conclude, however, that ‘the Safe Cities Initiative presents the first-­ever global attempt at documenting and preventing the scourge of sexual harassment and violence in public spaces’ (2018, p.  121), and their research points to the significance of this global intervention. They also note the rise of bottom-­up responses to gender and violence in cities through the use of technology and activism, including mapping apps such as SafetiPin (2018) which work to map levels of safety in cities according to various criteria through the use of crowdsourced data. Chant and McIlwaine (2016, p. 150) identify a range of interventions in cities to reduce gendered ­vulnerability

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334  Handbook on gender and violence to violence, including safe design and women’s safety audits. The rise of a smart city agenda (Karvonen et al. 2019) is significant for future planning around gender and violence. Recent initiatives in South Korea to tackle sexual violence and risk on public transport include the use of apps, Bluetooth and mobile data to report concerns, request walking escorts late at night and to rapidly locate victims and perpetrators, including identifying carriage and registration numbers of vehicles. Shwayri (2019, p. 287) concludes that these and other governance initiatives have improved ‘the lives of women’.

CONCLUSION This chapter has examined a variety of dimensions of contemporary debates about gender, violence and urban spaces, including the concept of ‘safe cities’. It has focused primarily, but not solely, on the experiences of women in cities across the world, and noted the multiple and varied ways in which they suffer violence. The discussion has also identified how some women, the police and legal institutions, and society more broadly respond to violent practices. These are considered across the domestic/ public interface, recognizing that stark spatial divisions in analysis risk occlusion of particular forms of violence, making its reduction ever more challenging. City spaces as sites of power are implicated in gender and violence, and processes and outcomes of gendered violence are closely tied to legal, cultural, economic and social relations. The chapter concludes with a focus on a recent positive UN initiative to counter gender violence in public space. With new forms of violence emerging – ­ ­ in cyberspace for ­ example – t­he overarching message of the chapter is one of concern: concern over exceptional rates of gender violence globally; concern over the weakness and alarming complicity of key legal institutions; and concern about the ways in which women are unwilling or unable to access public space, in cities in particular, as a result of their legitimate fear of violence. This chapter hasn’t addressed wider analyses of the role of leadership and governance in fostering cultures of gendered violence within cities, but it closes with a final concern, which relates to the perpetuation and exacerbation of gendered inequalities and violence advanced by current and recent national leaders with significant influence and power, including Zuma in South Africa, Trump in the USA, Duterte in the Philippines and Bolsonaro in Brazil. Much future research is needed to examine ­these – a­ nd ­other – ­intersections and interactions of gender with governance, space and violence.

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REFERENCES Adur, S.M. and S. Jha (2018) ‘(Re)centering street harassment: an appraisal of safe cities global initiative in Delhi, India’, Journal of Gender Studies, 27 (1), 114–124. Brickell, K. (2016) ‘Gendered violences and rule of/by law in Cambodia’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 6 (2), 182–185. Caldeira, T. (2000) City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, Berkeley: University of California Press. Chant, S. (2013) ‘Cities through a “gender lens”: a golden “urban age” for women in the global south?’ Environment and Urbanization, 25, (1), 9–29. Chant, S. and C. McIlwaine (2016) Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South: Towards a Feminised Urban Future, London: Routledge. Dunckel Graglia, A. (2016) ‘Finding mobility: women negotiating fear and violence in Mexico City’s public transit system’, Gender, Place and Culture, 23 (5), 624–640. Farries, E. and T. Sturm (2019) ‘Feminist legal geographies of nonconsensual pornography online: using copyright logic to combat the unauthorized distribution of celebrity intimate images in cyberspace’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51 (5), 1145–1165. Freedman, J. (2016) ‘Sexual and gender-­based violence against refugee women: a hidden aspect of the refugee “crisis” ’, Reproductive Health Matters, 24 (47), 18–26. Henry, N. and A. Powell (2015) ‘Embodied harms: gender, shame, and technology-­facilitated sexual violence’, Violence Against Women, 21 (6), 758–779. Iqbal, A. (2018) ‘How safe are women-­only parks perceived to be?’ Security Journal, 31 (4), 859–881. Karvonen, A., F. Cugurullo and F. Caprotti (eds) (2019) Inside Smart Cities: Place, Politics and Urban Innovation, Abingdon: Routledge. Madan, M. and M.K. Nalla (2016) ‘Sexual harassment in public spaces: examining gender differences in perceived seriousness and victimization’, International Criminal Justice Review, 26 (2), 80–97. Matczak, A., E. Hatzidimitriadou and J. Lindsay (2011) Review of Domestic Violence Policies in England and Wales, London: Kingston University and St George’s, University of London. Mellgren, C., M. Andersson and A.-K. Ivert (2017) ‘“It happens all the time”: women’s experiences and normalization of sexual harassment in public space’, Women and Criminal Justice, DOI: 10.1080/08974454.2017.1372328. Meriluoto, L., R. Webb, A. Masselot, S. Morrish and G. Abel (2015) ‘Safety in the New Zealand sex industry’, New Zealand Economic Papers, 49 (3), 296–317. Meth, P. (2003) ‘Rethinking the “domu” in domestic violence: homelessness, space and domestic violence’, Geoforum, 34 (3), 317–327. Meth, P., S. Buthelezi and S. Rajasekhar (2019) ‘Gendered il/legalities of housing formalisation in India and South Africa’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51 (5), 1068–1088. Minichiello, V., J. Scott and D. Callander (2013) ‘New pleasures and old dangers: reinventing male sex work’, Journal of Sex Research, 50 (3-­4), 263–275. Moffett, H. (2006) ‘“These women, they force us to rape them”: rape as narrative of social control in post-­apartheid South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 32 (1), 129–144. Netto, G., H. Pawson and C. Sharp (2009) ‘Preventing homelessness due to domestic violence: providing a safe space or closing the door to new possibilities?’ Social Policy and Administration, 43 (7), 719–735. Pain, R. (2014a) ‘Everyday terrorism: connecting domestic violence and global terrorism’, Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 531–550. Pain, R. (2014b) ‘Gendered violence: rotating intimacy’, Area, 46 (4), 344–360. Pain, R. (1997) ‘Social geographies of women’s fear of crime’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 22 (2), 231–244.

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336  Handbook on gender and violence Panda, P. and B. Agarwal (2005) ‘Marital violence, human development and women’s property status in India’, World Development, 33 (5), 823–850. Ratele, K. (2016) Liberating Masculinities, Cape Town: HSRC Press. SafetiPin (2018) ‘Supporting safer cities’, accessed 12 September 2018 at http://safetipin.com. Sanders, T. (2004) ‘The risks of street prostitution’, Urban Studies, 41 (9), 1703–1717. Shwayri, S. (2019) ‘Life in smart Seoul: the female factor’, in A. Karvonen, F. Cugurullo and F. Caprotti (eds) Inside Smart Cities: Place, Politics and Urban Innovation, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 275–290. Sinozich, S. and L. Langton (2014) ‘Rape and Sexual assault victimization among college-­age females, 1995–2013’, Special report, US Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics, http://jpp.whs.mil/Public/docs/03_​ Topic-­ Areas/07-­ CM_​ Trends_​Analysis/20150918/05_​BJS_​SpecialReport_​SexAsslt_​CollegeAge_​Females.pdf. Tyner, J. (2012) Space, Place and Violence: Violence and the Embodied Geographies of Race, Sex and Gender, New York: Routledge. UK Government (2018) ‘Definition of domestic violence’, accessed 5 September 2018 at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-­v iolence-­a nd-­a buse#domestic-­v iolence-­a nd-­ abuse-­new-­definition Site. UN (2015) The World’s Women: Trends and Statistics, New York: United Nations. UN Women (2017) ‘Creating safe public places’, accessed: 11 September 2018 at http:// www.unwomen.org/en/what-­we-­do/ending-­violence-­against-­women/creating-­safe-­public-­ spaces. Valentine, G. (1989) ‘The geography of women’s fear’, Area, 21 (4), 385–390. Warrington, M. (2001) ‘“I must get out”: the geographies of domestic violence’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26 (3), 365–382. Whitzman, C. (2007) ‘Stuck at the front door: gender, fear of crime and the challenge of creating safer space’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 39 (11), 2715–2732.

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24.  Gender and economic violence Penny Griffin

This chapter considers some important aspects of the relationship between gender, economy and violence. It encourages the reader to think broadly, both in terms of the meanings of violence and its possible locations. Using violence as ‘a concept and not merely a bare fact’ (Howell 2015), the chapter considers gender, economy and violence as crucial ‘practices of power’ (Shepherd 2013) in world politics. Such practices are ‘productive of our cognitive architectures and the very concepts that we use to think with’ (Shepherd 2013, p. 7). They are, of course, specific to context, culture and location, and cannot be universalized. While violence is often, and for good reason, associated with destruction and suffering, its role in creating and organizing key elements of human life should not be underestimated, and this chapter intentionally focuses on some of the productive, ordering aspects of violence in economic terms. Violence lies at the heart of the formation and maintenance of states, nations, institutions, law-­making, social practices, cultural and historical traditions, international intervention, judicial regimes, political modalities and economic systems. Violence is ‘a force for creating integrities as well as one that violates, pollutes and destroys already existing entities’ (Bowman 2014, p.  152). Practices of economic violence include various forms of deprivation, harm and trauma, but they also include dynamic configurations of transformation, resistance, activism and collective struggle. This chapter echoes the assumption, made in feminist work in all disciplines, that gender is a foundational social distinguisher, and is therefore a core component both of how a person sees the world and how the world sees them. The chapter focuses on the category of ‘economy’, but sees no clear separation between ‘economy’ and other key social systems, such as ‘politics’, ‘culture’ or ‘society’. Rather, discussion here focuses on the discourses of meaning and identity formation on which economic practices, processes, structures and actors depend to reveal some of the locations of gendered violence. As gender cannot be abstracted from practices of human identity formation, or how we become who we are, so violence serves, as Shepherd articulates, a ‘conceptual ordering function’ that shapes what people are, might be, or cannot be, in the world (2013, pp. 5–6). The meaning of ‘violence’ is not just something done to human bodies; it is also something capable of creating the very ­identities 337

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338  Handbook on gender and violence of those bodies. It is ‘a way of making sense and grouping together a number of practices’ (Howell 2015) and, while violence can be known ­statistically – ­that is, measured and counted as data (when it is defined in particular ways) – it is also a discursive practice and, as such, may exceed the boundaries of factual recording. The following sections offer an engagement with existing approaches to gender and violence in the contemporary global political economy, as practised in the politics of global governance and as studied in the canons of feminist and gender scholarship. The chapter is thus divided into five sections: the first considers current approaches to economy and violence in the practices of the global political economy; the second overviews feminist debates on gender and violence in the global political economy. The third, fourth and fifth sections examine examples of important debates and questions posed concerning the relationship between gender, economy and violence in terms of three themes: violence against women; the violence of ‘development’; and the relationship between economic restructuring and violence.

GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY: CURRENT PRACTICES There are multiple ways to read the relationships between gender, violence and economy. While this chapter does not dispute that acts of economic violence exist as forms of abuse and are worrisome in their prevalence, it does focus on a necessarily broad conceptualization of economic violence. This entails thinking about violence not only as it manifests in specifically economic forms, but also as violence produced and sustained by economic systems that may not seem technically ‘economic’ in form. Such an approach, as Jacqui True articulates, ‘avoids the compartmentalisation and selective treatment’ of gender-­based violence, which risks disconnecting ‘the problem from its underlying causes’ (2012, p. 7). As an example, violence is not often articulated as having a core role in processes of capitalist production and global supply chains. As feminists have noted, however, the large-­scale transnational processes driving contemporary globalization engender highly uneven, inequitable effects dependent on structural hierarchies that can be hugely damaging to different people, and groups of people. Globalized, neoliberal, capitalist discourse, and the practices it entails (such as the liberalization of national economies, the flexibilization of labour and the privatization of public resources) have ‘written out’ of the economy all sorts of people, places, activities and practices that do not fit with the neoliberal picture in acts of, as Bergeron

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Gender and economic violence  ­339 articulates, ‘epistemic violence’ designed to disrupt and displace (2004, p. xii). Conventionally, especially in current political and policy-­making parlance, ‘economic violence’ refers to particular forms of abuse deployed to harm individuals or to further disadvantage already economically disadvantaged people. Such forms of abuse might include financial abuse, eviction, fraud, misinformation, neglect, deprivation of money or property damage, and misuse of authority. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE n.d.) defines economic violence as any ‘act or behaviour which causes economic harm to an individual’. An act of violence need not be economic in design, intent or application, widening the parameters for economic violence. EIGE goes on to note that economic violence ‘can take the form of, for example, property damage, restricting access to financial resources, education or the labour market, or not complying with economic responsibilities, such as alimony’. Several key international organizations today employ in their work some sort of discussion of violence, although explicit use of the term ‘economic violence’ is both uneven and sporadic. The World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, a agencies – ­ for number of regional development banks, governmental ­ example, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) – and various non-­governmental organizations (NGOs) discuss, in some form, the economic roots, and impact, of gender-­based violence. Such a consideration of a wider story for violence and its constituents lies in sustained feminist, transnational campaigning, especially with regard to expanding the parameters of ‘violence’. The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has played a particularly crucial role in joining the violence dots, both in terms of agenda-­setting and policy analysis. CEDAW, as True notes, ‘has recognised the linkages between forms of violence against women such as trafficking, domestic violence, and exploitation and women’s lack of enjoyment of economic and social rights’ (2012, p.  6). On the other hand, the UN elsewhere fails to connect the ‘effects of financial crises, macroeconomic policies, and trade liberalization and the prevalence of violence against women’ (True 2012, p. 5). True highlights the weaknesses of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals/MDGs (the Sustainable Development Goals/SDGs also fail in this regard), the Secretary-­General’s UNITE campaign (launched in 2008) and available UN Development Programme (UNDP) indices, none of which explicitly link gender-­based violence with women’s economic situation and political representation. True also notes that UN Security Council resolutions on the more recent Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda have failed to contextualize

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340  Handbook on gender and violence sexual violence in conflict settings ‘within the gendered structures of economic impoverishment and lack of opportunity’ (2012, pp. 5–6). The recent WPS ­ Index – ­ created by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) and the Peace Research Institute, ­Oslo – c­ an be considered a positive step in this regard, since it correlates low levels of women in the labour force and high levels of intimate partner abuse with a state’s propensity to use violence to resolve internal or external disputes (Goetz 2018). The Index ranks countries according to three thematic areas: inclusion, justice and security (GIWPS 2019). As Goetz notes, the Index ‘provides facts about women’s political and economic social inclusion, the prevalence and social tolerance of gender-­ based discrimination, and levels of public and private violence’ and, in this sense, can be used as a reliable ‘women’s empowerment index’. It would be exceedingly difficult, and slightly pointless, to argue either that ‘the economy’ exists separately from any of these areas, or that each area is somehow economically untied. As Goetz highlights, the foreign and trade policies that individual states pursue contribute directly to a population’s experience of peace or to insecurity. It remains, however, up to the organization, agent or agency to draw the explicit connections themselves when using this data. The Index has been much hyped, but what it counts, or is ‘making count’, argue Mundkur and Shepherd (2018), ‘only partially captures the complexity and dynamics of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’. Indices do not, by themselves, initiate policy or champion c­ hange – ­though they may be used to do ­this – a­ nd so it is unclear yet how agents and agencies of development make the relevant connections between violence, gender and economy, if indeed they do. ‘Structural or institutional violence’, EIGE writes, ‘can be defined as the subordination of women in economic, social and political life’: it is ‘important to recognise that gender-­based violence may be normalised and reproduced due to structural inequalities’, including ‘societal norms, attitudes and stereotypes around gender generally and violence against women specifically’. Protesting against ‘the naturalisation of women’s oppression’, which takes ‘gender hierarchy as “given” rather than historically, politically constructed’, is thoroughly embedded across location and economic scenario and has been a considerable obstacle to articulating the significance of the economic roots of gender violence in the global political economy (Peterson 2008, p. 68). The naturalization of women’s oppression also, as Peterson notes, ‘serves as the model for depoliticizing exploitation generally, whether of groups or of nature’ (2003, p. 68). As True writes, achieving policy-­making that actually attends to the economic context of gender-­based violence has been challenging, not least because gender-­ based violence ‘occurs in all socioeconomic groupings’ and so, ‘on the face

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Gender and economic violence  ­341 of it, a political economy analysis is often dismissed’. All this, of course, despite consistent campaigning from NGOs, developmental agencies and women’s advocacy groups to widen ‘the violence against women framework to take account of the structural cause and consequences of violence evident in women’s poverty and labour exploitation, socioeconomic inequality with men, and lack of political representation’ (True 2012, p. 7). In light of the unevenness of the practices of global governance and the global political economy in responding to and accounting for gender, violence and economy, the following section overviews some key debates on gender and violence in studies of the global political economy, chiefly those emanating from Feminist International Political Economy (FIPE), Feminist Development Studies and Feminist Economics scholarship, beginning with FIPE.

VIOLENCE AND FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY While feminist scholarship ‘has generally perceived of militarism, political economy, and the environment as interrelated’, the ‘development of FSS [Feminist Security Studies] as a distinct approach has fostered the privileging of researching security as an analytical category, side-­lining issues of economic inequalities or economic determinants of (in)security’. This ‘has, in many ways, reproduced the ahistorical and Eurocentric assumptions of the mainstream regarding the causes of war and political violence’ (Meger 2017). At the same time, the feminist global political economy has largely avoided questions of security and violence, particularly in terms of how such gendered and racialized violence matter in the constitution of ‘value’. Thus, the assumptions of scholarship that takes security as a social good disconnected from either its use or (and even more so) exchange value within this political-­economic system are implicated in its maintenance and reproduction (Meger 2017). In terms of violence and its relationship with gender, Feminist Security Studies have made then, at least in International Relations (IR), probably the chief contribution to disciplinary understandings. While Feminist International Political Economy (FIPE) has also engaged with the subject of violence, it has done so perhaps more sporadically. Meger et al. (2017) note an ‘intellectual division of labour’ at play here across Feminist IR that, unwittingly, mirrors the ‘“economic” and “security” divisions’ beloved of mainstream IR (realist/security and liberal/political economy). Such an analytical separation is perhaps not unreasonable, not least since, as Weldes and Wynne-­Hughes (2017) articulate, recognizing ‘the

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342  Handbook on gender and violence i­ nterconnectedness of everything’ makes the everything ‘difficult to study’. There is, however, little reason for feminist work to reproduce and ‘reinscribe problematic IR distinctions’, especially given that they have long been successfully challenged, especially by feminists themselves (Weldes and Wynne-­Hughes 2017). As others have also noted, a number of key feminist scholars of world politics do not use or seek to reify a security/economy distinction in their work (Cynthia Enloe, Katharine Moon, Spike Peterson, Lily Ling, Anna Agathangelou and Jindy Pettman spring immediately to mind). The work of these authors does not ‘begin from a separation of security and political economy’ and gets ‘much closer to recognising the interconnectedness of everything, beginning from unreified understandings of local and global, domestic and international, political and economic’ (Weldes and Wynne-­ Hughes 2017). In recent years, this has marked something of a growing trend in feminist scholarship on world politics. Recent work engaging with the inter-­relationships between gender, security and economy has sought explicitly to close the gap between security and economy. Recent publications point to some of the many violences endemic in, but perhaps not obvious to, the contemporary global, neoliberal political economy. These include: the intersections of the market and (market) violence, especially the connections between economy, violence and security that surround indebtedness (Wöhl 2017a, 2017b), the invisible reproductive labour required to sustain militaries and private security services and the key role that households play in the functioning of the global security market (Elias and Chisholm 2017), everyday practices of ‘securing’ the home and the omnipresence of gender-­based violence (Hedström 2017), and the relationship between the global market, everyday politics and the gendered and racialized project of private security (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016; Chisholm 2018). Generally speaking, there are a number of ways in which violence in the global political economy has been discussed in relation to gender. Feminist scholars (including FIPE scholars and scholars of Development and Feminist Economics) have focused on several key topics, including, inter alia: violence against women; violence and development; violence and reproduction; gender inequality and domestic violence; violence and processes of economic restructuring; violence and labour; violence and colonialism; violence and sex work; violence and conflict; and violence and sexuality. The following sections consider three of these thematic areas as examples of current debates on the systemic relationship between gender, economy and violence in the global political economy: violence against women; the violence of development; and economic restructuring and violence. This is by no means an exhaustive discussion of feminist

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Gender and economic violence  ­343 work on the global political economy, and there is much more to know than this chapter is able to discuss here.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN1 As a category of analysis, ‘violence’ in political economy, where it is discussed explicitly, has often been approached quite literally, and almost overwhelmingly, in terms of violence against women, especially in the form of ‘domestic violence’. That violence against women sits at the core of feminist accounts of the global political economy should come as no surprise, with violence against women remaining a problem of epic proportions, globally and locally. Recent research in the US, for example, estimates the ‘lifetime costs’ of intimate partner violence (IPV) – ­‘including the costs of related health problems, lost productivity, and criminal justice costs’ – ‘at $103,767 for women and $23,414 for men’ (Hess and Del Rosario 2018, p. 8). UN estimates suggest that more than 1 in 3 women (35 per cent) ‘have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime’, although some estimates suggest this number constitutes as much as 70 per cent; and nearly half (47 per cent) of all murders of women ‘are committed by an intimate partner or family member’, compared to ‘less than 6 per cent of murders of men’ (UN Women 2018). Domestic violence has been so well attended to across development discourse and policy-­making because it has been ‘an issue around which feminist activists and other civil society organizations have long mobilized’ (Chant and Brickell 2014, p.  99; see also Hall 2015). Chant and Brickell highlight the particular advances in broadening the conception making in of domestic violence that have been evidenced across law-­ developing countries, where ‘economic abuse’ – such as the withdrawal 1   Gender-­based violence in the global political economy does not, of course, only involve women, and patterns of gendered employment precarity, unhealthy and dangerous employment practices, economic dispossession, trafficking and criminality, asset loss and economic disenfranchisement involve substantially harmful and potentially damaging effects for men, children and all types of bodies. Queer approaches to understanding the relationship between gender, sexuality and economic violence would also note the many, various and often uninterrogated forms of violence experienced by non-­straight bodies in the global political economy. These include, for example, extensive colonial histories of brutalizing and erasing non-­heteronormative groups and individuals; the increasing police presence in queer urban spaces; the denial of impartial healthcare options to queer bodies; and forms of gender and sexual violence not accounted for in the WPS agenda. Queer scholars have noted weaknesses in analyses of intimate partner violence (IPV), where IPV tends to be framed in heteronormative terms while IPV in same-­sex relationships is ignored (see, for example, Cannon 2015; Cannon et al. 2015). These are important analytical considerations, and this chapter points to them here to note the significance of ongoing research in these areas.

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344  Handbook on gender and violence of financial support and curtailing family members’ access to common access or legitimate ­occupation – h ­ as been increasingly incorporated in definitions of domestic violence (2014, p. 99). Other scholars have focused, in FIPE and Feminist Economics in particular, on the mounting evidence that economic security and vulnerability correlate directly with domestic violence. These include smaller-­scale, local studies of household inequality and domestic violence (see for example Oduro et al. 2015; Oduro and van Staveren 2015), but also larger, systematic engagements with violence against women and its effects (see for example Fawole 2008; True 2012; Hess and Del Rosario 2018; Voth Schrag et al. 2018). As Oduro and van Staveren (2015, pp.  14–15) argue, examining economic policy-­making in sub-­Saharan Africa, asymmetric policy-­making and gendered informal ­ institutions – ­ which are ‘unwritten but dominant social norms’ (2015, p.  1) – constrain women’s agency, affect patterns of reward and affect the opportunities of men and women in the economy. Oduro and van Staveren contend that official responses to women’s empowerment often fail to address the crux of the problem, and so countries and their donors develop gender policies that rely on individualistic approaches to empowerment based on reforming formal institutions (2015, p.  15). Such programmes ‘do not necessarily affect gendered informal institutions, and thereby do not necessarily contribute to the social transformation needed to happen to make growth inclusive’ (2015, p.  16). Formal mechanisms can, indeed, increase and strengthen women’s employment, income and resource control: the point for Oduro and van Staveren is that, without the social and cultural work required to transform patriarchal domestic and social relations, formal institutions (such as equal land rights, equal inheritance rights, equal access to credit, free education for all and laws against domestic violence) can often be perceived by men as a threat to their status. ‘When men perceive their masculinity threatened rather than transformed’, argue Oduro and van Staveren, ‘women may gain jobs and assets, but neither the individual agency nor the collective agency enjoy the benefits of these resources in their economic and social lives’ (2015, p. 16). Similarly focused on the need for a holistic, system-­based response, True’s important research has revealed the extent of the ‘invisible’ faces of violence in the global political economy. She examines the, ever-­increasing, problem of violence against women in ‘peaceful’ settings, and the need to generate analysis and policy-­making attentive to the multiple (not just conflict-­based) contexts of women’s oppression (2012, p.  3). She argues that the ‘underlying causes of violence against women and girls remain poorly understood by scholars and policymakers’, while ‘the effects of the broader political economic order on this violence are usually neglected

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Gender and economic violence  ­345 even in studies of countries in transition or emerging from conflict’ (True 2018, p. 187). True is careful to centre the global political economy in her account of the (global) absence of equal social and economic rights for women and men, and the lack of equal access to productive resources. She argues that official approaches, such as those adopted by key development actors, frequently fail to connect the ‘economic’ (finance and crisis, macroeconomic policy-­making and trade liberalization programmes) with ‘the prevalence of violence against women’ (True 2012, p.  5). As True contends, armed conflicts, post-­conflict and post-­humanitarian crises, and natural disaster processes ‘have tended to deepen gender inequalities in economic and political participation, negatively affecting women’s vulnerability to violence’. Despite what are, she posits, ‘glaring realities’, the global political economy ‘is often neglected in analyses of violence against women’ (2012, p. 5).

THE VIOLENCE OF ‘DEVELOPMENT’ For feminist and gender scholars of Development and IPE, developmental spaces are infused with various types of violence. Critical development scholars have made clear how the foundations of Western-­ led development in the twentieth century and beyond are violent, built out of hierarchies of knowledge, meaning and practice that exclude and police alternative communities of knowledge. While ‘development’ has been discursively and conceptually ordered to correspond to culturally specific notions of progress, civility, legitimacy, proper governance and so on, the imposition of cultural ideals and the reordering of ‘developing’ societies mark violent processes of exclusion and regulation. At the same time as those with the historical power to design and dictate development practice and policy-­making have described their undertakings as essential, good and beneficial to all, they have masked the violence of the class, gender and racial forms of segregation on which national economic ­prosperity – ­e.g. gross domestic product (GDP) – has been built (see, for example, Rajagopal 2001; Kothari 2005; Mowforth 2014). Complex levels of violence are evident in the development process. The invasive restructuring of societies in the name of development has created and continues to reproduce, as Kothari and Harcourt note, ‘multiple kinds of violence’ (2004, p.  3). Violence lies in the ‘everyday exclusion, exploitation, discrimination and marginalization’ of development’s constituents, people trying to eke out their livings in difficult, often hostile, conditions: whether it is ‘possible to give primacy to the perspective of those excluded and victimised by development’ remains unclear (Kothari

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346  Handbook on gender and violence and Harcourt 2004, p.  3). Importantly, official development not only fails to ask important questions about how to improve these people’s lives, it also misses the ways in which these groups resist the processes of development that destabilize their communities and identities. This last point is especially noteworthy because it reveals the productive aspects of violence in and across development spaces as marginalized, uncounted people forge their identities by resisting both the development machine and the ‘stories of victimisation and conflict’ that follow them (Kothari and Harcourt 2004, p. 3). As Nair articulates, one of the most notable contributions of postcolonial feminist theory to the study of the global political economy ‘is the insight that marginality is embedded in histories of imperialism and colonisation that may not always be similarly experienced but nevertheless signal a common oppression’ (2018, p.  50). Feminist scholars have thus highlighted the significance of the creation of alternative development frameworks based on resisting, as Charusheela and Zein-­Elabdin describe, the powerful ‘orientalism and developmentalism’ of economic discourse (2003, p.  184). The importance of the role of colonialist mindsets in classical political economy should not be underestimated. Classical and neoclassical frameworks have invariably proceeded as if slaves, women and colonized peoples did not exist, continuing in ‘the “new” frameworks of modernist economics’ embodied in, for example, the ‘easy transportation of Malthusian orthodoxies of the classical period into the postwar development project of population control’ (Charusheela and Zein-­Elabdin 2003, p. 185). A number of feminist analyses are especially critical of the ongoing colonialism of ‘development’, echoing Sylvia Federici’s influential efforts to ‘rethink the development of capitalism from a feminist viewpoint’ (2004, p.  11). Federici, famously, reads the ‘violence and enslavement’ of colonization in the late twentieth century development efforts of the international financial institutions, or modern day ‘conquistadors’ (2004, p. 17). Arguing that ‘capitalism, as a social-­economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism’, she sees development actors unleashing their violence especially on women, since ‘the conquest of the female body is still a precondition for the accumulation of labour and wealth’ (Federici 2004, p.  17). Similarly, Shirin Rai (2018, p.  149) focuses on Mies, Bennholdt-­Thomsen and von Werlhof’s noteworthy Women: The Last Colony (1988) to re-­centre the significance of how ‘international and national capital and state systems’ have ‘exploited both the Third World as well as women in their pursuit of profit’. The ‘capitalist exploitation of wage labour’, Rai argues, has been based on ‘the male monopoly of violence in a modified form’, such that ‘patriarchal violence at home and

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Gender and economic violence  ­347 in the public space’ is ‘intrinsic to the lives of women and to their exploitation’ (2018, p. 149). Clara Park uses the example of land grabbing in Southeast Asia and its effects on women to record the reshaping and transformation of social and gender relations in modern-­day, local contexts. Her work is particularly interested in ‘power dynamics at different levels’, facilitated by policies ‘that promote capital penetration in rural areas’ and the ‘individualisation of land access’ (Park 2018, p. 1). Recent outbreaks of violence, ‘mass protests, and retaliations’ have brought attention to widespread land dispossession ‘due to elite capture, natural resources exploitation, and agribusiness development’ (2018, p.  1). Sounding a cautionary note to accounts of resistance that are not so careful with the details, Park observes the high price that women pay in resisting their exploitation and mobilizing for their own rights. ‘Studies from Cambodia highlight’, for example, ‘that women land activists often suffer from impacts such as domestic violence and family breakdown’ (2018, p. 4).

ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING AND VIOLENCE The many violences inflicted by economic restructuring have been well documented by feminists and are closely entwined with postcolonial, gendered engagements with the development machine. The post-­Second World War rise of ‘development’ – to be achieved largely through ‘modernization theory’ and the subsequent neoliberal ‘revolution’ – has provided research agendas across feminist IR, IPE and Economics with extensive evidence of dramatic, substantial and ongoing harm. Individuals’ and communities’ lives are being transformed, and sometimes erased, by the powerful, dominating forces of capitalist, globalist market ideology. As feminists have recorded, and for many years now, the conditions of (neoliberal) globalization are predicated on dominance and expansion, entrenchment and multiplication, the articulations of which are to be found in neoliberal narratives of globalization (particularly those espoused by international development and financial institutions, which invariably see globalization as an implacable and essentially positive force). Through the actual and intended spread of capitalist market ideology, the reproduction of neoliberal globalization causes local and global economic, racial and gender orders to come into contact, not always peaceably. As economic and cultural power becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of elite and already wealthy groupings, and as the recent global financial crisis has shown, the racialized and gendered hegemony of neoliberal development continues to impact the world’s poor.

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348  Handbook on gender and violence Feminists have revealed in full relief that ‘global economic restructuring operates to reproduce gendered and racialised inequalities’, especially through micro-­ level processes of economic, social and cultural transformation (Elias and Rai 2019, p.  202). Feminist critiques of economic restructuring and globalization isolate various patterns and effects of neoliberal development planning and practice, including the gendered consequences of the industrialization and urbanization that have lain at the heart of Western ­developmentalism – ­a discourse led in large part by development organizations and agencies such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD) and the UN. Emerging especially in response to the continued, and wilful, blindness of development theory and practice to the category of ‘woman’, and following the publication of Ester Boserup’s highly influential Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970), gendered analyses of the economic ‘development’ regime have been far-­reaching. These point critical fingers at several interrelated aspects of the effects of development and its local practices. These include: the increasing displacement of communities and individuals from sources of sustenance and meaning; increasing levels of peripherality and the neglect of certain areas and locales, especially rural areas; the harmful effects of the global extraction of resources and cheap labour; the exploitation of ‘special economic zones’, trade zones, and the creation of new zones of privilege and dispossession; divisions of labour and gendered, racial and class-­based manipulations therein; growing inequalities and disparities in wealth and access to resources; increasing social, economic and environmental insecurity; the disruption and destruction of fragile environmental sources of life; heightened levels of domestic violence corresponding to increasing levels of economic, cultural and political insecurity; increasingly unhealthy and dangerous sources of employment for economically desperate workforces; increased criminality; declining health trends and escalating rates of suicide; and the mounting divide evident across locations and situations between marginalized, but loud, voices of dispossession and alienation, and the processes and actors of national and global policy-­making (see for example Ward 1990; Kabeer 1994; Marchand and Parpart 1995; Bakker and Gill 2003; Bergeron 2004; Rai and Waylen 2008; Wichterich 2000; Peterson and Runyan 2014; Harcourt 2016). Feminists have also revealed the relationship between, and the costs of, global restructuring, the increasing informalization of the world economy and gender inequality. As Peterson argues, ‘global restructuring has dramatically increased the volume, value, extent, and socio-­political significance of informal sector activities’ (2008, p. 88), which include all economic activities (jobs, tasks, enterprises and workers) not regulated, protected or

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Gender and economic violence  ­349 measured by the state. The International Labour Organization (ILO n.d.) states that the informal economy ‘comprises more than half of the global labour force and more than 90 per cent of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) worldwide’. According to Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), this numbers some 2 billion workers across the world, a staggering figure. While the concept of the informal economy originally referred to ‘self-­ employment in small unregistered enterprises’, it has since come to include a huge array of waged employment ‘in unprotected jobs’ (WIEGO n.d.). For Peterson, among others, ‘economic informalisation and political informalisation (weak or eroded state capacity) are often interconnected’ (2016, p. 447, emphasis in original). While the increasing informalization of the world economy challenges conventional economic categories of work and value, and the gendered dichotomies therein, it also shapes ‘devalued (feminised) work’ and the ‘hierarchies of gender, ethnicity/race, class, and nation’ that dictate who does this work, which is likely ‘the poor, ethnic minorities, women, youth, migrants, the urban underclass, the global South’ (Peterson 2016, p.  447). Such patterns constitute insecurities, not only in conflict situations (although processes of economic exploitation cannot be untied from political militarization) but at all levels and across social situation, ‘from the intimate and local to the national and global’ (2016, p. 455). The absence, or lack of purchase, of the state, is of course, diverse in effect. As weak as increasing global informalization reveals certain states under certain circumstances to be, ‘the state’ should not be forgotten as a key instrument of economic coercion and civil harm. Bodies become subject to and constituted through power and violence, of which governmental bureaucracy and global governance are key, if not obvious, mechanisms. Scholars of masculinity studies have shown in various ways how the state, as a mechanism for generating violence and conflict, creates the conditions that ‘lead to distorted and anti-­social expressions of masculinity’ (Cleaver 2002, p. 16). Here, economic instability, cultural discourses, the socialization of boys and girls, and experiences of fear and weakness are formative in both domestic and societal violence. Dominant masculinities develop historically through processes of colonialism, development, industrialization and modernization, and macro-­level societal and economic processes are closely linked to the shaping of individual behaviour. The function of gender violence within economic systems becomes crucial in the formation of identity at micro levels. Scholars have shown how key economic processes of ‘liberalization’ not only augment existing social insecurities, but also actively create new patterns of gender, race and class exploitation. A powerful example has been the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has both exacerbated poverty and

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350  Handbook on gender and violence insecurity in Central and South America and (uncoincidentally) heralded increased levels of violence against women (especially femicide) (see, for example, Navarro 2002; Gaspar de Alba and Guzmán 2010; Pantaleo 2010). As Chant notes, neoliberal restructuring and ‘the immiseration and emasculation associated with male losses in the labour market’, including the loss of ‘breadwinner status’, play a role in exacerbating tendencies to stereotypically ‘disaffected male behaviour’, such as violence in the home and community, or drug or alcohol abuse (2016, p. 5). Feminist research has taken pains to explore the constitution and effects of marketization, liberalization and flexibilization resulting from neoliberal policies of economic restructuring. Feminist analyses have persuasively argued that ignorance of the local and social constitution of global processes leads to flawed scholarship and ignorant policy-­making, exacerbating and reproducing hierarchies and inequalities of race, class, gender and sexual relations (Griffin 2015, pp.  51–52). Such scholarship has shown how the ‘roll-­back’ of state services under neoliberal mandates has impacted ‘on social reproduction in ways that have often exacerbated gender inequalities’ (Bergeron 2011, p. 151). Frequently guilty of the swift and too-­easy association between women’s employment and women’s liberation (Wichterich 2000), global governance’s policy-­ makers and economists have failed to account for and invest in the ‘care deficit’, which has itself been created by policy and practices careless of the role of social reproduction in economic life. As Bergeron argues, cuts ‘in government support for social reproduction’ and as advocated by the IMF, the World Bank, and other global governance institutions, have been based ‘on the flawed belief that women would take on the newly privatized care tasks formerly supported by the state and that women’s supply of non-­market labour’ is ‘“infinitely elastic” ’ (Elson 1998, quoted in Bergeron 2011, p. 151). IFIs tend to introduce ‘stabilisation and structural adjustment programs’ in societies ‘in which economic, social, and political power’ is already substantially unequally distributed between women and men (Aslanbeigui and Summerfield 2000, p. 85). ‘Women often need permission from male members of their families to work outside the home’, and ‘are crowded into low-­wage occupations and in the informal sector, are discriminated against in employment, and have a greater probability of being laid off’ (2000, p.  85). According to Aslanbeigui and Summerfield, stabilization and structural adjustment programmes have never been gender neutral, as the debt crises of the 1980s and beyond have shown (see also Sassen 2000; Young 2003; Bergeron 2011). As Aslanbeigui and Summerfield argue, these crises reinforce ‘already existing biases’ while creating new damage such as increasing levels of child labour, prostitution and domestic violence (2000, pp. 85–91).

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Gender and economic violence  ­351 The effects of economic restructuring on the workforces and populations involved have been dramatic, but rarely documented in neoliberal accounts themselves (Griffin 2009, p. 152). Importantly, economic restructuring is not simply a problem for poor people in the global South, although until the recent global financial crisis it may more easily have been dismissed as this. Policies of economic restructuring have, as Benería articulates, ‘increased the economic freedom of many actors involved in the functioning of markets’; but they have also depended on ‘the use of a strong hand on the part of national governments and international institutions to build the neoliberal model of late twentieth century’ (2003, p.  71). As recent engagements with the politics of austerity in the early twenty-­first century have attested, the austerity policies evident throughout not only the global South but also Northern societies have stripped social, welfare systems that would otherwise buffer populations against economic hardship. As such, and as Cooper and Whyte argue in the case of austerity policy-­making in the United Kingdom, these policies can be considered a form of systematic violence, creative of ‘devastatingly violent consequences’ for already vulnerable people (2017, p. 1). ‘Economics’ is not often linked directly with violence, especially across mainstream media and the public statements of government officials. Economics is so widely reported across media accounts ‘in terms of rational processes, statistics or the rising or declining fortunes of the political class’ that its function as ‘the means by which wealthy individuals and powerful institutions perpetuate harm on others’ is rarely articulated (Wayne and O’Neill 2016). ‘Economic violence’, Wayne and O’Neill argue, ‘involves causing harm by denying those in need, of the economic resources required to live above a minimum threshold’, and austerity is a perfect example, made possible through repeated representations and ‘negative and derogatory images of the working classes’ as ‘problematic and dangerous in ways that both justify austerity and excuse economic violence’. As an example, Emejulu and Bassel examine the UK’s new ‘citizenship test’, a process that ‘appears to be gender neutral’ but which, on closer inspection, ‘interacts with gendered social structures and ideologies’, such as gendered divisions of labour and of caring responsibilities (2018, p.  114). ‘This face of subjectivation by care is’, they argue, ‘the product of border control and austerity through which migrant women of colour experience material and discursive violence and barriers to public space’ (2018, p. 114). As carers, women are already constantly subject to ‘state intervention, control and violence’, but: For Muslim migrant women in particular, a discourse of failed care is deployed against them to justify everyday state intrusions in their lives. These failed

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352  Handbook on gender and violence care discourses are further exacerbated by austerity measures and a tightening border regime in which women are compelled to ‘become’ British citizens but the means to do so are withheld from them because of dramatic cuts to local services and seemingly impossible eligibility requirements for naturalization and citizenship. (Emejulu and Bassel 2018, pp. 116–117)2

CONCLUSION(S): VIOLENCE, ECONOMY AND GENDER Violence is part of the glue that binds certain relationships while regulating the boundaries of others. It is part of the story that entwines economy and gender, and that renders gender and violence only artificially separable practices of power. There are obvious examples here of where certain identities make no sense unless there is a certain a priori acceptance of violence as meaning-­bearing: ‘soldier’, ‘terrorist’, ‘warrior’, ‘enemy’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘criminal’, ‘radical’, ‘colonizer’. These identity categories are also highly gendered, and virtually impossible to imagine without some recourse to gendered social norms, assumptions or expectations. ‘Economist’ and ‘development policy-­maker’ may not spring immediately to mind, but these are also identity categories whose conceptual roots, intelligibility and possible impact are entwined with practices of (gendered) violence. This chapter has examined violence in economic life, looking closely at three particular thematic areas (violence against women, the violence of development and economic restructuring) as examples of current debates, in the practices and studies of the global political economy, on the systemic relationship between gender, economy and violence. While it is hoped that discussion here can point to further possibilities for thinking about violence, gender and economy, this chapter has only touched the surface of where this thinking might go. In the same way that economy and gender are co-­constitutive, mutually created in relationship with each other, this chapter has looked at gender and violence as only artificially separable. By showing what violence might mean, and the discursive significance of violence conceptualized broadly, this chapter contributes to the multiple ways it is possible to read gender and violence in world politics.

2   Emejulu and Bassel also note that, importantly, ‘care’ can also become a ‘galvanizing force for collective action’, serving as a form of resistance to hostile, austerity-­driven government policy that creates the ‘hierarchical exclusions and violence’ that the act of caring for and about others contests (2018, p. 117).

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Gender and economic violence  ­353

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354  Handbook on gender and violence Gaspar de Alba, A. and G. Guzmán (2010) Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and la Frontera, Austin: University of Texas Press. Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) (2019) ‘Women, Peace and Security Index’, accessed December 2018 at https://giwps.georgetown.edu/the-­index/. Goetz, A.M. (2018) ‘What does the new Women, Peace, and Security Index measure?’, 13 March, accessed November 2018 at https://theglobalobservatory.org/2018/03/what-­does-­ wps-­index-­measure/. Griffin, P. (2015) ‘Crisis, austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective’, Feminist Review, 109, 49–72. Griffin, P. (2009) Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, R.J. (2015) ‘Feminist strategies to end violence against women’, in R. Baksh and W. Harcourt (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 394–416. Harcourt, W. (ed.) (2016) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hedström, J. (2017) ‘How can feminist ethics help us with the study of violence and war?’ Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Sydney, 11 October, accessed January 2019 at http:// ppesydney.net/can-­feminist-­ethics-­help-­us-­study-­violence-­war/. Hess, C. and A. Del Rosario (2018) ‘Dreams deferred: a survey on the impact of intimate partner violence on survivors’ education, careers, and economic security’, Institute for Women’s Policy Research Report IWPR #C474, accessed February 2019 at https://iwpr. org/publications/dreams-­deferred-­domestic-­violence-­survey-­2018/. Howell, A. (2015) ‘Bodies, and violence: thinking with and beyond feminist IR’, The Disorder of Things, 14 July, accessed November 2018 at https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/07/14/ bodies-­and-­violence-­thinking-­with-­and-­beyond-­feminist-­ir/. International Labour Organization (ILO) (n.d.) ‘Informal economy’, https://www.ilo .org/global/topics/employment-­promotion/informal-­economy/lang--en/index.htm, accessed January 2019. Kabeer, N. (1994) Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, London and New York: Verso. Kothari, S. and W. Harcourt (2004) ‘Introduction: the violence of development’, Development, 47 (1), 3–7. Kothari, U. (ed.) (2005) A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies, London: Zed Books. Marchand, M.H. and J.L. Parpart (eds) (1995) Feminism, Postmodernism, Development, London and New York: Routledge. Meger, S. (2017) ‘Introducing feminist “secureconomy” ’, Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Sydney, 4 September, accessed November 2018 at http://ppesydney.net/ introducing-­feminist-­secureconomy/. Meger, S., A. Chisholm and S. Stachowitsch (2017) ‘Feminist Global “Secureconomy”: Linking Global Political Economy and Global Security’, Progress in Political Economy global-­ (PPE) Sydney, accessed November 2018 at http://ppesydney.net/feminist-­ secureconomy/. Mies, M., V. Bennholdt-­Thomsen and C. von Werlhof (1988) Women: The Last Colony, London: Zed Books. Mowforth, M. (2014) The Violence of Development: Resource Depletion, Environmental Crises and Human Rights Abuses in Central America, London: Pluto. Mundkur, A. and L.J. Shepherd (2018) ‘How (not) to make WPS count’, 23 January, accessed January 2019 at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/wps/2018/01/23/how-­not-­to-­make-­wps-­ count/. Nair, S. (2018) ‘Postcolonial feminism’ in J. Elias and A. Roberts (eds) Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 50–60. Navarro, S.A. (2002) ‘Las mujeres invisibles/the invisible women’ in N.A. Naples and M. Desai

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Gender and economic violence  ­355 (eds) Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 80–95. Oduro, A.D. and I. van Staveren (2015) ‘Engendering economic policy in Africa’, Feminist Economics, 21 (3), 1–22. Oduro, A.D., C.D. Deere and Z.B. Catanzarite (2015) ‘Women’s wealth and intimate partner violence: insights from Ecuador and Ghana’, Feminist Economics, 21 (2), 1–29. Pantaleo, K. (2010) ‘Gendered violence: an analysis of the Maquiladora murders’, International Criminal Justice Review, 20 (4), 349–365. Park, C.M.Y. (2018) ‘“Our lands are our lives”: gendered experiences of resistance to land grabbing in rural Cambodia’, Feminist Economics, 4 October, https://doi.org/10.1080/135 45701.2018.1503417. Peterson, V.S. (2003) A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies, London and New York: Routledge. Peterson, V.S. (2008) ‘“New wars” and gendered economies’, Feminist Review, 88 (1), 7–20. Peterson, V.S. (2016) ‘Gendering insecurities, informalization and “war economies” ’ in W.  Harcourt (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 441–462. Peterson, V.S. and A.S. Runyan (2014) Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (4th edn), Boulder, CO: Westview. Rai, S. (2018) ‘Gender and development’ in J. Elias and A. Roberts (eds) Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 142–158. Rai, S.M. and G. Waylen (eds) (2008) Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rajagopal, B. (2001) ‘The violence of development’, Washington Post, 9 August, accessed February 2019 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2001/08/09/the-­ violence-­of-­development/1b169574-­3992-­44ec-­bff9-­a1e42857f192/?noredirect=on&utm_​ term=.9cb3a467a6be. Sassen, S. (2000) ‘Women’s burden: counter-­geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival’, Journal of International Affairs, 53 (2), 503–524. Shepherd, L.J. (2013) Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories, London and New York: Routledge. True, J. (2012) The Political Economy of Violence Against Women, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. True, J. (2018) ‘The political economy of post-­conflict violence against women’ in J. Elias and A. Roberts (eds) Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 184–195. UN Women (2018) ‘Facts and figures: ending violence against women’, accessed February 2019 at http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-­we-­do/ending-­violence-­against-­women/facts-­ and-­figures. Voth Schrag, R., K.E. Ravi and S.R. Robinson (2018) ‘The role of social support in the link between economic abuse and economic hardship’, Journal of Family Violence, 10 November, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-­018-­0019-­8. Ward, K.B. (ed.) (1990) Women Workers and Global Restructuring, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Wayne, M. and D. O’Neill (2016) ‘The invisible victims of economic violence ought to shame the media’, openDemocracy, 24 May, accessed January 2019 at https://www.opendemoc racy.net/uk/austerity-­media/michael-­wayne-­deirdre-­o-neill/invisible-­victims-­of-­economic-­ violence-­ought-­to-­sha/. Weldes, J. and E. Wynne-­Hughes (2017) ‘Beyond binaries with feminist secureconomy’, Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Sydney, 11 September, accessed January 2019 at http://ppesydney.net/beyond-­binaries-­feminist-­secureconomy/. Wichterich, C. (2000) The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality, London: Zed Books. WIEGO (n.d.) ‘About the informal economy’, accessed January 2019 at http://www.wiego. org/informal-­economy/about-­informal-­economy.

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356  Handbook on gender and violence Wöhl, S. (2017a) ‘The gender dynamics of financialization and austerity in the European Union: the Irish case’ in J. Kantola and E. Lombardo (eds) Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 139–160. Wöhl, S. (2017b) ‘Security as a concept: issues for IR and feminist IPE’, Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Sydney, 22 November, accessed January 2019 at http://ppesydney.net/ security-­concept-­issues-­ir-­feminist-­ipe/. Young, B. (2003) ‘Financial crises and social reproduction: Asia, Argentina and Brazil’ in I. Bakker and S. Gill (eds) Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human Insecurity in the Global Political Economy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103–123.

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25.  Gender, violence and human rights Dianne Otto*

Prominently displayed at an anti-­sex education rally in Warsaw on 30 April 2015, a banner proclaimed: [We oppose the] Gender Convention about so-­called ‘violence against the women and violence in the family’ this is the Ebola for Poland from Brussels. (Korolczuk and Graff 2018, p. 811)

The banner’s hostile message was directed at the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (2011 Istanbul Convention), which has elsewhere been widely heralded as providing the most advanced system of protection from gender-­based violence of any international instrument to date (De Vido 2017, p.  70). It promotes harmonized standards to ensure that victims benefit from the same level of protection everywhere in Europe. All but two (the Russian Federation and Azerbaijan) of the 46 member states of the Council have expressed their support for the Istanbul Convention by signing it, while 32 states have deposited instruments of ratification, including Poland. The concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘gendered violence’ (usually understood as ‘violence against women’) arrived belatedly to the field of international human rights law, and their inclusion has never been without controversy. Both concepts made their ­ entrance – ­ separately and in ­ combination – ­through agreements reached at 1990s’ world conferences on human rights, on population and development, and on women, hosted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. Yet there continues to be furious disagreement in the human rights field about what is encompassed by the terminology of gender and, while the issue of violence against women was widely accepted as a human rights issue during the 1990s and 2000s, its central place on the human rights agenda is today threatened by the meteoric rise of neo-­conservative ‘pro-­family’ and ‘anti-­gender’ movements operating domestically in many states, and increasingly at the global level. In order to account for the analogy with racialized ­contamination – ­even ­death – ­that efforts to condemn violence against women as a human *  Thanks to my colleague Hilary Charlesworth for reading an earlier draft.

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358  Handbook on gender and violence rights violation have aroused in Europe, and the threat this poses to what has been achieved in the human rights field since 1990, I need to provide a context. I begin in the first section of this chapter with a potted genealogy of the treatment of gender and gendered violence in international human rights law, which has resulted in large part from feminist human rights campaigning, and more recently from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights advocacy. Developments following the world conferences have been significant, with the General Assembly condemning violence against women in all its forms, the Human Rights Treaty bodies interpreting their respective treaties to recognize violence against women as a human rights violation, and many of the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC, formerly the Commission on Human Rights) mainstreaming gender and integrating gendered violence into their mandates. In the second section, I map the parallel genealogy of the ‘transnational conservative patriarchal network’ (Chappell 2006, p.  493) and how it has sought to prevent and challenge these developments as threatening the ‘natural’ family and promoting a ‘homosexual agenda’. This mapping reveals that the main ‘battleground’ for contestation of human rights associated with gender and gendered violence has shifted from the General Assembly’s world conferences and their follow-­up events to the HRC, where the achievements of the last two decades are now looking frighteningly precarious. I conclude that the immediate future looks bleak for addressing gendered violence through the state-­based political mechanisms of international human rights law, while at the same time hoping that the many efforts to counter these neo-­patriarchal, homophobic and transphobic developments will succeed.

GENDERED VIOLENCE (AGAINST WOMEN): THE ROAD TO RECOGNITION AS A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION In 1989, a global campaign was launched by women’s rights advocates to demand that violence against women be recognized as a human rights violation. At this point, more than 40 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (GA Res. 217 A (III), 1948), it was clear that women’s rights had been systematically neglected and marginalized in the UN system (Reanda 1981). While the General Assembly had adopted its first resolution on domestic violence in 1985, it was treated as an issue of crime control and prevention, rather than as a gender-­based human rights violation (GA Res. 40/36, 1985). The global

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­359 campaign called for a ‘transformation’ of international human rights law to respond to women’s specific experiences of violation and degradation, describing violence against women as a ‘touchstone’ that illuminates the present failure of universal human rights to problematize structural relations of male domination (Bunch 1990). The campaign specifically sought to break down the public/private distinction, exempting the domestic sphere from human rights scrutiny that had vexed feminist engagement with international human rights law from its inception (Romany 1993). For many women, and especially Third World and poor women, this addressed only ‘half the problem’ as it did not recognize the gendered violence of private market actors, such as transnational corporations and banks, who, like private individuals, are not directly regulated by human Onyango and Tamale 1996; Obiora 1997). Despite rights law (Oloka-­ this shortcoming, women’s groups from around the world supported the campaign, showing that even addressing only half the problem spoke to women’s situations everywhere (see, for example, Center for Women’s Global Leadership 1998). The campaign was soon able to claim tangible results in legal developments, although a shift in state practice has proved much more difficult to achieve. As urged by the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights (UN WCHR, para. 38), the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (GA Res. 48/104, 1993) later that year. The Declaration recognized that violence against women both violates and impairs or nullifies the enjoyment by women of human rights and fundamental freedoms (preamble para. 5). Of particular importance is its entreaty that states ‘not invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination’ (art. 4). Clearly informed by feminist thinking, violence against women is described as a ‘manifestation of unequal power relations between men and women’ (preamble para. 6), rather than a problem of individual criminality, and, in a transformative move, gendered violence in the domestic sphere of the family was expressly included (art. 2). Consequently, family violence was no longer able to be dismissed as a private matter that lay outside the responsibility of s­ tates – ­or so it was hoped. At this point, the use of the terminology of gender was as a synonym for ­women – ­a usage that remained unquestioned for many years to come (Charlesworth 2005). Following the lead of the General Assembly, in 1994 the UN Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on the elimination of violence against women, its causes and consequences (SR VAW) to work closely with other human rights mechanisms and recommend measures to eliminate violence against women and remedy its consequences (CHR Res. 1994/45, para. 7). Subsequently, both the General Assembly and

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360  Handbook on gender and violence the HRC have made further concerted efforts to address violence against women as a human rights violation, including in the domestic sphere (Chinkin 2012, p. 448). As might be expected, the Committee that monitors the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) was quick to respond to the global campaign. Despite the absence of an express reference to violence against women in CEDAW, reflecting the prevailing reluctance to address the issue at the time it was drafted, the CEDAW Committee joined the global campaign and adopted General Recommendation No. 12 (1989), which requested that states parties include, in their periodic reports, information about measures they had taken to address all kinds of violence directed at women in everyday life, ‘including sexual violence, abuses in the family, sexual harassment at the workplace, etc.’ (para. 1). The CEDAW Committee has twice updated this General Recommendation. In the first of these updates, General Recommendation No. 19 (1992), violence against women is interpreted as a form of discrimination against women as defined in article 1 of CEDAW (para. 6), locating its elimination at the heart of CEDAW obligations, while the second, General Recommendation No. 35 (2017), is aimed at accelerating the elimination of ‘gender-­based violence against women’ (para. 9). With this new terminology of gender, the CEDAW Committee seeks to underscore that such violence is a social rather than an individual problem, implicitly acknowledging that, while their focus remains asymmetrically on women, gender-­based violence is not restricted to women. General Recommendation No. 35 (para. 2) also boldly asserts that ‘the prohibition of gender-­based violence against women’ has crystallized into a ‘principle of customary international law’ which, if accepted, would make the obligation binding on all states and not reliant on their ratification of CEDAW. These authoritative interpretations have enabled the CEDAW Committee to vigorously address the issue. Since 1992, violence against women has been routinely referred to in over 600 Concluding Observations to states parties, and more than two-­thirds of the 28 findings of a violation under the CEDAW Optional Protocol individual communications procedure (as of mid-­2018) have concerned gender-­based violence against women. Somewhat belatedly, the other Human Rights Treaty bodies also joined the growing consensus. They set about interpreting their respective treaties to include violence against women, as part of the commitment to gender mainstreaming assumed at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing (FWCW 1995, para. 221). Mainstreaming did not involve identifying new human rights, but reinterpreting existing state obligations to be inclusive of violations, including violence, suffered solely or primar-

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­361 ily by women because of their gender. It was argued, for example, that the prohibition of torture (a jus cogens norm the violation of which can never be justified) includes the most egregious forms of domestic violence (Copelon 1994), and that the definition of the right to adequate housing must recognize how domestic violence impacts on housing adequacy, security of tenure and habitability (Paglione 2006). Mainstreaming is a potentially powerful strategy because it does not require the time-­ consuming and politically fraught negotiation of new international instruments. Yet, perhaps because it is so potentially transformative, gender mainstreaming has been widely resisted and/or misunderstood (Gallagher 1997; Charlesworth 2005). The Human Rights Committee, which monitors the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR Committee), was the first treaty body to comprehensively outline its approach to gender mainstreaming with the adoption of General Comment No. 28 (2000) on the equality of rights between men and women. This authoritative interpretation reimagines the universal subject of the ICCPR as a woman and, in response to the continuing campaign to address violence against women, highlights many instances of such violence. For example, it is made clear that the right to life (ICCPR art. 6) may be violated if women have no option but to resort to the violence of backyard abortions (para. 10), and, taking up Copelon’s argument, that the right to be free from torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (ICCPR art. 7) may be violated if a state party fails to protect women from domestic violence (para. 11). When drafting the General Comment, the ICCPR Committee decided against including gendered harms experienced primarily or solely by ­men – ­like military conscription, for ­example – ­treating gender mainstreaming as an exercise aimed at including women. Also in 2000, the Committee that monitors implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD Committee) adopted General Recommendation No. XXV on the ‘gender-­related dimensions of racial discrimination’. Taking a different approach, the ICERD Committee (2000, para 3) elaborates a ‘methodology’ for analysing the relationship between gender and racial discrimination, aiming to develop ‘a more systematic and consistent approach’. This method opens the way to a deeper understanding of the structural dimensions of the intersection of race and sex/gender discrimination and how they work together. Again, the effectiveness of the campaign to address violence against women is evident in the few examples of intersectional discrimination provided, which all address race-­based violence against women (para. 2). Yet while General Recommendation No. XXV is noteworthy for its use of the language of ‘gender’ rather than ‘women’, there

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362  Handbook on gender and violence is no indication that the intention was to recognize that men and other gender identities may also suffer from discrimination in which race and gender intersect. A fuller conception of gender mainstreaming is evident in General Comment No. 16 (2005), adopted by the Committee that monitors the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR Committee). This General Comment identifies men, as well as women, as potentially suffering gendered harms in the enjoyment of ICESCR rights. For example, with respect to the right to social security, states parties are expected to guarantee ‘adequate maternity leave for women, paternity leave for men, and parental leave for both men and women’ (para. 26). It is also recognized, somewhat controversially, that victims of domestic violence are ‘primarily women’, thereby acknowledging that men too may be victims (para. 27). This more inclusive approach to gendered violence is perilous at the same time as being potentially transformative for feminist work in human rights law. If used as a means to deny the general reality of women’s structural inequality vis-­à-vis men, a move away from asymmetry would be disastrous for efforts to address women’s inequality, and there are many ‘men’s rights’ groups who seek to do just this, especially in opposition to family law and laws on violence against women (Boyd and Sheehy 2016, p. 5). However, a more symmetrical approach also has the radical potential to support a move towards recognizing men’s gendered human rights abuses, as well as women’s, which would help eliminate protective approaches to women (discussed further below) and advance a better understanding of the many ways in which gender structures relations of power. Including men as subjects of the strategy of gender mainstreaming also points to the importance of recognizing state obligations to eliminate harmful notions of masculinity that lead to gendered violence, which is conceptually excluded if violence against women is treated, predominantly, as an issue of women’s equality (Anderson 2008; Amirthalingam 2005). An even more inclusive approach to gender mainstreaming is championed by the Committee that monitors the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT Committee) in General Comment No. 2 (2008) on implementation obligations, which makes some important observations about the gender dimensions of CAT. The General Comment emphasizes that ‘gender is a key [risk] factor’ (para. 22). It notes that, for women, the risk is particularly acute in contexts that include ‘deprivation of liberty, medical treatment, particularly involving reproductive decisions, and violence by private actors in communities and homes’ (para. 22). For men, gendered violations of CAT include ‘rape or sexual violence and abuse’ and, further,

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­363 men and boys, as well as women and girls, may be subject to violations ‘on the basis of their actual or perceived non-­conformity with socially determined gender roles’ (para. 22). This approach opens the way for the CAT Committee to identify the full range of gendered human rights violations experienced solely or primarily on the basis of gender (identity), including women, men and other gender identities. This approach is consistent with the definition of gender identity adopted by the non-­binding Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (ICJ 2007), which makes it clear that everyone has a gender identity, ‘which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth’ (footnote 2). Thus, in CAT General Comment No. 2, it is finally recognized in international human rights law that gendered violence can take many forms and may, potentially, affect everyone in some way. Addressing gender-­based violence as a human rights violation has been further expounded in regional human rights instruments. The hostility expressed by the banner referred to at the start of this chapter, is directed at the Istanbul Convention, in which gender is defined as ‘the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men’ (art. 3(c)). This definition no doubt motivated the Polish Minister of Justice, who opposed Poland’s ratification, to describe it derisively as a ‘carrier of gender ideology’ (Graff and Korolczuk 2017, p. 178). Additionally, the treaty establishes a series of offences involving violence against women that ratifying states agree to incorporate into their domestic law, many of which take place in the domestic sphere. They include psychological violence, stalking, physical violence, sexual violence including all engagement in non-­consensual acts of a sexual nature (including marital rape), forced marriage, female genital mutilation, forced abortion and forced sterilization, sexual harassment and crimes committed in the name of so-­called ‘honour’ (arts 33–42). Other regional instruments include the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women (1994), the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (African Union 2003, art. 4) and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women in the ASEAN Region (ASEAN 2004). Yet while the issue of violence against women has proved to be a remarkably productive ‘touchstone’ for countering the marginalization of women’s gendered experiences of human rights violations, its effects have been double-­edged. Ironically, the issue has breathed new life into the conservative and racialized gender scripts that are deeply embedded in international law, which feminists have sought to challenge (Nesiah 1993).

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364  Handbook on gender and violence Traditional stereotypes of women’s (sexual) vulnerability and dependence have been revitalized (Scully 2009), and women are often viewed as ‘poor victims’ in need of masculine/state ‘protection’ (SR VAW 2009, para. 85). Such gender stereotypes have legitimated protective and paternalistic, rather than empowering responses to addressing violence against women (Miller 2004), even in the human rights field where protective responses were firmly rejected with the adoption of the principles of universality and equality between women and men in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Thus, in the name of addressing violence against women we have seen increased police powers, increased support for carceral responses, more criminal laws (Engle 2016) and the curtailment of women’s sexual freedoms, such as they were. In a rear-­ guard action, drafters of the more recent human rights instruments have attempted to counter protective responses. The Istanbul Convention, for example, identifies women’s empowerment and economic independence among its aims (arts 6, 12(6) and 18(3)). The problem of reinforcing traditional gender hierarchies is compounded by the emphasis that has been placed on forms of violence suffered predominantly by women outside the West (and migrant women in the West), such as forced/child marriage, female genital mutilation and the burning of widows, while Western practices of genital surgeries on intersex babies and ‘cosmetic’ surgeries like labiaplasty and breast augmentation escape condemnation. As a result, colonial stereotypes of the ‘native’ victim subject in need of rescue from her own traditions by ‘civilized’ human rights defenders have been newly invigorated (Kapur 2002). This bias, reflecting the imperial history of international human rights law, was apparent in earlier efforts to address violence against women which treated it as a ‘harmful traditional practice’, and thus a problem of ‘traditional’ societies, rather than a problem of structural inequalities inherent in gender relations (SR VAW 2009, para. 85). The intractability of this Orientalism is again evident in CEDAW Joint General Recommendation No. 31 (2014) on ‘harmful practices’ (adopted with the Committee on the Rights of the Child), which lists, as illustrative examples, child/forced marriage, female genital mutilation, polygamy and so-­called honour crimes (paras 19–30). In result, women outside the West have been represented as suffering the ‘worst’ forms of gendered violence (exonerating the West), and non-­ Western women have borne the brunt of protective consequences. Another problem with the campaign to focus on violence against women as a human rights violation is its assumption of a fixed gender d ­ ualism – ­male perpetrator/female ­victim – w ­ hich ignores, and therefore devalues, other forms of gender-­based violence experienced by men (Sivakumaran 2005) and those who do not conform to dominant dualistic gender expec-

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­365 tations, including those who identify as transgender, third gender, fluidly gendered, intersex, lesbian and gay (Otto 2013). Compounding this problem is the lack of agreement about the definition of the term ‘gender’, even among women’s human rights advocates, as seen in the different approaches taken by the human rights treaty bodies in their efforts at gender mainstreaming. Is ‘gender’ biologically (naturally) determined or socially/performatively (re)produced? Is it a euphemism for women, or does it refer to both women and men (Rosenblum 2011)? Does its usage entail the rejection of fixed, biologically based, dualistic understandings of gender that assume heteronormative relational ties (Cossman 2002; Gross 2008)? Does it enable recognition of the shifting array of expressions, identities, subjectivities and practices of gender? There has been deep disagreement about the meaning of the term ‘gender’ in international human rights law, at least since the Beijing World Conference on Women, where an uneasy compromise allowed the term to enter the international legal lexicon (Baden and Goetz 1997; Buss 1998, p. 351). At this point the opposition to the term was spearheaded by the Vatican (acting at the UN through its offices as the Holy See), which warned that the terminology of ‘gender’ would threaten the ‘natural’ family and condone a host of ‘unnatural’ sexual practices, like homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality (Otto 1996, p. 11). Along with several states, the Vatican placed on record an interpretive statement making it clear that ‘gender’ should be read ‘according to its ordinary usage in the United Nations context’, as referring to only two sexes, male and female, ‘as grounded in biological sexual identity’ (Reservations and Interpretive Statements 1995, para. 11). Today, however, this disagreement has reached a crescendo in the work of the HRC, where a highly organized coalition of states, religious bodies and non-­governmental organizations (NGOs), fuelled by right-­wing populist and religious movements from around the world, are threatening the gains made in addressing gender-­based violence in human rights law. It is to this looming threat that I now turn.

‘PRO-­FAMILY/TRADITIONAL VALUES’ TRUMP (PRIVATE) GENDERED VIOLENCE AS A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE The controversy over ‘gender’ at the Beijing Conference led the UN to adopt a definition that distinguished between ‘sex’ (nature) and ‘gender’ (nurture), which has since been widely accepted and relied upon (see, for example, Secretary-­General 1998, para. 16). Notably, this definition did not challenge gender dualism. For women’s rights advocates, the ­importance

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366  Handbook on gender and violence of the sex/gender distinction was that it recognized that women’s (and men’s) prospects, roles and opportunities were socially constructed, and that women’s unequal status could no longer be justified on biological grounds (Women’s Net 1995). Rather, gender needs to be understood as serving the analytical and functional purpose of organizing power along the lines of male/female difference, although feminists continue to disagree about the extent to which sex/biology has any determinative influence (Davies 1997). The understanding that a person’s gender identity is not biologically determined is fundamental to the feminist principle of gender equality. This sex/gender distinction has been widely accepted by the international human rights mechanisms, although, as I have indicated, it remains common for gender to be understood as dualism, and to be used as a synonym for women. Yet slowly, as evident from my discussion in the previous section, this usage is being challenged by both feminist and LGBTI human rights experts and advocates by, for example, questioning the asymmetrical focus on ‘women’s’ rights, and arguing that gendered violence includes violence directed at non-­heteronormative sexual practices and/or orientation and non-­dualistic gender identities (Sharpe 2002). In the five years that followed the Beijing Conference, a more organized, orthodox, inter-­faith alliance emerged at the UN. Uniting the Vatican with Christian right organizations and sympathetic states, including the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), this alliance cohered, despite their many differences, around defence of the ‘natural’ family, avowal of motherhood and protection of ‘pro-­ family’ values against those women’s rights seen as destructive to the family and promoting homosexuality. This fledgling alliance tested its influence by ‘storming’ the Beijing +5 follow-­up conference held in New York in 2000, hoping to undermine the gains made in Beijing around women’s reproductive and sexual rights and again ensure that ‘sexual orientation’ did not appear in the official outcome documents (Buss and Herman 2003, p. 101). In this newly vocal group, the Vatican was joined by Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Syria (Amnesty International 2000), as well as right-­wing Protestant and Catholic organizations. While the result was not as devastating for women’s human rights as many in the alliance had hoped, their interventions prevented any strengthening of the Beijing commitments and laid the groundwork for further cooperation. In the years that followed, anxiety about the supposed ‘homosexual agenda’ hidden in women’s rights advocacy grew, even as there was little recognition of gay and lesbian rights in practice (Buss 2004). Then, as the LGBTI human rights movement found its voice, the range of issues joined together under the banner of ‘pro-­family’ values, broadened to include: opposition to acknowledging a diversity of family forms; refusal to recog-

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­367 nize the multiplicity of sexual orientations and gender identities; rejection of same-­sex marriage and adoption by same-­sex couples; denial of access to new reproductive technologies; and opposition to sex education, gender mainstreaming and promotion of the use of condoms by safe-­sex campaigns. The increased visibility of antagonism to homosexuality served to strengthen the participation of Muslim states in the ‘pro-­family’ alliance, as evident at the General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS in 2001, where recognizing ‘gay men’ or ‘men who have sex with men’ as one of the vulnerable groups was rejected by an insistent group of predominantly Islamic states (Buss 2004, p. 272). The ‘pro-­family’ lobby focused its attention on the HRC following its establishment in 2005. The increased pressure to recognize violence and discrimination associated with non-­normative sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) as human rights violations added grist to the lobby’s mill of misinformation and fear-­mongering. Rather than rejecting the framework of human rights set out in the UDHR, the strategy that emerged was to reinterpret it, locating its foundation in ‘traditional values’. In 2009, a controversial resolution entitled ‘Promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind’ (HRC Res. 12/21, 2009), initiated by the Russian Federation, was adopted. Several years earlier, the Russian state, urged on by the Russian Orthodox Church, had embraced ‘traditional values’ as the hallmark of its national identity, which was also deployed ‘as a kind of exceptionalist-­ messianic pose to present Russia as the saviour of Europe and the leading defender of true European [traditional heteronormative] values’ (Moss 2017, p. 195). At the HRC, Russia was using the platform of ‘traditional values’ to revive its weakened position in global affairs by distinguishing itself from the ‘decadent west’ and assuming leadership of the ‘anti-­western’ world (Gessen 2014). It also cemented an alliance with the OIC, which premises its approach to human rights on ‘Islamic values of justice and equality’, emphasizing distinct roles for women and men that come with different sets of rights and duties (Blitt 2017, pp. 798–799). The OIC is specifically concerned to promote and protect ‘Islamic family values’, according to Shari’ah law, by limiting women’s rights to sexual and reproductive health, defending ‘reciprocal’ (rather than equal) roles for men and women in families, and ensuring that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman (Blitt 2017, pp. 809–811). In this context, though, it is important to remember that practices within OIC states vary enormously, and that there are many social movements working domestically for the recognition of SOGI-­associated rights (see, for example, Pakistan’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act (2018), which allows people to choose their gender and to have that identity recognized on official documents).

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368  Handbook on gender and violence Two further ‘traditional values’ resolutions followed the 2009 resolution. The first of these requested the HRC Advisory Committee to prepare a study on the issue (HRC Res. 16/3, 2011). The second, sponsored again by Russia, called for a reinterpretation of human rights in accordance with traditional values of ‘dignity, freedom and responsibility’ (HRC Res. 21/3, 2012). In a show of defiance, the second resolution was adopted before the study was finalized, after a preliminary draft revealed that the Advisory Committee was critical of the concept of ‘traditional values’, describing it as ‘vague, subjective and unclear’ (HRC Advisory Committee, 2012a, para. 74). This resolution was adopted by a clear majority, with a vote of 24 to 14, and 7 abstentions. The resolution identified ‘dignity, freedom and responsibility’ – but not equality and non-­discrimination – ­as traditional values that contribute to the protection of human rights. The final study, released later in 2012, acknowledged that there were ‘divided views’ on the relationship between traditional values and human rights (HRC Advisory Committee 2012b, para. 6), and advised that while the roots of universal human rights can be found in diverse traditional values, some traditional values had helped maintain unequal social power structures, affecting women and minority groups in particular (paras 32–44). Importantly, the study also observed that families are themselves diverse and are not the only institution entrusted with transmitting human rights values, highlighting the important role of communities, societies and educational institutions (paras 57–64). Undeterred, in the lead-­up to the 20th anniversary of the International Year of the Family in 2014, the ‘traditional values’ lobby was in full swing at the HRC, taking the opportunity to assert the primacy of ‘traditional family values’, propelled not only by the spectre of women’s equality in the family and reproductive rights, but also by spreading international support for LGBTI rights. A resolution entitled ‘Protection of the Family’ (HRC Res. 26/11, 2014), sponsored by Egypt, was adopted by a vote of 26 to 14, with 6 abstentions. Those who voted in favour included China, the Russian Federation, all members of the HRC from the OIC and the Group of African States. The resolution failed to recognize that ‘various forms of the family exist’, despite this formulation being accepted in Beijing (para. 29) and repeated many times since then by human rights bodies and in General Assembly resolutions. The HRC resolution also made no reference to women’s equality in the family. These omissions were hardly innocent. They indicated the ‘traditional’ version of the family that supporters of the resolution had in ­mind – ­based on heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, patriarchal sexual relations, and emphatically not non-­traditional families comprising LGBTI persons. Further, the resolution (wrongly) treated the family as the primary human rights-­

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­369 holder, subsuming the rights of individual family members (International Service for Human Rights 2015) and making no reference to human rights abuses that occur within families. Ominously, the Concept Note for the panel discussion on protection of the family, called for by the resolution, contained the same omissions as the resolution (Raday 2015). Thankfully, many participants in the panel discussion insisted on the recognition of family diversity and that families can be dangerous, particularly for women, children and the elderly (UNHCHR 2014). Undaunted, the ‘protection of the family’ lobby drafted another HRC resolution entitled ‘Protection of the family: contribution of the family to the realization of the right to an adequate standard of living for its members, particularly through its role in poverty eradication and achieving sustainable development’ (HRC Res. 29/22, 2015). As indicated by its title, the resolution sought to influence the discussions on the post-­2015 development agenda, which were taking place later that year. This resolution again failed to acknowledge the diversity of families, although it did recognize ‘single-­headed households, child-­headed households and intergenerational households’ as being ‘particularly vulnerable to poverty and social exclusion’ (para. 13). Also absent were any references to reproductive rights or decision-­making about the spacing of children. A brief reference to women’s equality in the family was finally included (para. 9), but only after heated debate. Echoing the earlier resolution, the family is treated as an institution that needs protection, in part so that it can protect the human rights of its members, without acknowledging the human rights abuses that can occur within families. There were only references to violence in the 11 preambular and 30 operative paragraphs of the 2015 HRC resolution on family protection. In the first reference, protection of the family is presented as a measure that promotes and protects the rights of individual family members outside the family, including ‘protection against violence, abuses, sexual exploitation, harmful practices and the worst forms of child labour’ (para. 17). The second reference calls for the provision of assistance to families and the individuals within them ‘who may be affected by specific problems’ (para. 21). The illustrative list of such specific problems included ‘domestic and sexual violence’, ‘incest’ and ‘child abuse’, as well as ‘extreme poverty’ and ‘chronic unemployment’, which also suggests that the causes of internal family problems may lie outside the family rather than within. The resolution was adopted by a vote of 29 to 14, with 4 abstentions, garnering even stronger support for the ‘traditional’ family than the earlier resolutions. Alarmingly, it appears that treating violence against women (and others) in the domestic sphere as a violation of their human rights no longer has universal support. This is a significant setback for efforts to have gendered

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370  Handbook on gender and violence violence treated with the seriousness that it merits: as a violation of universal human rights. It also suggests that the CEDAW Committee’s claim that the prohibition of gendered violence against women has achieved the status of customary international law is wrong. These developments at the HRC were not occurring in isolation from world politics. They reflect an emerging ‘new [illiberal/anti-­modernist] universalism’ that is more broadly championing the rights of the family as a ‘natural’ and fundamental social unit, in place of individual human rights (Korolczuk and Graff 2018, p.  801). The earlier international alliance of conservatives and religious fundamentalists that emerged in the decade following the 1990s’ world conferences has been emboldened and enlarged by the recent rise of right-­wing ‘anti-­gender’ populist movements. These movements widely belittle women’s equality and LGBT rights as ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender theory’ (Paternotte and Kuhar 2017, p. 253) and malign their advocacy as a form of ‘ideological colonization’, which has become a ‘metaphor for the arrogance of Western [neo]liberal elites’ at home and abroad (Korolczuk and Graff 2018, p. 797). Since the global economic crisis in 2008, a critique of contemporary global capitalism previously associated with postcolonial and left-­wing radicality has been incorporated into the anti-­feminist and anti-­homosexual platforms of many anti-­gender movements (Korolczuk and Graff 2018, p.  801). Another point of convergence of these disparate movements is their various racist commitments to ethnic and national homogeneity. Polish right-­ wing populists, for example, depict ‘Brussels’ (the Council of Europe) as threatening the sustainability of the whiteness of the Polish nation, not only with the contagion of gender ideology but also with its immigration and refugee policies (Korolczuk and Graff 2018, p. 811). This assemblage of conservative threats, despite its many contradictions and instabilities, provides a powerful base from which to lay claim to be the ‘true’ voice of domestic and global civil society (the oppressed majority) who are victims of the ‘political correctness’ and/or corruptness of Western global elites. Thus, we see, for example, the concerns of the ‘protection of the family’ lobby at the HRC expanding to include promoting the right to food, eradicating poverty and endorsing sustainable development. The combination of commitments built on the precarity produced by neo-­liberal economics and the challenges to white male supremacy presented by feminism and LGBTI activism has provided the glue for a coalition of an eclectic array of actors, including states, political parties, religious groups, NGOs and many individuals. Such is its grip on the politics of fear that linkages have been drawn between ‘gender ideology’ and deadly contagion (as at the Polish anti-­sex education demonstration), as well as global terrorism, totalitarianism and, according

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­371 to Pope Benedict XVI, ‘the self-­destruction of man himself’ (Case 2011, p. 812). Efforts to address violence against women as a violation of human rights have been one of the targets of domestic anti-­gender movements and, as we have seen, are increasingly endangered at the international level. In Europe, widespread opposition to the Istanbul Convention has emerged, not only in Poland but also in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and Ukraine. Opponents have accused the Convention of ‘violating the sanctity of marriage and the family’ and threatening ‘traditional values’ (Muižnieks 2017). Portentously, with the full support of President Putin, the Russian Duma decriminalized some forms of domestic violence in early 2017 by a vote of 380–3 (Stanglin 2017). A series of amendments were adopted that reduced the severity of some offences. For example, the crime of battery within families was downgraded to an administrative offence when it does not result in ‘substantial bodily harm’, which results in a fine for first-­time offenders (Manuilova 2017). Those who supported the new legislation argued that treating family violence as a criminal offence encroached into family affairs and wrongly punished parents for disciplining their children (Manuilova 2017). A year later, reports of surging rates of domestic battery in Russia abound (Stallard 2018). Disconcertingly, the global anti-­gender network, as well as many of its domestic counterparts, does not hesitate to draw heavily on the language of human rights when it suits its purposes. Frequent mantras include support for freedom of speech, thought and conscience, freedom of religion, cultural rights, economic and social rights, democratic rights, children’s rights, family rights and even women’s r­ ights – t­ o motherhood and to be protected by ‘traditional’ family values. At the HRC, the UDHR is constantly invoked as the basis for anti-­gender work in defence of ‘universally agreed’ human rights. In so doing, the transnational patriarchal network presents its quest as legitimate and just, as committed to respecting and promoting the human values of dignity, freedom and responsibility, and as offering an alternative vision of human rights that is more representative of the world’s people, their cultures, religions and traditions. In this substitute frame, gendered violence, especially when it occurs in the family and when it targets LGBTI people, is firmly removed from the human rights corpus.

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372  Handbook on gender and violence

CONCLUSION In 2009, the Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, critically reviewing 15 years of work, claimed that applying a human rights perspective to violence against women has given it momentum to break the silence surrounding it: ‘Today, a life free of violence is increasingly accepted as an entitlement rather than merely a humanitarian concern’ (SR VAW 2009, para. 35). Could she then have predicted what was coming? By 2017, the CEDAW Committee in General Recommendation No. 35 on violence against women, despite claiming that the prohibition has achieved the status of customary international law, notes the ‘erosion of legal and policy frameworks to eliminate gender-­based discrimination or violence, often justified in the name of tradition, culture, religion or fundamentalist ideologies’ (para. 7). There continues to be considerable opposition to these developments. In 2015, at the same session that the HRC adopted its traditional values resolution, the report of the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women in Law and Practice was accepted, which stated: The cultural construction of gender makes women’s subjection to gender-­based discrimination and violence appear to be inherent and immutable. The patriarchal family is the product of this construction and the most important social mechanism for its perpetuation. Women and girls’ human potential is restricted in families. (WG 2015, para. 71)

At the same session, the HRC adopted its annual resolution on the elimination of violence against women, which focused on domestic violence, underscoring ‘that domestic violence is of public concern and that States have the primary responsibility for protecting and promoting the human rights of women and girls [. . .] facing domestic violence’ (HRC Res. 29/14, 2015, para. 6). In 2016, the High Commissioner for Human Rights presented a report to the HRC on protection of the family which outlined a human rights-­based approach to family policies which called, inter alia, for legal recognition of same-­sex couples (UNHCHR 2016, para. 27) and protection for children from discrimination based on their own or their parent/guardian’s sexual orientation or gender identity (para. 42). Perhaps most importantly, people directly affected by gendered violence continue to organize locally, nationally, regionally and i­nternationally – ­with the support of other human rights defenders, and sometimes backed by states and religious ­organizations – ­to claim and defend their rights. The international campaign to eliminate violence against women that commenced in 1989 continues, now joined by the more recent burgeoning of LGBTI activism against homophobic and transphobic violence. Men,

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Gender, violence and human rights  ­373 too, have started to speak out about the gendered violence they endure. So, the transformation in human rights law by way of the ‘touchstone’ of addressing gendered violence may yet come, despite the many forces currently amassed to prevent it.

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Reports, Resolutions, International Instruments and Domestic Legislation African Union (2003) Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, adopted July 1, entered into force 25 November 2005. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2004) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women in the ASEAN Region. CAT Committee (2008) ‘General Comment No. 2: Implementation of article 2 by States parties’, UN Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev.9 (Vol. II) 376. CEDAW Committee (1989) ‘General Recommendation No. 12: Violence against women’. CEDAW Committee (1992) ‘General Recommendation No. 19: Violence against women’, UN Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev.9 (Vol. II) 331. CEDAW Committee (2014) ‘Joint General Recommendation No. 31/General Comment No. 18 of the Committee on the Rights of the Child on harmful practices’, UN Doc. CEDAW/C/GC/31-­CRC/C/GC/18, 14 November. CEDAW Committee (2017) ‘General Recommendation No. 35 on gender-­based violence against women, updating general recommendation No. 19’, UN Doc. CEDAW/C/GC/35, 26 July. CHR (1994) ‘Question of integrating the rights of women into the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations and the elimination of violence against women’, CHR Res. 1994/45 in E/CN.4/1994/132, 4 March. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984) UN GA Res. 39/46, 10 December, entered into force 26 June 1987. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) UN GA Res. 34/180, 18 December, entered into force 3 September 1981. Council of Europe (2011) Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, CETS No. 210, 11 May, entered into force 1 August 2014. Fourth World Conference on Women (1995) Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action, Beijing, 4–15 September. General Assembly (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN Doc. Res. 217 A (III), 10 December. General Assembly (1985) ‘Resolution on domestic violence’, UN Doc A/RES/40/36, 29 November. General Assembly (1993) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, UN Doc. A/RES/48/104, 20 December. HRC Advisory Committee (2012a) Preliminary study on promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind, UN Doc. A/HRC/AC/9/2, 1 June. HRC Advisory Committee (2012b) Study of the Human Rights Advisory Council on p­ romoting

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376  Handbook on gender and violence human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind, UN Doc A/HRC/22/71, 6 December. HRC Resolution (2014) ‘Protection of the family’, UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/26/11, 16 July. HRC Resolution (2015) ‘Protection of the family: contribution of the family to the realization of the right to an adequate standard of living for its members, particularly through its role in poverty eradication and achieving sustainable development’, UN Doc. A/HRC/ RES/29/22, 22 July. HRC Resolution (2015) ‘Accelerating efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women: eliminating domestic violence’, UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/29/14, 22 July. ICCPR Committee (2000) ‘General Comment No. 28: Article 3 (Equality of Rights between Men and Women)’, UN Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev 5, March 29. Related ICERD Committee (2000) ‘General Recommendation No. XXV: Gender-­ Dimensions of Racial Discrimination’, UN Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev.5, April 26. ICESCR Committee (2005) ‘General Comment No. 16: The equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all economic, social and cultural rights (art. 3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights)’, UN Doc. E/C.12/2005/4, August 11. Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women (1994). International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) UN GA Res. 220 A(XXI) 16 December, entered into force 23 March 1976. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) UN GA Res. 2200 A(XXI), 16 December, entered into force 3 January 1976. Pakistan, Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, adopted 7 March 2018. Reservations and interpretative statements on the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), in Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 4–15 September 1995), UN Doc. A/CONF.177/20, 17 October, New York: UN Department of Public Information, pp. 157–176. Secretary General (1998) ‘Integrating the gender perspective into the work of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies’, UN Doc. HRI/MC/1998/6, 3 September. Special Rapporteur on violence against women (2009), 15 Years of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences (1994–2009): A Critical Review, UN Doc. A/HRC/11/6/Add.5, 27 May. Special Rapporteur on violence against women (2018) Report on Online Violence Against Women and Girls from a Human Rights Perspective, UN Doc A/HRC/38/47, 14 June. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2014) Summary of HRC Panel Discussion on the Protection of the Family, A/HRC/28/40, 22 December. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2016) ‘Protection of the family: contribution of the family to the realization of the right to an adequate standard of living for its members, particularly through its role in poverty eradication and achieving sustainable development’, UN Doc. A/HRC/31/37, 15 January. UN World Conference on Human Rights (1993) Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, Vienna, 25 June. UN World Conference on Women (1995) Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 4–15 September 1995), UN Doc. A/CONF.177/20, 17 October, New York: UN Department of Public Information. Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice (2015) ‘Thematic analysis: eliminating discrimination against women in cultural and family life, with a focus on the family as a cultural space’, UN Doc. A/HRC/29/40, 2 April. Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (2007) International Commission of Jurists (ICJ).

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26.  Gender, violence and criminal justice Bianca Fileborn

This chapter outlines key contemporary debates relating to gender, violence and the criminal justice system. Violence is ‘gendered’ in a number of senses. Firstly, there are gendered patterns in the ‘types’ of violence men, women and gender diverse people encounter, and the contexts in which they experience violence (Walklate 2001). If we take physical assault as one example, Australian data indicates that men experience this form of violence at a higher rate than women, putting issues of under-­reporting to the side for the time being. In 2016, 5.4 per cent of Australian men reported experiencing physical violence, in contrast to 3.5 per cent of women (ABS 2017a). Secondly, it is clear that men experience this violence in vastly different contexts to women. Men are more likely to be physically assaulted in a public or semi-­public location, and to be assaulted by a stranger. In comparison, women are much more likely to be assaulted in a private or residential location by someone they know (ABS 2017a). With regard to the criminal justice system, we also see gendered patterns in terms of who is able to report to and access the system, in which circumstances and for certain types of v­ iolence – t­hough these patterns are also inflected with other socio-­structural factors such as class, race and sexuality. The first section of this chapter examines these gendered patterns, and some of the factors underlying them, in further detail. Violence is also gendered in the sense that it is intimately connected and intertwined with gender identity and the body, and these bodies are also classed, raced, sexualized and (dis)abled (Stanko 2003). Violence may, for example, be used as a vehicle for masculine performance and in reinforcing hierarchies of masculinity. Both experiencing and perpetrating violence might tell us something about ‘what it means’ to be a man or a woman (Stanko 1990; Walklate 2001): violence is instructive and productive. How we relate to and understand violence depends on which bodies are enacting that violence, and in which contexts. For example, we might construct physical violence occurring on the sports field or in a boxing ring much differently to that occurring on the street or within an intimate relationship. As Elizabeth Stanko observes, the ways in which we understand violence depend on the extent to which it adheres to the often ‘unspoken and unwritten’ rules of engagement (2003, p.  11). All of this is to say that violence is socially and culturally constructed. It is not a ‘natural’ or 377

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378  Handbook on gender and violence pre-­given category; rather, the boundaries of violence are permeable, and socially, culturally and historically contingent (Stanko 2003). Definitions of violence are contested, with the process of recognition deeply implicated in power relations and structural inequalities (Stanko 2003). This chapter aims to unpack some of the ways in which the criminal justice system is itself implicated in the construction of gender, bodies and violence. As Calavita (2001, p. 90) notes, criminal justice practice works to reinforce ‘particular ideologies through the power of its own legitimacy and its ongoing affirmation of the taken-­for-­granted social reality’, though it may occasionally also work to challenge, subvert and disrupt dominant ideologies (see also Smart 1990). Implicit here is the notion that the criminal justice system is not neutral in its operation. Feminist and other critical scholars have long argued that the construction and operation of the criminal justice system reflect and perpetuate the worldview of white, heterosexual, middle-­class men (Kennedy and Easteal 2011; Smart 1990; White and Easteal 2016). Key debates pertaining to gender, violence and criminal justice are taken up in a broad and conceptual sense. I do not seek to ‘drill down’ into these issues as they emerge in specific jurisdictions, but rather draw together international (predominantly Western) scholarship across key themes and issues. The discussion here cuts across a range of different ‘types’ and contexts of violence as a means of delving into broader debate. I am concerned with forms of violence that occur at the ‘domestic’ level between private citizens. This chapter does not address forms of violence that occur within wartime or transitional states, or state-­perpetrated violence, though this inevitably reinforces a false dichotomy between these different ‘scales’ of violence (see Pain 2015). Finally, the scope of this chapter is limited to violence that occurs between adults. This chapter is structured into three sections. Firstly, I examine trends in access to the criminal justice system for different ‘types’ of violence. Secondly, I interrogate the construction of violence and gender through the justice system. In closing, I briefly outline emerging, innovative justice responses to gender-­based violence.

ACCESSING JUSTICE From the outset, it is vital to note that incidents of violence that come to the attention of the criminal justice system are in the minority for most subsets of violence discussed in this chapter, perhaps with the exception of lethal violence. As Stanko suggests, ‘prosecution is still the least travelled route following an incident of violence. More often than not, people find a way of coming to terms with “what happened” outside of the law’ (2003,

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­379 p.  5). Even so, the extent to which violence comes to be ­known – ­and how it comes to be known (or not) – by the criminal justice system shifts across different iterations of violence: there are different epistemologies of violence within the criminal justice system. Levels of under-­reporting for all forms of violence addressed here may be heightened for particular groups who have both historically and contemporaneously experienced discrimination and oppression within the justice system, such as sex workers, Indigenous people, people of colour, people living with disability or mental illness, and homeless people (Willis 2011). Violence against Women Virtually all forms of gender-­based violence against women are highly under-­reported, with the vast majority of victim-­survivors never reporting their experience to the criminal justice system. This trend of under-­ reporting is observed internationally. For example, the United Nation’s (2015) World’s Women report documents that in the majority of countries for which data was available, less than 10 per cent of women reported experiences of violence to the ­police – ­with this figure drawing together reporting rates for different forms of violence against women. Another study on sexual violence in Latin America found that approximately 5 per cent of women who experienced sexual violence had reported it to the police (Contreras et al. 2010). Reasons for under-­reporting are vast and complex. Commonly documented barriers include: fear of reprisal from the perpetrator; belief that the incident was not ‘serious’ enough to report; shame and embarrassment; lack of awareness or access to support services; not understanding that the incident constituted a criminal offence (and, as we shall see below, the criminal justice system does exclude many forms of gender-­based violence); belief that there is little that the police could do; avoiding the often (re)traumatizing nature of the criminal justice system; and financial, cultural or language-­based barriers (Lievore 2003, 2005; Spohn and Tellis 2012; UN 2015). The male-­dominated nature of the criminal justice system may also dissuade women from reporting (UN 2015). Violence against LGBTQ Communities Individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) also experience disproportionate levels of violence. This includes violence within the context of interpersonal relationships, such as intimate partner violence and sexual violence, as well as prejudice-­motivated violence where an individual is targeted because of their perceived or actual

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380  Handbook on gender and violence gender identity or sexuality (and these categories of violence are not mutually exclusive). One Australian study, for example, found that just under 33 per cent of participants had ever experienced intimate partner violence (Pitts et al. 2006). This is reflected in international data, which suggests that LGBTQ individuals experience intimate partner violence at a rate similar to, if not higher than, heterosexual women (Duke and Davison 2009; Turell and Herrmann 2008). The violence experienced by LGBTQ people is likewise under-­reported. In Berman and Robinson’s (2010) Australian study, only 12 per cent of participants who had experienced homophobic or transphobic harassment or violence reported to the police. LGBTQ people encounter barriers to reporting sexual and intimate partner violence similar to those documented in the previous section. They may also experience additional ­barriers to reporting that relate more specifically to gender identity and sexual orientation, such as historically or currently poor relationships with the police (Dwyer et al. 2017; Leonard et al. 2008). In the global North, police often played a role in enforcing legislation outlawing homosexual sex, and perpetrated harassment and violence against LGBTQ people (Dwyer et al. 2017). Homosexuality continues to be outlawed in 71 countries today (Carroll and Mendos 2017), and this forms a substantial barrier to reporting violence and to state recognition of violence against LGBTQ people. LGBTQ people may fear experiencing discrimination or abuse from police. Reporting violence may require an individual to disclose their sexuality or gender identity, which may act as a barrier to someone who is not (or cannot be) openly ‘out’ (Leonard et al. 2008). Physical Violence While physical violence (excluding that which occurs as a form of intimate partner or domestic violence) is also under-­reported, the available evidence suggests that under-­reporting is potentially less acute than for the other contexts of violence covered here. Australian data indicates that approximately 55 per cent of both men and women reported their most recent experience of physical assault to police (ABS 2017b), although other sources place this figure at around 33 per cent for both men and women (ABS 2017a; Bricknell 2008). On the whole, physical violence occurring in non-­domestic contexts is surprisingly under-­ researched (Fuller 2015; Willis 2011). However, research that has been conducted documents similar reasons for non-­ reporting to those for violence against women, particularly that the physical assault was too trivial or ‘minor’ to report, the victim ‘took care of it themselves’ in some way or that the assault was not recognized as a crime

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­381 (Willis 2011). Willis’ review of research on reporting also indicates that the perceived severity of an assault can play an important mediating factor, with victims who did not incur physical injury comparatively less likely to report.

ATTRITION Even when violence is reported to the criminal justice system, a substantive number of cases are filtered out of the system after reporting, a process referred to as ‘attrition’. Attrition is particularly acute for sexual violence, which is drawn on as an example here. For cases of sexual violence reported to the police, only a proportion of these will result in prosecution, with smaller numbers still proceeding to trial and resulting in a successful conviction. Daly and Bohours’ analysis of attrition in rape cases from Australia, Canada, the UK and the US found that on average across these countries, 14 per cent of cases were reported to the police. Of these, ‘30 percent proceed past the police to prosecution, 20 percent are adjudicated in court, 12.5 percent are convicted of any sexual offense, and 6.5 percent are convicted of the original offense charged’ (2010, p. 568). Attrition of cases from the system occurs for a range of reasons, which typically relate to evidentiary and procedural requirements (for example, lack of evidence, inability to identify and locate the perpetrator), and to what Denise Lievore refers to as ‘variables that are extraneous to the legal elements of the case’ (2005, p.  1), where criminal justice professionals filter cases out of the system on the basis of the perceived ‘credibility’ of the victim-­survivor. Survivors who have engaged in behaviour that does not reflect norms of ‘acceptable’ f­emininity – s­uch as consuming drugs and alcohol, or engaging in casual sexual r­elationships – ­may be more likely to have their cases filtered out of the system (Alderden and Ullman 2012; Daly and Bohours 2010; Fileborn 2011; Lievore 2005). Criminal justice workers may likewise draw on a range of myths and misperceptions pertaining to ‘real rape’. For example, Lievore (2005) found that sexual assault cases were more likely to proceed when the victim-­survivor had clearly expressed their lack of consent, where the perpetrator used force or a weapon, and where the victim-­survivor sustained additional physical injury to the sexual assault itself (see also Spohn and Tellis 2012). Victim-­survivors may also withdraw from the criminal justice system as their case progresses. The re-­traumatizing nature of the criminal justice system (and particularly cross-­examination at trial) has been well documented, and is a prominent reason for victim-­survivor withdrawal (Daly and Bohours 2010; Lievore 2005; Spohn and Tellis 2012). Walby et al.

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382  Handbook on gender and violence (2015) note that the introduction of victim advocates has been successful in reducing the trauma associated with the criminal justice process, which can in turn help reduce attrition. However, despite the development of a range of mechanisms aimed at reducing the trauma associated with the criminal justice system, attrition rates remain high, and conviction rates have decreased in some jurisdictions in recent years (Bluett-­Boyd and Fileborn 2014; Daly and Bohours 2010).

DELIMITING VIOLENCE AND GENDER THROUGH THE JUSTICE SYSTEM The discussion thus far has illustrated that the vast majority of violence never comes to the attention of the criminal justice system. Acts of violence that become known to, or knowable by, the justice system have already been filtered through a range of lenses, meaning that only incidents of violence that meet certain criteria pertaining to perceived ‘seriousness’, harm and, as the discussion on attrition began to intimate, gendered norms will be made visible to the justice system in the first place. While the justice system may respond to only a minority of violence, it nonetheless plays a central, powerful role in shaping understandings of what violence ‘is’ (Smart 1990). This section addresses the ways in which the criminal justice system actively produces what constitutes ‘violence’, and privileges particular experiences of violence through the substantive and symbolic power afforded to the state. That is, the justice system discursively produces ‘violence’ (or, perhaps more specifically, delineates between criminal, ‘serious’ violence worthy of state intervention and ‘other’ iterations of violence) as much as it is responsible for responding to incidents of violence after the fact. The criminal justice system is not the neutral arbiter of violence and criminal responsibility. Rather, it (re)produces power structures relating to gender, class, race, sexuality and so forth in order to position certain types of violence, and the bodies which enact this violence, as ‘legitimate’ uses of force or otherwise. In order to illustrate and explore contemporary debates on the gendered production of violence, I draw on three key case studies: sexual violence; homicide and provocation, with this discussion examining homicide within the context of heterosexual intimate partner violence; and the ‘homosexual advance’ defence.

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­383 Sexual Violence The criminal justice system has functioned as a key site of the exclusion or disqualification of experiences of sexual violence (Larcombe 2011a; Smart 1990; White and Easteal 2016). Both contemporary and historical legal definitions have restricted and delimited what constitutes sexual violence. For instance, legal definitions of rape were traditionally limited to penis–vagina penetration, excluding many forms of sexual harm while simultaneously privileging phallocentric understandings of what sex ‘is’ (Walklate 2001). Such definitions precluded the possibility of cisgender men being the victims of sexual violence, and omit forms of sexual violence experienced by LGBTQ individuals (Walby et al. 2015). While definitions have evolved in many jurisdictions internationally to a more inclusive understanding (for example to include oral and anal penetration, and the use of objects), in others these limited definitions remain (Walby et al. 2015). Legal definitions can work to reify and reinforce particular gendered contexts of sexual violence as constituting ‘real’ violence. Legal definitions have likewise functioned to limit the scope of sexual violence to that which occurs within particular relationship contexts. Most notably, this is illustrated through the exclusion of rape in marriage and sexual violence perpetrated against sex workers from legal constructions of sexual violence. Men who perpetrated sexual violence against wives or sex workers have historically received legal immunity. That is, the law has constructed and perpetuated men’s right to sexually access certain ‘classes’ of women, rendering them ‘unrapeable’. Such women are thus positioned as, legally, always already consenting to s­ ex – ­their sexual and bodily autonomy denied. While extensive legislative reform has occurred, particularly in the global North, to remove this legal immunity, the rights of wives and sex workers to refuse sex continue to be denied in many jurisdictions internationally (Walby et al. 2015; Walklate 2001). Cases in which the victim-­survivor and perpetrator have a previous or current relationship remain less likely to progress through all stages of the criminal justice system (Spohn and Tellis 2012; White and Easteal 2016). As such, even where legislative change has occurred, those who experience sexual violence in the context of a dating or intimate partner relationship remain less likely or able to access justice. Delimiting the legal scope of sexual violence has also occurred through the use of differing conceptions of ‘what needs to have happened’ in order to establish that sexual violence has occurred. Sexual violence has variably been conceptualized as a property offence (historically), and in terms of use of force or against the will of the victim, or a violation of bodily autonomy and consent (Fileborn 2011; Walby et al. 2015). Again, the

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384  Handbook on gender and violence extent to which these understandings of sexual violence are still used varies across jurisdictions internationally. These conceptualizations of sexual violence bring with them different implications for what ‘counts’, and for how sexual violence is legally established. The requirement to demonstrate force or coercion places an onus on the victim-­survivor to demonstrate evidence of such circumstances, for example that they actively resisted or protested (Walby et al. 2015; Walklate 2001). In contrast, conceptualizations based on consent do not (at least in theory) require the victim to demonstrate that they resisted or protested, or that physical force was used against them (Fileborn 2011). Merely submitting to a sexual act is typically insufficient to demonstrate sexual consent under this construction of sexual violence. Sexual violence is also shaped via stereotypes pertaining to what sexual violence ‘is’, and through gendered (and classed, racialized) expectations regarding how we expect ‘real’ victims to act (Easteal and Judd 2008; Larcombe 2002b). These stereotypes and misconceptions work to (re) produce particular understandings of normative gendered behaviour, as well as (re)affirming the boundaries of ‘legitimate’ sexual violence. Despite substantial law reform in numerous international jurisdictions aiming to reduce the influence of these misperceptions, they continue to be drawn on and reproduced through the operation of criminal law (Bluett-­Boyd and Fileborn 2014; Fileborn 2011; Larcombe 2011b). For instance, women are often constructed as responsible for refusing or resisting men’s unwanted sexual advances, positioning them as the ‘gatekeepers’ of male sexuality. Although many jurisdictions have shifted towards conceptualizations of sexual violence that centre on consent and autonomy, in practice the focus is often still on the actions of the complainant, and the extent to which her lack of consent was clearly and unequivocally communicated (Bluett-­Boyd and Fileborn 2014; Fileborn 2011; Larcombe 2011a; Temkin 2010; White and Easteal 2016). This simultaneously positions (cisgender, heterosexual) men as unable to control their sexual urges, or to accurately interpret women’s sexual communication or refusals (Walklate 2001). Likewise, gendered and patriarchal notions of ‘credibility’ are often drawn on to undermine complainants in rape or sexual assault trials (Easteal and Judd 2008; Larcombe 2002b; Walklate 2001). As an example, women’s drug and alcohol consumption, sexual history and ‘provocative’ dress are factors commonly drawn on in an attempt to discredit the victim (Flowe et al. 2007; Goodman-­Delahunty and Graham 2011). Historically, judges have issued warnings to the jury relating to the propensity of women to lie about sexual assault, and thus signalling the dangers of convicting a man on the basis of a woman’s uncorroborated testimony alone (Bluett-­Boyd and Fileborn 2014; Flowe et al. 2007; Larcombe 2002a).

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­385 Despite the introduction of ‘rape shield laws’ and other protections aimed at eliminating the use of such practices in numerous jurisdictions, there is evidence to suggest that these practices persist and decision-­making within the system continues to be informed by a host of rape myths and misperceptions (Bluett-­Boyd and Fileborn 2014; Easteal and Judd 2008; Kennedy and Easteal 2011; Temkin 2010; White and Easteal 2016). Homicide, Gender and ‘Provocation’ Homicide offences provide an illuminating example of the gendered nature of violence in multiple respects. Firstly, men overwhelmingly perpetrate and are disproportionately the victims of homicide offences (Tomsen and Crofts 2012). Secondly, women are most likely to become both the victims and offenders of homicide in the context of domestic or family violence: women kill and are killed by men as a result of domestic violence (Fitz-­Gibbon and Walklate 2016; Stubbs 2016; Walklate 2001). Thirdly, criminal justice responses to homicide provide insight into the gendered operation of the system and construction of ‘legitimate’ use of violence. The partial defence of provocation provides an instructive case study on the masculine working of the law, and I briefly examine this defence in relation to women who kill abusive partners, and in ‘homosexual advance’ cases in the following section. While the exact nature of the defence shifts across jurisdictions, provocation has typically functioned as a partial defence to homicide on the basis that the words or actions of the deceased ‘provoked’ the defendant to the extent that they experienced ‘a sudden and temporary loss of self-­control’ (Tyson 1999, p.  67). Contemporary use of the provocation defence again varies across jurisdictions, with numerous jurisdictions having abolished or amended the defence in recent years (Mack 2013; Stubbs 2016). The partial defence of provocation is, from its origins, one that was designed to apply to heterosexual men (Ballinger 2016; Dressler 1995; Ramakrishnan 2011). As Ramakrishnan (2011, p.  313) discusses, the defence of provocation has traditionally been ‘invoked by men against affronts to masculinity’, with the defence thus symbolically and practically positioned as a ‘masculine’ one (see also Tomsen and Crofts 2012). Men are overwhelmingly more likely than women to perpetrate violence of all kinds. Regardless of the reasons underpinning this, men are thus in a position where they are more likely to be able to use and benefit from the defence of provocation (Dressler 1995). There are also considerable differences in what ‘provokes’ men and women to kill in the context of intimate relationships. Men, for example, have typically drawn on the provocation defence in circumstances where

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386  Handbook on gender and violence their female (ex)partner has left or threatened to leave, engaged (or is suspected to have engaged) in infidelity, or otherwise ‘insulted’ the accused’s masculinity (Ballinger 2016; Brown 1999; Stubbs 2016; Tyson 1999, 2011). In contrast, women tend to kill male partners almost exclusively in the context of domestic violence: they kill to escape their abusive, violent partners (Stubbs 2016; Tyson 2011). Yet, it is men’s use of the provocation defence that has been most successful (Douglas 2012; Tyson 2011). The workings of provocation illustrate the masculine assumptions underpinning legal thinking and the ‘legitimate’ use of violence. For example, the defence of provocation typically requires ‘that retaliation must be immediate and in proportion to the level of provocation endured’ (Ballinger 2016, p. 17). Yet, this construction of ‘reasonable’ use of violence rarely encapsulates the circumstances and means with which women kill, especially in contexts of domestic violence. In particular, rather than responding ‘immediately’ in response to a provocation, women have what Ballinger terms a ‘slow burn’ response, whereby they tend to kill some time after the act of ‘provocation’, and where threat or provocation is not immediately imminent.1 Further, women are more likely to use weapons or other implements when they kill, which has been legally inscribed as constituting ‘revenge’ or premeditation, rather than provocation. It can be difficult for abused women to ‘prove’ their experiences of domestic violence in court, especially in the absence of a police report or other tangible evidence (and, as we saw earlier, gender-­based violence is highly under-­ reported), while the veracity of women’s claims may be placed in doubt on account of their remaining in an abusive relationship (Fitz-­Gibbon and Vannier 2017). As Stubbs (2016, p.  46) observes, ‘the coercion that battered women experience cannot be realistically understood in terms of the immediate circumstances surrounding the homicide event’, given that domestic violence typically involves patterns of control and abuse over time. Resultantly, the actions of women who kill abusive partners are legally (re)inscribed as ‘unreasonable’, unwarranted and undeserving of partial exoneration. Constructions of femininity also come into play here, with dominant norms both shaping and being actively reproduced by legal responses to 1   Though, as Stubbs (2016, p.  37) notes, subsequent reform in some jurisdictions did attempt to remove the emphasis on immediacy to also recognize ‘a course of conduct over time’ as constituting provocation, in order to better encapsulate the experiences of women who kill in the context of domestic violence. Likewise, some jurisdictions have attempted to reform self-­defence in order to better reflect the circumstances in which women kill, and to open this line of defence up to women (Douglas 2012; Fitz-­Gibbon and Vannier 2017). Some jurisdictions have additionally sought to curtail men’s use of the defence where a partner has left a relationship or in cases of infidelity (Douglas 2012).

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­387 women who kill in contexts of domestic homicide. In such circumstances, the woman who kills is presented as either ‘the passive, helpless victim to be pitied rather than punished, who cannot be regarded as a responsible agent for pathological reasons [… or] the cold-­blooded femme fatale out to seek revenge at any cost’ (Ballinger 2016, p. 21). Thus, the possibility that such a woman’s actions could be ‘reasonable’ is precluded if she was agential, or she is inherently ‘unreasonable’ on the basis of some psychological ‘imbalance’. As Ballinger notes, ‘unlike dominant constructions of masculinity, anger and rage are not part of the construction of acceptable femininity’, rendering the actions of women who kill ‘unreasonable’ or unacceptable (2016, p. 21). The man who kills in response to ‘provocation’ is read as enacting acceptable forms of masculinity (at least in certain circumstances for certain men); the woman who kills is positioned as aberrant. Provocation has likewise been drawn on to excuse arguably problematic notions of masculinity and control, particularly through the successful use of the provocation defence by men who have killed female partners who have left them, threatened to leave or engaged in infidelity (Brown 1999). Homosexual Advance In interrogating the relationship(s) between gender and violence, it is vital to consider the role of violence in (re)establishing power relationships between men (Walklate 2001). Drawing on Connell’s (2005) concept of hegemonic masculinity, we can understand male-­ on-­ male violence as working to reify particular iterations of masculinity, as a means of performing hegemonic masculinity, and in reinforcing hierarchies of masculinity. Violence between men, as Tomsen and Crofts (2012, p. 424) explain, is ‘shaped around a dynamic and unresolved power struggle between rival forms of masculinity’. ‘Homosexual advance’ provides a partial defence based on ‘provocation’, whereby the (perceived) sexual actions of the (perceived) homosexual man ‘provoke’ the heterosexual man to defend himself violently, if not lethally (Ramakrishnan 2011). The use of provocation as a defence to the use of lethal violence in response to a homosexual advance reproduces particular iterations of hegemonic masculinity: namely, where suitably ‘masculine’ men are thoroughly heterosexual, and willing and able to defend their heterosexuality against ‘deviant’ same-­sex sexual advances (Golder 2004; Mack 2013; Tomsen and Crofts 2012). The ‘homosexual advance’ defence further perpetuates and (re)inscribes notions of the hegemonic masculine body as one that is ‘bounded and impenetrable’ (Golder 2004).

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388  Handbook on gender and violence Homosexual advance constructs lethal or violent force against queer men as a ‘reasonable’ response to (male) same-­sex advances (Dressler 1995; Mack 2013; Ramakrishnan 2011; Tomsen and Crofts 2012). This further positions queer sexuality as ‘deviant and abnormal’ (Ramakrishnan 2011, p. 307; see also Golder 2004; Mack 2013; Sewell 2001), while reinforcing the ‘naturalness’ and ‘normalcy’ of heterosexual desire. The ‘deviancy’ of queer desire is such that a non-­violent homosexual advance is often, though not always, deemed sufficient to warrant the use of extreme violence, with this violence constructed as ‘reasonable’ or ‘acceptable’ within the circumstances (Mack 2013; Ramakrishnan 2011; Sewell 2001; Strader et al. 2015). In so doing, the justice system constructs and reinforces sexuality within a hetero/homo binary, with the homosexual marked out as ‘abject’ or ‘other’. The homosexual advance defence works to reify particular types of masculine violence, enacted by hegemonic masculine bodies, as ‘legitimate’ and ‘normal’ (Tomsen and Crofts 2012). Ramakrishnan’s analysis of the ‘homosexual advance’ defence in comparison to sexual and street harassment claims made by women also demonstrates how ‘homosexual advance’ is used to further marginalize women and LGBTQ people’s experiences of sexual and other violence. As Ramakrishnan (2011, p.  291) explains, ‘unwanted advances on men are often conclusively presumed to be unwanted and worthy of legal recognition, whereas unwanted advances on women are more rigorously subjected to a host of procedural and doctrinal barriers’, as my previous discussion illustrated. This approach reinforces hierarchies of sexual harm (with the unwanted experiences of heterosexual men positioned as credible), as well as reinforcing what constitutes normative and acceptable (hetero)sexual behaviour. Thus, ‘queer men who make sexual advances on men risk legal action, or even death; heterosexual men who make sexual advances on women can generally expect impunity’, with women and queer men subsequently enjoying less legal protection than that afforded to heterosexual men (Ramakrishnan 2011, p. 292; see also Mack 2013). Notably, victim-­blaming occurs in both sexual violence and ‘homosexual advance’ cases, with the victims’ actions and character ‘put on trial’ (Strader et al. 2015; see also Tilleman 2010 and Wodda and Panfil 2015 in relation to the analogous ‘trans panic’ defence). Simultaneously, this defence may work to obfuscate and excuse what actually constitutes a form of hate or bias crime against queer men (Dressler 1995; Mack 2013; Ramakrishnan 2011). Not only is the vast majority of violence against LGBTQ people never reported to the criminal justice system, but it may be actively obscured and reframed when it does come to the attention of the system.

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­389

BEYOND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: VICTIM-­CENTRED JUSTICE RESPONSES Given the substantial limitations associated with mainstream criminal justice responses to both sexual and domestic violence, practice and scholarship has shifted to examine ways of ‘doing justice’ differently (Larcombe 2011a; Spohn and Tellis 2012). The final section of this chapter examines contemporary debates and developments regarding victim-­centred justice, gender and violence. Victim-­centred perspectives of justice developed from feminist critiques of the criminal justice system and the inability of the system to deliver justice in response to gender-­based violence (particularly sexual violence), as outlined earlier in the chapter. There are longstanding and well-­ documented limitations of the formal criminal justice system in responding to sexual violence, including the often retraumatizing nature of the system and the tendency for the justice system to reinforce problematic, gendered notions of sexual violence and victim-­survivors. Such problems persist even in the face of extensive legislative reform in some jurisdictions. Resultantly, feminist scholars have argued that justice responses must take victims’ justice needs or interests as the starting point (Clark 2010; Daly 2014; Temkin 2010; Walklate 2001). Under this approach, victim-­ survivors’ justice interests are placed at the centre of justice responses, rather than being situated at the margins of the structure and operation of the justice system, at best an afterthought. Victim-­survivors’ justice interests are diverse. However, current research has identified a number of core justice interests. Commonly identified justice interests include: voice, where the victim-­survivor is able to share their experience in a way that is meaningful, and in a forum where what they say is heard; belief and validation, where the victim-­survivor’s experience is believed by others and taken seriously; control, where the victim-­survivor has meaningful input into key points of decision-­making; and denouncement and punishment, where the actions of the perpetrator are condemned and the perpetrator receives meaningful consequences for their actions (Clark 2010; Daly 2014; McGlynn and Westmarland 2019). Some justice interests also extend beyond the needs of the individual victim-­survivor themselves to include goals such as community safety and the prevention of sexual violence (Clark 2010; McGlynn and Westmarland 2019). Victims’ justice interests are not static or homogeneous. The justice interests of individual victims may include some, all or none of those outlined here. Likewise, the most salient justice interests to an individual survivor may shift and evolve over time, a process McGlynn and Westmarland term ‘kaleidoscopic justice’ (see also Holder and Daly 2017).

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390  Handbook on gender and violence According to this approach, justice mechanisms should be appraised by the extent to which they meet victims’ justice needs, rather than whether they are formal/informal, innovative/­traditional – a­ focus Daly (2014) terms ‘pragmatic justice’. Some of these needs may well be met through the conventional justice system; however, many will not and cannot be. A victim-­centred approach to justice demands a plurality of justice responses: if victims’ justice interests are fluid and diverse, it follows that there is no single justice mechanism that is able to meet all victims’ justice interests at all times. Increasingly, there is a focus on the potential of informal and innovative justice responses to sexual and gender-­based violence. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to address these in detail, feminist scholarship has examined the use (or potential use) of restorative (Daly and Stubbs 2006), transformative (Coker 2002; Fileborn and Vera-­Gray 2017) and online justice mechanisms (Fileborn 2017; Salter 2013). At this point, it remains less clear how gender and the construction of violence figure in these informal and innovative justice responses. The small body of work that has considered gender suggests that informal and innovative mechanisms play out in highly gendered ways (Daly and Stubbs 2006). Critiques of the use of restorative justice for gender-­based violence have argued that this process may replicate unequal power dynamics between the victim-­survivor and perpetrator, thus working to perpetuate abuse and jeopardize victim-­survivor safety, while the gendered inequalities and power structures underpinning such violence remain largely unchallenged (Daly and Stubbs 2006). Online justice has likewise been critiqued for replicating the gendered division of emotional labour (Fileborn 2017), and for circumscribing the ‘types’ of sexual violence and performance of gender and victimhood required to receive recognition (Loney-­Howes 2015; Salter 2013). This suggests that we should not assume that innovative, victim-­centred responses necessarily or automatically avoid some of the problems associated with the formal justice system. While these innovative responses may in some respects open up opportunities to ‘do’ justice differently, they may simultaneously inscribe particular notions of gendered bodies and violence. At the very least, this is something that warrants careful consideration as these justice mechanisms proliferate.

CONCLUSION The discussion throughout this chapter has illustrated that gender permeates virtually all aspects of our understandings, experiences and constructions of violence and criminal justice responses to that violence. Gender, violence and criminal justice are thoroughly entangled with each other

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­391 in complex, multiple and shifting ways. The categories of violence and gender are discursively (re)produced through the criminal justice system, and (re)produced in particular ways. Dominant norms of masculinity and violence are (re)inscribed through legal responses to violence. Which and whose actions are labelled as ‘violence’ and which and whose actions come to be understood as problematic, or conversely ‘reasonable’, uses of violence is filtered through a lens of gendered expectations. For the most part, the criminal justice system has operated in a manner that reinforces dominant norms of hegemonic masculinity and ‘appropriate’ femininity. However, this is not universally the case, and it would be a mistake to suggest that gender and violence are always already constructed in a universal way within the justice system. As we have also seen, the justice system itself evolves and adjusts its gendered operations over time, for example through legislative reforms that aim to move away from particular understandings of gender and violence (albeit, these have resulted in limited changes at best). The formal criminal justice system is itself becoming decentred in (some) responses to violence, as we see an increased focus on informal and innovative justice. Although early evidence suggests that these are operating in what we might consider problematic ways when it comes to gender, it nonetheless illustrates the constantly shifting nature and operation of the justice system, and the potential for gender and violence to be constructed or ‘done’ differently.

REFERENCES Alderden, M.A. and S.E. Ullman (2012) ‘Creating a more complete and current picture: examining police and prosecutor decision-­making when processing sexual assault cases’, Violence Against Women, 18 (5), 525–551. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2017a) Personal Safety Survey, Australia, Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2017b) Crime Victimisation, Australia, 2016–17, Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Ballinger, A. (2016) ‘A question of provocation or responsibility? Revisiting the case of Ruth Ellis and David Blakely’ in K. Fitz-­Gibbon and S. Walklate (eds) Homicide, Gender and Responsibility: An International Perspective, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 15–35. Berman, A. and S. Robinson (2010) Speaking Out: Stopping Homophobic and Transphobic Abuse in Queensland, Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press. Bluett-­ Boyd, N. and B. Fileborn (2014) ‘Victim/survivor-­ focused justice responses and reforms to criminal court practice’, Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies. Bricknell, S. (2008) ‘Trends in violent crime’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No. 359, Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Brown, H. (1999) ‘Provocation as a defence to murder: to abolish or to reform?’ Australian Feminist Law Journal, 12 (1), 137–141. Calavita, K. (2001) ‘Blue jeans, rape, and the “de-­constitutive” power of law’, Law Society Review, 35 (1), 89–115.

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392  Handbook on gender and violence Carroll, A. and L.R. Mendos (2017) State Sponsored Homophobia 2017: A World Survey of Sexual Orientation Laws: Criminalization, Protection and Recognition, Geneva: International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA). Clark, H. (2010) ‘“What is the justice system willing to offer?” Understanding sexual assault victim/survivors’ criminal justice needs’, Family Matters, 85, 28–37. Coker, D. (2002) ‘Transformative justice: anti-­subordination processes in cases of domestic violence’ in H. Strang and J. Braithwaite (eds) Restorative Justice and Family Violence, Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 128–152. Connell, R. (2005) Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity. Contreras, J.M., S. Bott, A. Guedes and E. Dartnall (2010) Sexual Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Desk Review, Pretoria: Sexual Violence Research Initiative. Daly, K. (2014) ‘Reconceptualising sexual victimization and justice’ in I. Vanfraechem, A. Pemberton and F.M. Mdahinda (eds) Justice for Victims: Perspectives on Rights, Transition And Reconciliation, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 378–395. Daly, K. and B. Bohours (2010) ‘Rape and attrition in the legal process: a comparative analysis of five countries’, Crime and Justice, 39 (1), 564–650. Daly, K. and J. Stubbs (2006) ‘Feminist engagement with restorative justice’, Theoretical Criminology, 10 (1), 9–28. Douglas, H. (2012) ‘A consideration of the merits of specialized homicide offences and defences for battered women’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 45 (3), 367–382. Dressler, J. (1995) ‘When “heterosexual” men kill “homosexual” men: reflections on provocation law, sexual advances, and the “reasonable man” standard’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 85 (3), 726–763. Duke, A. and M.M. Davison (2009) ‘Same-­sex intimate partner violence: lesbian, gay, and bisexual affirmative outreach advocacy’, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, 18, 795–816. Dwyer, A., M. Ball, C. Bond, M. Lee and T. Crofts (2017) ‘Exploring LGBTI police liaison services: factors influencing their use and effectiveness according to LGBTI people and LGBTI police liaison officers’, Report to the Criminology Research Advisory Council. Easteal, P. and K. Judd (2008) ‘“She said, he said”: credibility and sexual harassment cases in Australia’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 31, 336–344. Fileborn, B. (2011) ‘Sexual assault laws in Australia’, ACSSA Resource Sheet 1, February, Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies. Fileborn, B. (2017) ‘Justice 2.0: street harassment victims’ use of social media and online activism as sites of informal justice’, British Journal of Criminology, 57 (6), 1482–1501. Fileborn, B. and F. Vera-­Gray (2017) ‘“I want to be able to walk the street without fear”: transforming justice for street harassment’, Feminist Legal Studies, 25 (2), 203–227. Fitz-­Gibbon, K. and M. Vannier (2017) ‘Domestic violence and the gendered law of self-­ defence in France: the case of Jacqueline Sauvage’, Feminist Legal Studies, 25, 313–335. Fitz-­Gibbon, K. and S. Walklate (2016) Homicide, Gender and Responsibility: An International Perspective, London and New York: Routledge. Flowe, H.D., E.B. Ebbesen and A. Putcha-­Bhagavatula (2007) ‘Rape shield laws and sexual behavior evidence: effects on consent level and women’s sexual history on rape allegations’, Law and Human Behavior, 31, 159–175. Fuller, G. (2015) ‘The serious impact and consequences of physical assault’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No. 496, Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Golder, B. (2004) ‘The homosexual advance defence and the law/body nexus: towards a poetics of law reform’, Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law, 11 (1), https://ssrn. com/abstract=1351564. Goodman-­Delahunty, J. and K. Graham (2011) ‘The influence of victim intoxication and victim attire on police responses to sexual assault’, Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 8, 22–40. Holder, R. and K. Daly (2017) ‘Sequencing justice: a longitudinal study of justice goals of

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Gender, violence and criminal justice  ­393 domestic violence victims’, British Journal of Criminology, 28 September, https://dx.doi. org/10.2139/ssrn.3053387. Kennedy, J. and P. Easteal (2011) ‘Shades of grey: indeterminacy and sexual assault law reform’, Flinders Law Journal, 13, 49–77. Larcombe, W. (2002a) ‘Cautionary tales and telling anxieties: the story of the false complainant’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 16, 95–108. Larcombe, W. (2002b) ‘The “ideal” victim v successful rape complainants: not what you might expect’, Feminist Legal Studies, 10, 131–148. Larcombe, W. (2011a) ‘Falling rape conviction rates: (some) feminist aims and measures for rape law’, Feminist Legal Studies, 19, 27–45. Larcombe, W. (2011b) ‘Worsnop v. the Queen: subjective belief in consent prevails (again) in Victoria’s rape law’, Melbourne University Law Review, 35, 697–716. Leonard, W., A. Mitchell, M. Pitts, S. Patel and C. Fox (2008) Coming Forward: The Underreporting of Heterosexist Violence and Same-Sex Partner Abuse in Victoria, Melbourne: Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society. Lievore, D. (2003) Non-Reporting and Hidden Recording of Sexual Assault: An International Literature Review, Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Lievore, D. (2005) No Longer Silent: A Study of Women’s Help-Seeking Decisions and Service Responses to Sexual Assault, Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Loney-­Howes, R. (2015) ‘Beyond the spectacle of suffering: representations of rape in online anti-­rape activism’, Outskirts, 33, 1–17. Mack, D. (2013) ‘“But words can never hurt me”: untangling and reforming Queensland’s homosexual advance defence’, Sydney Law Review, 35, 167–186. McGlynn, C. and N. Westmarland (2019) ‘Kaleidoscopic justice: sexual violence and victim-­ survivors’ perceptions of justice’, Social and Legal Studies, 28 (2), 179–201. Pain, R. (2015) ‘Intimate war’, Political Geography, 44, 64–73. Pitts, M., A. Smith, A. Mitchell and S. Patel (2006) Private Lives: A Report on the Health and Wellbeing of GLBTIQ Australians, Melbourne: Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society. Ramakrishnan, K.B. (2011) ‘Inconsistent legal treatment of unwanted sexual advances: a study of the homosexual advance defense, street harassment, and sexual harassment in the workplace’, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice, 26 (2), 291–355. Salter, M. (2013) ‘Justice and revenge in online counter-­publics: emerging responses to sexual violence in the age of social media’, Crime Media Culture, 9, 225–242. Sewell, J. (2001) ‘“I just bashed somebody up. Don’t worry about it Mum, he’s only a poof”: the “homosexual advance defence” and discursive constructions of the “gay” victim’, Southern Cross University Law Review, 5, 47–81. Smart, C. (1990) ‘Law’s power, the sexed body, and feminist discourse’, Law and Society, 17, 194–210. Spohn, C. and K. Tellis (2012) ‘The criminal justice system’s response to sexual violence’, Violence Against Women, 18 (2), 169–192. Stanko, E.A. (1990) Everyday Violence: How Women and Men Experience Sexual and Physical Danger, London: Pandora. Stanko, E.A. (2003) ‘Introduction: conceptualizing the meanings of violence’ in E.A. Stanko (ed.) The Meanings of Violence, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–13. Strader, K.J., M. Selvin and L. Hay (2015) ‘Gay panic, gay victims, and the case for gay shield laws’, Cardozo Law Review, 36, 1473–1531. Stubbs, J. (2016) ‘Murder, manslaughter and domestic violence’ in K. Fitz-­Gibbon and S.  Walklate (eds) Homicide, Gender and Responsibility: An International Perspective, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 36–52. Temkin, J. (2010) ‘“And always keep a-­hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse”: challenging rape myths in the courtroom’, New Criminal Law Review, 13 (4), 710–734. Tilleman, M. (2010) ‘(Trans)forming the provocation defense’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 100 (4), 1659–1688. Tomsen, S. and T. Crofts (2012) ‘Social and cultural meanings of legal responses to ­homicide

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394  Handbook on gender and violence among men: masculine honour, sexual advances and accidents’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 45 (3), 423–437. Turell, S.C. and M.M. Herrmann (2008) ‘“Family” support for family violence: exploring community support systems for lesbian and bisexual women who have experienced abuse’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 12 (2–3), 211–224. Tyson, D. (1999) ‘“Asking for it”: an anatomy of provocation’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 13 (1), 66–85. Tyson, D. (2011) ‘Victoria’s new homicide laws: provocative reforms or more stories of women’s asking for it?’ Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 23 (2), 203–233 United Nations (2015) The World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics, Geneva: United Nations Statistics Division. Walby, S., P. Olive, J. Towers, B. Francis, S. Strid, A. Krizsan, E. Lombardo, C. May-­ Chahal, S. Franzway, D. Sugarman, B. Agarwal and J. Armstrong (2015) Stopping Rape: Towards a Comprehensive Policy, Bristol: Policy Press. Walklate, S. (2001) Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice (2nd edn), London and New York: Routledge. White, J. and P. Easteal (2016) ‘Feminist jurisprudence, the Australian legal system, and intimate partner sexual violence: fiction over fact’, Laws, 5 (1), 11. Willis, M. (2011) ‘Non-­disclosure of violence in Australian Indigenous communities’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No. 405, Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Wodda, A. and V.R. Panfil (2015) ‘“Don’t talk to me about deception”: the necessary erosion of the trans* panic defense’, Albany Law Review, 78 (3), 927–971.

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27. Prosecuting sexual and gender-­based violence at the International Criminal Court Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC

Dieneke de Vos

On 17 July 1998, 120 states voted in favour of the Rome Statute and thus voted to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC) with a mandate to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression; the Statute entered into force in July 2002.1 This was a watershed moment for the field of international criminal law, not just because it established the first permanent international criminal court, but because of the gender-­sensitive nature of its mandate. In recognition of the historical barriers obstructing accountability for sexual and gender-­based violence (SGBV), and following successful lobbying by feminist activists (see, for example, Bedont and Hall-­Martinez 1999; Spees 2003; Glasius 2005; Inder 2013), the drafters of the Rome Statute adopted a broad range of gender-­sensitive provisions to ensure a sustained focus within international criminal law on these crimes. This presented a significant move forward in a field that traditionally largely neglected or rendered invisible sexual violence and the impact of gender in times of armed conflict, political repression or unrest. The Rome Statute contains the most advanced articulation of SGBV crimes in international criminal law, and thus provides a broad basis for their investigation and prosecution (Chappell 2011; Inder 2013). The Statute criminalizes not only rape, but also includes separate crime categories of sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, gender-­based persecution and ‘other forms of sexual violence’ as war crimes, crimes against humanity and/or, in some circumstances, genocide. This represented the first time an international legal instrument of this kind codified the crimes of sexual slavery, gender-­based persecution and forced pregnancy (Steains 1999, pp.  364, 370). A number of other crime categories may also be applicable to SGBV, including torture, cruel treatment, mutilation, other inhumane acts, outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating or degrading treatment. Additionally, the Rome 1   The ICC’s jurisdiction over the crime of aggression only entered into force on 17 July 2018.

395

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396  Handbook on gender and violence Statute contains important procedural and structural principles, particularly regarding evidence of sexual violence (Rules 63(4), 70 and 71 of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence), demands specific institutional gender capacity (Articles 36(8)(a) and (b), 42(9), 43(6) and 68) and requires the Court to consider gender in its interpretation of applicable laws (Article 21(3)). Together, these provisions moved gender from the periphery to the heart of international criminal law (Steains 1999). As Patricia Sellers (2016) aptly put it: ‘gender justice formed part of [the Rome Statute’s] teleological objective’. Unfortunately, the high hopes held by many dissipated rather quickly. Although SGBV charges have been brought in all but one of the investigations in which charges have been brought so far,2 and evidence of sexual violence was heard in three of four trials that have been completed to date, the Court has not achieved a single successful conviction for SGBV.3 In June 2018, a month before the Rome Statute’s 20th anniversary, the ICC’s SGBV conviction record returned to zero when the Appeals Chamber overturned Jean-­Pierre Bemba Gombo’s 2016 conviction for rape, pillage and murder. His had been the Court’s first and only conviction for SGBV, its first on the grounds of command responsibility, and the first in the history of international criminal law to classify rape of men as rape. In other words, the significant advancement of the Rome Statute in terms of legal recognition of SGBV and related institutional capacity has not (yet) translated into greater accountability for these crimes. SGBV has remained one of the most vulnerable categories of crimes at the ICC. 2   The ICC has opened 11 investigations: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda, Sudan (Darfur), two in the Central African Republic (CAR), Kenya, Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Georgia and Burundi. At the time of writing, no charges had been brought publicly against any individuals in the Georgia, Burundi and second CAR investigations. Charges for SGBV crimes were brought against one or more individuals in all other investigations except Libya. In the Libya investigation, sexual violence forms part of the crime base, but is not labelled as sexual violence in the corresponding arrest warrant. 3   At the time of writing, the ICC had completed four trials: against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo in 2012 (evidence of SGBV was presented during the trial but because there were no SGBV charges, the accused was not convicted of SGBV); against Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui in 2013/2014 (both were ­acquitted – ­the latter of all charges, the former of SGBV charges only); against Jean-­Pierre Bemba Gombo in 2016 (the accused was acquitted of all charges upon appeal in June 2018); and against Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi in 2016 (no SGBV evidence or charges were brought; the accused pled guilty). A fifth trial, against Bosco Ntaganda, heard closing statements in September 2018 and was awaiting judgment. Subsequently, in July 2019 Ntaganda was convicted of 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ituri, DRC, in 2002–2003. These included rape and sexual slavery committed against child soldiers and against the Hema population (both men and women). The Prosecutor v. Bosco Ntaganda, ICC, Trial Chamber IV, ‘Judgment’, ICC-­01/04-­02/06-­2359 (8 July 2019); see also Grey and Rosenthal (2019). Trials against Dominic Ongwen and against Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé remained ongoing at the time of writing.

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­397 This is due to a variety of factors, including: insufficient, rushed or limited investigations; the absence of a prosecutorial strategy inclusive of gender concerns; weak or insufficiently contextualized evidence leading to the attrition of SGBV charges at the ICC’s confirmation of charges stage; and what Hayes (2013, p. 41) has called the judges’ ‘extreme reticence to progressively interpret the law on sexual and gender-­based ­crimes – ­and in some cases, refusal even to acknowledge the law as it currently stands’. Additionally, ‘gender misrecognitions’ (Chappell 2016) or gender justice ‘pressure points’ (Jarvis and Vigneswaran 2016) have contributed to overlooking, reducing or eliminating sexual violence crimes at key moments when decisions are made around selection and prioritization: unconscious gender biases held by investigators, prosecutors or judges, or biases embedded in institutional practices or structures have remained pervasive.4 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a complete picture of the progress and challenges in prosecuting SGBV at the ICC. Indeed, many scholars have already extensively analysed and critiqued the Court’s ability to deliver gender justice. This includes scholarship on the importance of prosecutorial and investigative strategies (Agirre 2013; Hayes 2012; Luping 2009; SáCouto and Cleary 2009); examining structural weaknesses contributing to the high attrition rate of sexual violence crimes and recent attempts to overcome these (Hayes 2015; Oosterveld 2018; SáCouto 2013); dissecting ambiguities in the definition of gender (Oosterveld 2014a) or the issue of consent in the definition of rape (Dowds 2018; Grewal 2012); feminist critiques of the essentialist focus on sexual violence (Henry 2014; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2018); and evaluating the value of thematic SGBV prosecutions (DeGuzman 2012). Rather than reproducing this important body of existing scholarship, this chapter elaborates on three emerging areas of research: first, the Court’s capacity to address broader gendered harms, such as reproductive violence; second, the recognition of male victims of sexual violence; and, third, the intersection between the Court’s complementarity principle and its gender justice provisions. In so doing, the chapter reveals the un(der)explored gender justice potential of the Rome Statute. 4   For instance, SGBV crimes may be excluded from cases because of what is deemed to be ‘reliable’ evidence: the idea ‘that the testimony of the victims of these a­ cts – p ­ rimarily ­women – ­is less reliable than others, that these victims are unlikely to want to testify, and that it is difficult to devise investigation techniques for interrogating these sorts of crimes’ remains pervasive (Chappell 2016, p. 39). Other examples include the perception that sexual violence acts are matters of honour and dignity rather than violent crimes, that they are of comparatively lower gravity than other crimes, and the idea that sexual violence is always or necessarily opportunistic and therefore not part of the broader dynamic of violence (see Baig et al. 2016; Jarvis and Vigneswaran 2016, pp. 34-­42).

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CAPACITY TO CAPTURE BROADER GENDERED HARMS: MOVING BEYOND THE ‘SEXUAL’ While SGBV crimes have always been an integral part of war and conflict, they have long remained invisible in international law. Rape and other forms of sexual violence were deemed unfortunate side-­effects of conflict or booty of war because ‘boys will be boys’; they were perceived as committed within the ‘private’ sphere, and therefore outside the scope of regulation (see, for example, Askin 2003; Charlesworth 2002; Chinkin 1994; Copelon 2000). In the mid-­1990s, the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR, respectively) represented an important first step to change in this respect, and their jurisprudence contributed to the development of a comprehensive definition of rape in international law (Hayes 2010; Weiner 2013). However, faced with little international legal precedent on gendered violence, these courts struggled to give full recognition to the multifaceted harms suffered by victims through gendered and sexualized violence in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia (de Brouwer 2005; Jarvis and Brammertz 2016). Building on the ICTY and ICTR’s case law, and in an effort to address this gap, the Rome Statute recognizes a much wider set of gendered and sexual harms. Although the first cases to arise from the ICC’s investigations followed the ICTY and ICTR’s exclusive focus on rape, following the adoption of the Office of the Prosecutor’s Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes Policy in 2014 (SGBC Policy) – which led to a number of structural policy changes (Oosterveld 2018) – important advancements have been made in recognizing broader gendered harms, including non-­sexual harms. For instance, in the Court’s most recent case brought against Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud (Al Hassan) arising from its investigation in Mali, the Prosecution charged the accused with a range of crimes, including rape, sexual slavery, forced marriage, persecution on gender and religious grounds, torture, other inhumane acts and outrages upon personal dignity. The case is likely to become the Court’s first trial to address the crime of gender-­based persecution.5 This will then also trigger deliberations on the Rome Statute’s ambiguous definition of gender (Oosterveld 2014a). Importantly, the charges of gender-­based 5   Charges of gender-­based persecution had also been included in an earlier case against Callixte Mbarushimana in the DRC investigation. However, this specific charge was dropped by then Prosecutor Luis Moreno-­Ocampo at the confirmation stage in 2011. Subsequently, the Pre-­Trial Chamber declined to confirm any of the charges against Mbarushimana; he was released on 23 December 2011.

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­399 persecution in this case appear to acknowledge the intersectionality of identities; whereas previous cases in international criminal law tended to focus on persecution on one ground or another, the Al Hassan case presents charges of persecution based on religious grounds ‘coupled with’ gender grounds (Grey 2018). This may present an important opportunity for the Court to consider the intersectional nature of gender-­based and other violence, and thus contribute to a more holistic understanding of the impact of violence on victims and communities. Another case with the potential to push the boundaries of international criminal law is the case against Dominic Ongwen in the Uganda investigation.6 The Prosecution has charged him with 70 counts, 19 of which relate to SGBV. It is the first time an accused has faced such a broad range of SGBV charges at the ICC: they include several counts of rape, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture, outrages upon personal dignity, forced pregnancy and forced marriage. The case presents an important opportunity for the Court to firmly incorporate non-­sexual gendered harm and violence within its accountability efforts, and to give effect to the broader gender justice provisions of its Statute. What has been particularly interesting in the Ongwen case is that the Prosecution advanced what could be called a ‘value-­based’ perspective on crimes (Laverty 2018). In so doing, the case provides a first and important step towards ‘surfacing’ reproductive violence in international criminal law (Grey 2017). Notably, in relation to the charges of forced ­pregnancy – t­he first such charges ever brought in international criminal ­law – ­the Prosecution highlighted that this crime includes both (en)forced impregnation and (en)forced maternity, underscoring that its criminalization is intended to protect ‘the value of reproductive autonomy’7 (see also Boon 2001). As determined by the Pre-­Trial Chamber, the essence of the crime involved ‘unlawfully placing the victim in a position in which she cannot choose whether to continue the pregnancy’ (emphasis added).8 As such, it is also the first in international criminal law to ‘expressly consider the reproductive autonomy of individual women and girls’ (Grey 2017, p.  909). Similarly, the crime of forced ­marriage – w ­ hich has been 6   Following Dominic Ongwen’s surrender to the ICC in January 2015, the Office of the Prosecutor conducted additional investigations to redress the initial absence of SGBV charges in the case against him. His trial remains ongoing at the time of writing. 7   The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen, ICC, Office of the Prosecutor, ‘Prosecution’s Pre-­ Trial Brief’, ICC-­02/04-­01/15-­533 (6 September 2016), para 512 (hereinafter ‘Prosecution’s Pre-­Trial Brief’). 8   The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen, ICC, Pre-­Trial Chamber II, ‘Decision on the confirmation of charges against Dominic Ongwen’, ICC-­02/04-­01/15-­422-­Red (23 March 2016), para 99 (hereinafter ‘Confirmation of charges decision’).

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400  Handbook on gender and violence charged as ‘other inhumane acts’ – is not defined in this case as primarily a sexual crime. Rather, the Prosecution underscored that forced marriage, ‘a forced exclusive conjugal relationship [. . .] irrevocably changed the status of its victims, both in the way that they perceived themselves and how they were perceived by others’.9 Additionally, for the Pre-­Trial Chamber, forced marriage differs from the existing crime of sexual slavery ‘in terms of conduct, ensuing harm, and protected interests’: it ‘violates the independently recognised basic right to consensually marry and establish a family’.10 Concurring with the Prosecution, the Pre-­Trial Chamber held that this basic right is ‘a value’ that demands specific protection as a crime against humanity separate from sexual slavery. While examples of reproductive harm, such as pregnancies resulting from rape or physical harm to reproductive organs, have been discussed in various other cases before the ICC, they had not featured centrally in the Court’s jurisprudence until the Ongwen case (Grey 2017, pp.  924– 925). By emphasizing reproductive and gendered harms as distinct from sexual harm, and by focusing on violence specifically targeting individuals because of their reproductive capacity and outside a context of ethnic cleansing, the Ongwen case may thus contribute to illuminating particular gender-­based harms that have long remained invisible in international criminal law. The Office of the Prosecutor has also started paying greater attention to broader gendered harms in the context of the Court’s preliminary examinations.11 For example, in her request for authorization to open an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan,12 describing the crime of gender-­based persecution, the Prosecutor argued that there were reasonable grounds to believe the Taliban and affiliated groups specifically targeted women and girls ‘to prevent them from studying, teaching, working or participating in public affairs, through intimidation, death threats, abductions and killings’.13 In other words, women and girls were   Prosecution’s Pre-­Trial Brief, paras 502, 509.   Confirmation of charges decision, paras 92-­94. 11   A preliminary examination is a pre-­investigation or analysis stage that allows the Office of the Prosecutor to determine whether there are sufficient grounds to open an investigation on the basis of information submitted by private individuals, organizations or governments, or information otherwise made available. 12   When the Prosecutor seeks to open an investigation on her own initiative following the receipt or discovery of information about crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction (i.e. without a referral by a State Party or by the UN Security Council), she must seek authorization from the Pre-­Trial Chamber to proceed. 13   Situation in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, ICC, Office of the Prosecutor, ‘Public redacted version of ‘Request for authorisation of an investigation pursuant to article 15’’, ICC-­02/17-­7-Red (20 November 2017), para 116. 9

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­401 specifically targeted because they were perceived as defying gender norms in a context where education and participation in public life are privileges exclusively reserved for men (Grey 2018). Similarly, in the context of the preliminary examination in Nigeria in relation to Boko Haram’s specific targeting of young girls and students, the Office of the Prosecutor is examining whether gender-­based persecution charges could be brought against Boko Haram for targeting girls for attending school or for using girls as suicide bombers.14 There are diverging views as to whether international criminal law has focused too much or too little on the ‘sexual’ in sexual violence, with some authors arguing that the almost exclusive focus on the sexual component of SGBV crimes when committed against female victims has rendered the violence aspect of such crimes invisible (Jarvis and Brammertz 2016; Kravetz 2016), while others argue there has been an erasure of ‘the sexual’ in accountability efforts and scholarship around wartime sexual violence (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2018). While acknowledging these diverging views, I argue that the move by the ICC to pay greater attention to categories of harm that go beyond sexualized harm serves not to render invisible either the sexual or the violent, but rather serves to illuminate broader harms that have been overshadowed or neglected in international criminal law to date, and thus serves to acknowledge holistically the sexual, violent and gendered aspects of crimes. Such cases can thus contribute to pushing the boundaries of international criminal law to be more inclusive of broader gender dynamics, and will assist in further developing a more holistic understanding of gender and its impact in times of crises. Indeed, as Oosterveld (2018, p. 453) argues, ‘gender-­based crimes are not limited to sexual violence and gender-­based persecution because all crimes under the ICC’s jurisdiction are potentially gendered in nature’. As these cases also show, broader crime categories such as ‘other forms of sexual violence’ and ‘other inhumane acts’ may be particularly important as they allow the ICC to address forms of sexualized and gendered violence that may not otherwise be captured. Further advancing the interpretation of these broader crime categories thus creates space to strengthen the capacity of international criminal law to capture new and emerging types of sexualized, gendered and reproductive violence, such as the use of forced contraception or forced abortion (de Vos 2016; Edwards 2018; Grey 2017).

14   Office of the Prosecutor, Report on Preliminary Examinations Activities 2016, para 293.

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402  Handbook on gender and violence

RECOGNIZING MALE VICTIMS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE While the broadening of international criminal law’s understanding of crimes from sexual to gendered is important, it has been primarily focused on explaining how crimes against female victims are gendered, rather than advancing an understanding of how gender impacts crimes and violence against all victims, regardless of their gender. Despite the striking similarities between testimonies of male and female victims of sexual v­ iolence – ­such as in relation to the stigma and shame victims experience, the risk of rejection by families and communities, the emotional and psychological trauma, or long-­term medical ­consequences – ­sexual violence against male victims ‘has been marginalized to an even greater extent than sexual violence against women’ (Hayes 2015, p. 835). This is due to a variety of factors, most prominently the lack of legal and factual recognition that men and boys are targeted through sexual violence both in ways similar to women and girls and in ways particular to their gender. A 2014 survey of 189 domestic criminal law systems showed that in two-­thirds of the world’s countries, domestic criminal law only recognizes female victims of rape and 67 countries criminalize men who report sexual violence due to domestic prohibitions on what are deemed or assumed to be ‘homosexual acts’ (Dolan 2014). The survey also found that 90 per cent of men in conflict-­affected areas live in situations where the law provides no protection at all against sexual violence committed against male victims. In other words, many national rape laws are premised on gendered assumptions and notions of ‘male aggression and female submissiveness’ (Dolan 2014, p.  6). This renders male-­targeted sexual violence invisible. Similarly, in scholarship the issue is still too often ‘relegated to a footnote’ (Sivakumaran 2007). In contrast to many domestic criminal laws, on paper, the Rome Statute recognizes victims of sexual violence regardless of their gender; its definitions of crimes, such as that of rape, are phrased in gender-­neutral terms. Yet, there remain factual, legal and social gaps in international criminal law’s understanding of sexual violence against male victims (Oosterveld 2014b). For example, although evidence of sexual violence against men and boys was introduced in a number of trials at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, because the Prosecution’s indictments only referenced ‘women and girls’, the Chamber held that the charges could not subsequently be corrected to include sexual violence against men and boys (Oosterveld 2018, p. 447). Similarly, a request by the Legal Representatives for Victims in the ICC’s Ongwen trial to introduce evidence regarding sexual violence against men and boys was rejected by the Trial Chamber because the

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­403 Prosecutor’s charges in the case relate exclusively to sexual violence against women and girls.15 Yet, as explained by the Legal Representative, as part of the LRA armed group’s recruitment and initiation practices, young male abductees suffered sexual violence and were often forced to commit sexual violence against others, including fellow female recruits or civilian women and girls; the rape of both men and women during LRA attacks served to further terrorize and dehumanize the local population.16 Similarly, it is hard to believe that the Court would have made the same determination had the crimes not involved SGBV but what are seen as ‘non-­gendered’ crimes such as murder, where the gender of victims is rarely specifically delineated as a relevant factor for underlying conduct. As Oosterveld (2018, p. 448) argues, ‘an assumption [among investigators/ prosecutors/judges] that gender crimes are solely female crimes can have far-­reaching effects on the crimes prosecuted in a given case’. To the extent that sexual violence against men has been recognized in international law, it is often characterized as other, non-­sexual, categories of crimes (Sivakumaran 2007, 2013). This is partly due to the gendered stereotype of the man as the perpetrator and the woman as the v­ ictim – ­the idea that men cannot be raped. It is also premised on the notion that violence against men is of a different nature from violence against women: violence against men is violence against their standing in public, against their authority, and, as such, is seen as a public violation (torture, inhumane treatment) rather than a private violation (sexual violence) and thus deserving of different attention. In this way, gendered ideas around perpetrators and victims affect how crimes are valued and labelled. Whereas with female victims of sexual violence the emphasis has often been placed too heavily upon the sexual components, thus diminishing the violence of these crimes, with male victims the opposite tends to happen. In an attempt to understand this divergence, Turan (2016, p.  41) posits that, for male victims, sexual violence crimes are often understood solely in terms of an absence of ‘dominance’, whereas for female victims the crimes are primarily conceptualized based on an absence of ‘consent’. Yet, power and dominance are at the heart of every act of sexual violence, regardless of the gender of the victim (Sivakumaran 2007, pp. 267–269). This misunderstanding of the differences and importantly the similarities in the ways in which male and female victims are targeted through 15   The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen, ICC, Trial Chamber IX, ‘Decision on the Legal Representatives for Victims Requests to Present Evidence and Views and Concerns and related requests’, ICC-­02/04-­01/15-­1199-­Red (6 March 2018), paras 55-­59. 16   The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen, ICC, Trial Chamber IX, ‘Victims’ requests for leave to present evidence and to present victims’ views and concerns in person’, ICC-­02/04-­ 01/15-­1166 (2 February 2018), paras 16-­22.

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404  Handbook on gender and violence s­ exualized and gendered violence ultimately impairs the law’s transformative potential. It is also worth pointing out that, while the 2014 SGBC Policy acknowledges that SGBV can be committed against individuals regardless of their gender, it does not include specific recommendations or approaches to ensure the recognition of male victims of sexual violence (Hayes 2015, p. 835). Nonetheless, sexual violence against male victims has featured in a few cases at the ICC, albeit in the shadows. For example, in the Muthaura case, the Prosecutor initially brought charges of ‘other forms of sexual violence’ relating to acts of penile amputation and forced circumcision committed against men of Luo ethnicity during the post-­election violence in Kenya in 2007–2008.17 The Prosecution had argued these acts were both attacks on men’s sexual organs and attacks on their masculinity. Disagreeing with the Prosecutor’s classification, the Pre-­Trial Chamber re-­characterized these charges as ‘other inhumane acts’ because, in its view, they ‘cannot be considered acts of a “sexual nature” [. . .] and are to be more properly qualified as “other inhumane acts” [. . .] in light of the serious injury to body that the forcible circumcision causes’.18 While the Pre-­Trial Chamber provides little reasoning for this decision, it appears to be grounded in the judges’ understanding of what it means for an act to be ‘sexual’ – namely, that it has sexual intent. Forced circumcision and penile amputation did not have any such sexual intent; the perpetrator derived no sexual pleasure or gratification out of the act. Yet, the Chamber failed to recognize that these acts were sexual not because there was anything inherently sexual about the perpetrator’s motives, but because they targeted the victims’ sexual function and permanently affected their sexual integrity as well as their reproductive capacities (Hayes 2013, pp.  43–44; Hayes 2015, p. 805). The Chamber thus failed to acknowledge that a particular form of violence attacking men’s sexual organs constitutes sexual violence, rather than simply violence. Similarly, in the case against Al-­ Tuhamy Mohamed Khaled (Al-­ Tuhamy), while acts of sexual violence were recognized, the harms were not specifically charged as such, but were subsumed within other more 17   Following the withdrawal of charges by the Prosecutor against the accused in March 2013 and December 2014, the case was closed in March 2015. 18   The Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali, ICC, Pre-­Trial Chamber II, ‘Decision on the Prosecutor’s Application for Summonses to Appear for Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali’, ICC-­01/09-­02/11-­01 (8 March 2011), at para 27. See also The Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali, ICC, Pre-­Trial Chamber II, ‘Decision on the Confirmation of Charges Pursuant to Article 61(7)(a) and (b) of the Rome Statute’, ICC-­01/09-­02/11-­382-­Red (23 January 2012), at paras 264-­266.

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­405 generic crime categories. Issuing his arrest warrant in April 2013, the Pre-­Trial Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that members of the Libyan Internal Security Agency, with Al-­Tuhamy at its head, arrested and detained perceived opponents of the Gaddafi regime and subjected them to various forms of mistreatment, ‘including severe beatings, electrocution, acts of sexual violence and rape, solitary confinement, deprivation of food and water, inhumane conditions of detention, mock executions, threats of killing and rape’ (emphasis added).19 Yet, despite explicitly acknowledging that the mistreatment of persons in detention included various acts of sexual violence, these acts are subsumed within non-­sexual crime categories, rather than specifically charging such acts as ‘rape’ and/or ‘other forms of sexual violence’. While more general crime labels, such as torture, certainly give expression to a part of harm suffered by victims in detention, they fail to recognize a key distinctive feature of the violence perpetrated. This is not to say that the sexual must always trump these other categories of harm; rather, there is a need ‘to recognise both the g­ eneral – r­ ape as torture, as well as the p ­ articular – r­ ape as rape’ (Sivakumaran 2007, pp. 256–257). A notable exception in this regard is the case against Jean-­Pierre Bemba Gombo. In this case, the Prosecution called two male victims of sexual violence: one victim testified that he was raped in front of his wife and children by Mouvement de libération du Congo soldiers due to his position as a community leader; the other testified that he was raped and forced to perform fellatio on the soldiers after he tried to protest against his wife’s rape.20 This represents the first time a male victim was specifically called to support rape charges before an international criminal tribunal (Hayes 2015, p. 835), and thus where charges were specifically brought that recognized the rape of male victims as rape. The more recent case against Bosco Ntaganda, whose trial commenced in September 2015 and heard closing statements in August 2018, also includes male victims of sexual violence with the charge of rape as a crime against humanity and as a war crime.21 The recognition of male victims of sexual violence in the Bemba and Ntaganda cases represent important first steps in an otherwise under-­ addressed area of international criminal law. While women and girls 19   The Prosecutor v. Al-Tuhamy Mohamed Khaled, ICC, Pre-­Trial Chamber I, ‘Warrant of Arrest for Al-­Tuhamy Mohamed Khaled with under seal and ex parte Annex’, ICC-­01/11-­ 01/13-­1 (18 April 2013), para 7. 20   For a detailed overview of this testimony, see Inder et al. (2011, pp. 249-­250); Inder et al. (2012, pp. 254-­256). Bemba was acquitted of all charges upon appeal in June 2018. 21   The Prosecutor v. Bosco Ntaganda, ICC, Pre-­Trial Chamber II, ‘Decision Pursuant to Article 61(7)(a) and (b) of the Rome Statute on the Charges of the Prosecutor Against Bosco Ntaganda’, ICC-­01/04-­02/06-­309 (9 June 2014), paras 50 and 52.

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406  Handbook on gender and violence remain disproportionately affected by sexual violence, there is increasing recognition that men and boys also suffer sexual violence in conflicts around the world to degrees previously unknown (Kapur and Muddell 2016). Public testimonies by both male and female victims to support sexual violence charges present important opportunities to expand not only the legal and factual gaps identified by Oosterveld in the understanding of male-­targeted sexual violence, but may go a long way towards addressing the social gap, through the expressive function often ascribed to international trials (DeGuzman 2012; Meijers and Glasius 2016). Increasing recognition of male victims of sexual violence, as with female victims of sexual violence, presents an important, yet under-­utilized, opportunity for the ICC to demonstrate the progressive nature of its mandate and set important legal precedents.

DIFFUSING GENDER JUSTICE NORMS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPLEMENTARITY One of the most hotly contested issues during the Rome Statute negotiations, other than the definition of gender, involved the parameters of the Court’s jurisdiction. This involved a debate not just on jurisdiction in terms of the types of crimes that could be investigated and prosecuted by the Court (the existence of jurisdiction), but also, and perhaps more importantly, about when the Court should, and when it should not, be able to exercise that jurisdiction. To put it differently, it was a question of how to balance the need for the ICC’s jurisdiction with principles of state sovereignty. Previous international tribunals, notably the ICTY and ICTR, had primary jurisdiction: their jurisdiction superseded that of domestic courts, yet most states were comfortable with this because the ICTY and ICTR had restrictive territorial and temporal jurisdiction. Now that they were discussing the establishment of a permanent court with potentially worldwide reach, states were very reluctant to sign over their sovereignty to an independent prosecutor with unchecked powers. The compromise ultimately reached was that the ICC would be ‘complementary to national criminal jurisdictions’ (Rome Statute, Article 1). Within this framework of complementarity, states retain primary jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute Rome Statute crimes, and the ICC essentially functions as a court of last resort. Additionally, noting that the types of situations that come before the Court often involve widespread mass criminality and a broad range of crimes and perpetrators, the ICC will only ever be able to address a few exemplary cases. Indeed, with the significant and increasing budget constraints on the ICC, and given its abysmal

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­407 conviction record for SGBV crimes to date, the ICC cannot be the only avenue of accountability. Strictly speaking, complementarity presents a legal test pertaining to the admissibility of cases before the ICC, as set out in Article 17 of the Rome Statute. This admissibility test essentially poses three (sets of) questions that must be answered to determine whether or not the ICC can exercise jurisdiction. First, are there domestic proceedings and do they relate to the same case that is the subject of proceedings at the ICC, or have such proceedings been completed, or was a decision made not to pursue the case? Second, is or was the state in question genuinely able or willing to carry out these proceedings? And third, is the case of sufficient gravity to justify action by the ICC? While delineating the detail of this admissibility test is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that several scholars, including this author, have argued that the way in which this test has been interpreted by the Court risks leaving significant impunity gaps for SGBV (Chappell et al. 2013; de Vos 2018; Kapur 2016, 2018). For example, to pre-­empt the ICC from exercising jurisdiction, a national court must conduct a case involving the same person and substantially the same conduct, but the legal characterization of that conduct is irrelevant. In other words, states may prosecute relevant conduct as a domestic crime (for example ‘ordinary’ rape or assault), rather than an international crime (for example rape as a crime against humanity).22 Noting the inadequacies of many domestic legal frameworks in recognizing SGBV, this may fail to capture the full extent of criminality, and risks perpetuating the misconception that sexual violence crimes are unconnected to broader political contexts within which such crimes are perpetrated (for a more detailed discussion of the gender justice obstacles in admissibility, see de Vos 2018). Fundamentally, achieving justice under the Rome Statute depends on States Parties themselves carrying out investigations and prosecutions of crimes with the Court’s jurisdiction. Over time, therefore, the principle of complementarity has developed beyond its ‘legal life’ (Nouwen 2013) into a normative principle structuring and shaping a broader system of ‘Rome Statute justice’: complementarity being the cornerstone of a system in which domestic courts and the ICC together create a web of accountability for perpetrators of international crimes. In this way, more than resolving jurisdictional conflicts, complementarity is about ‘doing what the other could not or would not do through a division of tasks’ (El Zeidy 2008, p.  154). This has led some authors to argue that the threat 22   I use the term ‘ordinary’ in quotation marks here to distinguish rape charges under ordinary criminal codes from rape charges brought under international crime provisions in domestic legal systems.

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408  Handbook on gender and violence of intervention by the Court can spur domestic authorities into a­ ction – ­complementarity’s ‘catalyst’ effect (e.g. Kleffner 2006; Nouwen 2013). Relatedly, in this broader Rome Statute system of justice, the ICC has a role to play in the encouragement of domestic accountability processes through a standard-­setting or norm-­expressing function: how the ICC interprets its mandate, what crimes it focuses on, and how it conducts its investigations and prosecutions is highly relevant. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that what the ICC says and does can have a ripple effect at a national level, including on accountability for SGBV, particularly in the context of the ICC’s preliminary examinations. For example, Kapur (2018) argues that developments in the national justice process in Guinea, such as bringing charges for sexual violence or increasing security for judges to hear cases, often occur around visits from the Office of the Prosecutor, where ICC staff engage with Guinean authorities and discuss the progress of cases and investigations. Similarly, my research on Colombia suggests a correlation between ICC pronouncements on priorities in its assessment of whether to open an investigation, for example its concerns around ongoing impunity for SGBV, and related domestic developments (de Vos 2017). While this is not to say that there is a direct causal relationship between pronouncements by the ICC, on the one hand, and changes or improvements in domestic accountability, on the other, these examples highlight the underexplored gender justice potential of complementarity’s catalyst dimension. Additionally, beyond the impact of direct interactions between the ICC and national authorities on domestic accountability for SGBV, complementarity may also stimulate domestic accountability on a more indirect level. For example, some authors have argued that the ratification of the Rome Statute has encouraged states to amend national criminal laws to reflect a more comprehensive understanding of SGBV (Ní Aoláin 2014; Waller et al. 2014). Additionally, the involvement of the ICC in a particular situation, such as its preliminary examination in Colombia or its investigation in the DRC, has allowed civil society organizations in those countries to mobilize more effectively in support of domestic accountability efforts. Importantly, this may have effects beyond the investigation and prosecution of SGBV as international crimes. As my research has shown, in both Colombia and the DRC, efforts to domestically implement the Rome Statute, oftentimes championed by civil society organizations, gave rise to broader amendments of criminal law and policies, including regarding SGBV crimes outside the context of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (de Vos 2017). In this respect, while there is no specific legal obligation to incorporate any of the Rome Statute’s provisions into national legislation, complementarity can provide a powerful

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­409 incentive for states to enact domestic implementing legislation, and may foster increased engagement with those standards by domestic actors. In other words, the broader significance of the Rome Statute’s principle of complementarity, when connected to its gender justice principles and provisions, may be its effect on the domestic practice of international criminal law, for instance through the harmonization of domestic legal standards with the Rome Statute’s progressive norms (Kapur 2018; Laplante 2010). Such processes may open up opportunities to promote justice and redress for victims of SGBV more widely. Nonetheless, while this transfer of international norms around SGBV to the domestic level has been celebrated and encouraged by many, others have called for a more critical evaluation of the transplantation of international norms, noting that, while progressive, the Rome Statute’s standards are far from perfect (Dowds 2018). The connection between complementarity, on the one hand, and the Rome Statute’s gender justice provisions, on the other, remains an underexplored area of study. More research is needed to fully understand the way in which international criminal law can and does facilitate domestic accountability for SGBV, and to better grasp how the ICC can capitalize on this role within the limits of its mandate.

CONCLUSIONS With not a single successful conviction for SGBV at the twentieth anniversary of the Rome Statute, it is high time for critical reflection on the disconnect between the Statute’s gender justice promise and the reality of the Court’s accountability efforts. Its continuous struggle to deliver gender justice risks damaging the Court’s legitimacy and credibility among even its staunchest supporters. While the Prosecution is to be commended for the progressive steps it has recently taken in a number of cases, without real, tangible accountability effects in practice, its transformative potential may ultimately be limited. Nonetheless, as this chapter has also shown, there are a number of emerging areas of research and examples of evolving practice that can serve to reinvigorate the ICC’s relevance at the global stage in the fight against impunity for SGBV, particularly when connected to the Court’s broader function in the expression of global norms. Writing this chapter as celebrations of the Rome Statute’s twentieth anniversary are underway around the ­world – ­yet also at a time when the Court’s SGBV record returned to zero following an acquittal in a high-­profile ­case – ­the wish expressed by some academic and civil society commentators to look beyond the Court to the impact of its Statute is one that resonates with me (Cannock 2018; Kersten 2018). It is also one

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410  Handbook on gender and violence that may be most valuable to the areas of emerging research identified in this chapter. While it remains important to critically evaluate the ICC’s capacity to deliver gender justice through the cases it prosecutes, given the importance accorded to domestic accountability processes within the Rome Statute system of justice, another important question is how to ensure that the gender justice progress gained with the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998 is not lost when the weight of international criminal justice is to be found at a national level. For the Court to fully embrace the gender justice potential of its mandate, it must continue pushing the boundaries of international criminal law to be more inclusive, such as by embracing intersectionality, reproductive violence and broader gendered harms, and by fully recognizing all victims of sexual violence, regardless of their gender.

REFERENCES Agirre, X.A. (2013) ‘Beyond dogma and taboo: criteria for effective investigation of sexual violence’ in M. Bergsmo, A.B. Skre and E.J. Wood (eds) Understanding and Proving International Sex Crimes, Beijing: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher. Askin, K.D. (2003) ‘Prosecuting wartime rape and other gender-­related crimes under international law: extraordinary advances, enduring obstacles’, Berkeley Journal of International Law, 21 (1), 288–349. Baig, L., M. Jarvis, E.M. Salgado and G. Pinzauti (2016) ‘Contextualising Sexual Violence: Selection of Crimes’ in M. Jarvis and S. Brammertz (eds) Prosecuting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at the ICTY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 172–219. Bedont, B. and K. Hall-­Martinez (1999) ‘Ending impunity for gender crimes under the International Criminal Court’, Brown Journal of World Affairs, 6 (1), 65–85. Boon, K. (2001) ‘Rape and forced pregnancy under the ICC statute: human dignity, autonomy, and consent’, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 32 (3), 625–675. Cannock, M. (2018) ‘The ICC at 20: all roads lead away from Rome’, Amnesty International, accessed 30 July 2018 at https://hrij.amnesty.nl/the-­icc-­at-­20-­all-­roads-­lead-­away-­from-­ rome/. Chappell, L. (2011) ‘Nested newness and institutional innovation: expanding gender justice in the International Criminal Court’ in M.L. Krook and F. Mackay (eds) Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 163–180. Chappell, L. (2016) The Politics of Gender Justice at the International Criminal Court: Legacies and Legitimacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chappell, L., R. Grey and E. Waller (2013) ‘The gender justice shadow of complementarity: lessons from the International Criminal Court’s preliminary examinations in Guinea and Colombia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 7 (3), 1–21. Charlesworth, H. (2002) ‘International law: a discipline of crisis’, Modern Law Review, 65 (3), 377–392. Chinkin, C. (1994) ‘Rape and sexual abuse of women in international law’, European Journal of International Law, 5 (3), 326–341. Copelon, R. (2000) ‘Gender crimes as war crimes: integrating crimes against women into international criminal law’, McGill Law Journal, 46 (1), 217–240. de Brouwer, A.-M. (2005) Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence: The ICC and the Practice of the ICTY and the ICTR, Antwerp: Intersentia.

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­411 de Vos, D. (2016) ‘Can the ICC prosecute forced contraception?’, EUI blogs, accessed 7 July 2018 at https://me.eui.eu/dieneke-­de-­vos/blog/can-­the-­icc-­prosecute-­forced-­contra­ ception/. de Vos, D. (2017) ‘Complementarity’s gender justice prospects and limitations: examining normative interactions between the Rome Statute and national accountability processes for sexual violence crimes in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo’, PhD thesis, European University Institute. de Vos, D. (2018) ‘Complementarity and case selection: exposing the vulnerability of sexual and gender-­based violence in the admissibility test’ in Morten Bergsmo (ed.) Thematic Prosecution of International Sex Crimes (2nd edn), Beijing: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, pp. 465–500. DeGuzman, M.M. (2012) ‘An expressive rationale for the thematic prosecution of sex crimes’ in Morten Bergsmo (ed.) Thematic Prosecution of International Sex Crimes (2nd edn), Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, pp. 13–44. Dolan, C. (2014) ‘Into the mainstream: addressing sexual violence against men and boys in conflict’, Briefing paper prepared for the workshop held at the Overseas Development Institute, London. Dowds, E. (2018) ‘Conceptualizing the role of consent in the definition of rape at the international criminal court: a norm transfer perspective’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (1), 624–643. Edwards, C. (2018) ‘Forced contraception as a means of torture’ in Gender Perspectives on Torture: Law and Practice, Washington: Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, American University Washington College of Law, pp. 139–159. El Zeidy, M.M. (2008) The Principle of Complementarity in International Criminal Law: Origins, Development and Practice, Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. Eriksson Baaz, M. and M. Stern (2018) ‘Curious erasures: the sexual in wartime sexual violence’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20 (1), 295–314. Glasius, M. (2005) ‘Who is the real civil society? Women’s groups versus pro-­family groups at the International Criminal Court negotiations’ in J. Howell and D. Mulligan (eds) Gender and Civil Society: Transcending Boundaries, London: Routledge, pp. 222–241. Grewal, K. (2012) ‘The protection of sexual autonomy under international criminal law: the International Criminal Court and the challenge of defining rape’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 10 (2), 373–396. Grey, R. (2017) ‘The ICC’s first “forced pregnancy” case in historical perspective’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 15 (5), 905–930. Grey, R. (2018) ‘International Criminal Court poised to interpret the crime of “gender-­based persecution” for the first time’, IntLawGrrls, 12 April, accessed 28 July 2018 at https:// ilg2.org/2018/04/12/international-­criminal-­court-­poised-­to-­interpret-­the-­crime-­of-­gender-­ based-­persecution-­for-­the-­first-­time/. Grey, R. and I. Rosenthal (2019) ‘Gender-­based crimes: a monumental day for the ICC’, IntLawGrrls, 8 July, accessed 17 July 2019 at https://ilg2.org/2019/07/08/gender-­based-­ crimes-­a-monumental-­day-­for-­the-­icc/. Hayes, N. (2010) ‘Creating a definition of rape in international law: the contribution of the international criminal tribunals’ in S. Darcy and J. Powderly (eds) Judicial Creativity at the International Criminal Tribunals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 129–156. Hayes, N. (2012) ‘The impact of prosecutorial strategy on the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence at international criminal tribunals’ in M. Bergsmo (ed.) Thematic Prosecution of International Sex Crimes (2nd edn), Beijing: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, pp. 413–444. Hayes, N. (2013) ‘Sisyphus wept: prosecuting sexual violence at the International Criminal Court’ in W. Schabas, Y. McDermott and N. Hayes (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to International Criminal Law: Critical Perspectives, Farnham: Ashgate. Hayes, N. (2015) ‘La lutte continue: investigating and prosecuting sexual violence at the ICC’ in C. Stahn (ed.) The Law and Practice of the International Criminal Court, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 801–839.

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412  Handbook on gender and violence Henry, N. (2014) ‘The fixation on wartime rape: feminist critique and international criminal law’, Social and Legal Studies, 23 (1), 93–111. Inder, B. (2013) ‘Partners for gender justice’ in A.-M. de Brouwer, C. Ku, R. Römkens and L. van den Herik (eds) Sexual violence as an International Crime: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Cambridge: Intersentia, pp. 315–338. Inder, B., K. Orlovsky, D. de Vos, N. Hayes and L. Mann (2012) Gender Report Card on the International Criminal Court 2012, The Hague: Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. Inder, B., K. Orlovsky, V. Serra, D. de Vos, L. Mann and N. Hayes (2011) Gender Report Card on the International Criminal Court 2011, The Hague: Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. Jarvis, M. and S. Brammertz (eds) (2016) Prosecuting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at the ICTY, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jarvis, M. and K. Vigneswaran (2016) ‘Facing challenges in sexual violence cases’ in M. Jarvis and S. Brammertz (eds) Prosecuting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at the ICTY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 33–72. Kapur, A. (2016) ‘The value of international-­national interactions and norm interpretations in catalysing national prosecutions of sexual violence’, Oñati Socio-Legal Studies, 6, 62–90. Kapur, A. (2018) ‘Complementarity as a catalyst for gender justice in national prosecutions’ in F. Ní Aoláin, N. Cahn, D.F. Haynes and N. Valji (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 226–239. Kapur, A. and K. Muddell (2016) ‘When no one calls it rape: the tough truth about sexual violence against men and boys in transitional contexts’, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), December. Kersten, M. (2018) ‘Making a distinction: the Rome Statute is not the ICC; it is much more than that’, Justice in Conflict, accessed 30 July 2018 at https://justiceinconflict. org/2018/07/17/making-­a-distinction-­the-­anniversary-­of-­the-­rome-­statute-­not-­just-­the-­ international-­criminal-­court/. Kleffner, J.K. (2006) ‘Complementarity as a catalyst for compliance’ in J.K. Kleffner and G. Kor (eds) Complementary Views on Complementarity, The Hague: T.M.C. Asser. Kravetz, D. (2016) ‘Prosecuting conflict-­related sexual violence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)’, IntLawGrrls, accessed 30 July 2018 at https:// ilg2.org/2016/03/08/prosecuting-­conflict-­related-­sexual-­violence-­at-­the-­international-­ criminal-­tribunal-­for-­the-­former-­yugoslavia-­icty/. Laplante, L.J. (2010) ‘The domestication of international criminal law: a proposal for expanding the International Criminal Court’s influence’, John Marshall Law Review, 43 (3), https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2127894. Laverty, C. (2018) ‘What lies beneath? The turn to values in international criminal legal discourse’, EJIL: Talk!, accessed 28 July 2018 at https://www.ejiltalk.org/what-­lies-­beneath-­ the-­turn-­to-­values-­in-­international-­criminal-­legal-­discourse/. Luping, D. (2009) ‘Investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-­based crimes before the International Criminal Court’, Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, 17 (2), 431–491. Meijers, T. and M. Glasius (2016) ‘Trials as messages of justice: what should be expected of international criminal courts?’, Ethics and International Affairs, 30 (4), 429–447. Ní Aoláin, F. (2014) ‘Gendered harms and their interface with international criminal law’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16, 622–646. Nouwen, S. (2013) Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The Catalysing Effect of the International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oosterveld, V. (2014a) ‘Constructive ambiguity and the meaning of “gender” for the International Criminal Court’, International Journal of Feminist Politics, 16 (4), 563–580. Oosterveld, V. (2014b) ‘Sexual violence directed against men and boys in armed conflict or mass atrocity: addressing a gendered harm in international criminal tribunals’, Journal of International Law and International Relations, 10, 107–128. Oosterveld, V. (2018) ‘The ICC Policy Paper on sexual and gender-­based crimes: a crucial

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Prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence at the ICC  ­413 step for international criminal law’, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, 24, 443–457. SáCouto, S. (2013) ‘Perspectives on crimes of sexual violence in international law: Advances and Challenges at the International Criminal Court’, ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law, 19 (2), 263. SáCouto, S. and K. Cleary (2009) ‘The importance of effective investigation of sexual violence and gender-­based crimes at the International Criminal Court’, Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, 17 (2), 337–359. Sellers, P. (2016) ‘Beyond a recitation of sexual violence provisions: a mature social science evaluation of the ­ICC – ­book discussion’, EJIL: Talk!, accessed 29 July 2018 at http:// www.ejiltalk.org/beyond-­a-recitation-­of-­sexual-­violence-­provisions-­a-mature-­social-­ science-­evaluation-­of-­the-­icc-­book-­discussion/. Sivakumaran, S. (2007) ‘Sexual violence against men in armed conflict’, European Journal of International Law, 18, 253–276. Sivakumaran, S. (2013) ‘Prosecuting sexual violence against men and boys’ in A.-M. de Brouwer, C. Ku, R.G. Römkens and L.J. van den Herik (eds) Sexual Violence as an International Crime: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Cambridge: Intersentia, pp. 79–97. Spees, P. (2003) ‘Women’s advocacy in the creation of the International Criminal Court: changing the landscapes of justice and power’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28, 1233–1254. Steains, C. (1999) ‘Gender issues’ in R.S.K. Lee (ed.) The International Criminal Court: The Making of the Rome Statute – Issues, Negotiations, Results, The Hague: Kluwer Law International, pp. 357–390. Turan, G. (2016) ‘Manhood deprived and (re)constructed during conflicts and international prosecutions: the curious case of the Prosecutor v. Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta et al.’, Feminist Legal Studies, 24, 29–47. Waller, E., E. Palmer and L. Chappell (2014) ‘Strengthening gender justice in the Asia-­Pacific through the Rome Statute’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 68 (3), 356–373. Weiner, P. (2013) ‘The evolving jurisprudence of the crime of rape in international criminal law’, Boston College Law Review, 54, 1207–1237.

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28. Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century Sharon Marcus

On or about October 2017, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, the way we talk about sexual violence ­changed – ­probably not permanently, but, for at least a few months, searingly, unavoidably, and globally. I wrote what follows before that, during the last months of 2016, after being invited to speak at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota by No Es Normal, a group of feminist faculty and students determined to make sexual harassment less acceptable on their campus. For that occasion, I decided to revisit my 1992 essay ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention’, and to discuss some recently published feminist contributions to debates about sexual violence. At the time, I felt that very little had improved since 1992. By the time this appears in print, readers may feel the same way. But the events that took place soon after I wrote this reflection also attest to the rage that paved the way for the #MeToo moment and to the fathomless unpredictability of social change.

In 1992, I published an essay entitled ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’ (Marcus 1992) that has since been widely cited and discussed. Here, I discuss how and why I came to write it. I summarize its insights, rethink some of its claims, and assess which of those claims remain relevant today, given all that has changed and all that has remained the same since that essay first appeared. The first time I remember being sexually harassed, I was ten years old. It was 1976 in New York City, which was celebrating the nation’s bicentennial with tall ships and talk of freedom. One day at school, I was standing in line with my class when I felt something poke my butt. I turned around and saw the boy behind me, a classmate, smirking at me, holding the baseball bat he had just used to prod my butt. I don’t remember if I kicked him or just thought about kicking him. I don’t remember if I told my parents or not; if I did tell them, I don’t remember what they said. But I do recall very clearly what I felt: simple, uncomplicated anger. I did not feel confused. I did not feel flattered. I did not wonder if I should feel flattered. I did not feel afraid. I felt that I had been insulted, disrespected, and invaded. Maybe I found some way to communicate my rage, because he never tried anything like that with me again. I remember that feeling of anger so clearly because I have felt it thousands of times since then. During my teens, twenties, and thirties I could 414

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Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century  ­415 not take a walk without having unwanted comments directed at me by men, almost always strangers passing me in the street. It did not matter how I dressed (although winter was the quietest season), whether my hair was long or short, whether I wore glasses or contact lenses. The men who harassed me were all ages, races, and classes. Sometimes they pretended to be polite: ‘Hi baby, you look good.’ More often they made obscene comments about my body or about sexual acts. I didn’t distinguish much between the polite and overtly lewd remarks because they all had the same effect and the same cause: men were interrupting my train of thought because they presumed that they had a right to talk to me, and because they presumed they had a right to pass judgment on me. Given how enraged their provocations made me, it fascinated me how little these men feared me. To be sure, I didn’t look like someone they had been to taught to worry about offending. As an acquaintance once told me after reading an essay I’d written about how angry it makes me when men tell me to smile: he would tell both men and women to smile, but he worries that if he told a man to smile he’d get punched in the nose. Given how angry men’s street harassment made me, I thought they should be more worried about my punching them in the nose. I was worried about what I might do one day if someone attacked me physically as well as verbally. I often responded to verbal harassment by talking back to the harassers. Sometimes I was polite: ‘Don’t talk to me that way. I don’t like it and it’s disrespectful.’ Sometimes I screamed curses at the top of my lungs. I felt that strangers who said disgusting things to me on the street did not deserve my respect or consideration. I felt that I had the right to respond in any way that made me feel better in that particular moment. I did not aim to have a consistent way of responding. I did not seek to educate or change my harassers. I wanted them to feel that there was a price to pay for being rude to me. Most of my friends thought I was being reckless or just wasting my time; they told me it was best to ignore harassers. Some even said they were frightened that I might provoke someone into really attacking me. I didn’t take my friends’ warnings seriously because all of the women I knew who had been raped had been attacked by someone they knew, not by a stranger on the street, and because research studies confirm that stranger rape is far less common than rape by an acquaintance, partner, or family member. I didn’t find that ignoring harassers did anything to quiet them; when I didn’t tell men to shut up, they usually continued or even escalated their harassment. Most of all, I felt worse when I didn’t express my anger out loud. Harassers tended to respond identically whether my comments were polite or angry: they yelled angry insults at me, but not once did anyone escalate to physical violence.

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416  Handbook on gender and violence Talking back to harassers did not transform unpleasant interactions into productive or pleasant ones. But when my reactions did make harassers more verbally hostile, I found that I liked exposing these interactions for the aggressions they were. A few men seemed genuinely confused and upset that I did not like their harassment; maybe they were so used to thinking that they were bestowing compliments that they felt hurt that I considered their comments on my body, clothing, and sexual attractiveness insulting. But since even the well-­intentioned men were not concerned about how I felt, about the effect their words might have on me, I trained myself not to care how they felt. This was not easy because, in most circumstances, I want to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings in even the slightest way. Some men clearly thought I was crazy. That didn’t bother me at all because people are less likely to attack a crazy person. I remembered a friend telling me he’d read somewhere that if someone tries to rape you, you should try to defecate, urinate, or vomit in the hopes that behaving abnormally might disgust an attacker into leaving you alone. Most of all, I talked back in order to assert my sense of reality and normality: I didn’t like being harassed. It upset me. Why should I keep my distress to myself when it was caused by someone else not minding his own business? I wanted to be able to walk down the street in peace; and if someone disrupted my peace, I was going to disrupt his. In my twenties, I was harassed almost every single time I left the house and went more than two blocks. I refused to compound those relentless, exhausting disruptions by being too intimidated or ashamed to stick up for myself and speak my mind. Overcoming the fear others had instilled in me about talking back felt transformative and liberating. I had been a feminist since high school. As part of my feminist education, I had read books and articles about rape. The feminist movement in the US had made rape an open topic of discussion in the 1970s. Angela Davis (1975, 1981), Susan Griffin (1979), and Susan Brownmiller (1975) wrote important books and essays about rape; feminist novels like Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977) made rape and the fear of rape central to their plots; Catherine MacKinnon (1982) expanded the concept of sexual violence to include sexual harassment, even heterosexuality itself; Adrienne Rich (1980) extended that point in her work on compulsory heterosexuality. In the early 1980s, I went on Take Back the Night marches that asserted women’s right to occupy public space; I took self-­defense courses for women. In graduate school, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I began to read scholarship designed to raise awareness about the most common kind of rape, acquaintance rape. That was the context in which, in 1991, I came to research and write ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’, which was published the following

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Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century  ­417 year later in a book edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott, entitled Feminists Theorize the Political. The impetus behind that book was to challenge the notion, common at the time, that postmodern and post-­ structural theory were enemies of feminist practice. That is why I began the essay by raising questions of representation and reality. That frame strikes me as somewhat dated today, when it is no longer especially controversial to suggest that we cannot separate representation from reality. By that I do not mean that representations are as true as reality. I mean that we recognize more readily today that if we want to change reality, we need to change how we represent it; that we need phrases, narratives, and images that show reality from many points of view; that representations play a crucial role in reproducing inequality and violence, and can also play a key role in helping us imagine and create a better world. To write ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’ I read a great deal of feminist theory, most of it rooted in legal studies, literary studies, film studies, and history. I also did something unusual for a graduate student in comparative literature: I read scholarship based on empirical research conducted by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and criminologists. I was most interested in books that described how women felt about rape and that discussed how the fear of rape affects every woman, whether she has been raped or not. Even more, I was interested in what feminists and law enforcement officials had to say about how to prevent rape. I found that even anti-­rape activists had far more to say about what happens after rapes have been committed than about how individual women in everyday life might prevent a rape from taking place. So much of the literature focused on court cases, arrest procedures, and journalistic coverage of completed rapes. What little discussion of prevention there was focused on listing the many situations women should avoid to minimize the chances of being raped. A few researchers, however, had thought to ask women whether they had ever successfully prevented a rape. This was a bold question for them even to ask because, in 1991, the received wisdom from police, from parents, and even from some anti-­rape activists was: never fight back if someone tries to rape you, because he might then try to kill you. So-­called self-­defense manuals, on the basis of no evidence, advised women to be passive and avoid engaging in any kind of resistance, even yelling or running, because that might goad their attackers to greater violence. Even as feminists encouraged women to share stories about being raped, in order to raise awareness and overcome trauma, it was rare to hear women asked to share accounts, if they had them, of having thwarted an attack in process. Discussions about avoiding rape emphasized tactics that constrained women’s freedom of movement: don’t leave the house too early in the morning; don’t come home too late at

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418  Handbook on gender and violence night. Be careful around strangers, but remember, most women are raped by someone they know. The near-­impossibility of avoiding situations that might lead to rape made me all the more interested in learning about how and why women sometimes successfully fended off attackers. I keenly felt the danger of focusing on such stories: asking about how some women prevented some rape attempts might seem to fault those women who did not fight off their attackers. In the logic of rape culture, any discussion of rape can end up blaming the victim. But I felt that it should be possible to talk about how a woman could try to prevent an attack without saying it was her fault if her attempt failed. Here are the main points I made in the essay: because rape is about power, it can never be separated from other social categories that organize the unequal distribution of power, such as race; instead of focusing exclusively on how to get rape victims a better hearing in court, or debating the effectiveness of higher conviction rates or harsher sentences for convicted rapists, we should also give women skills to prevent rape from taking place at all; and, finally, to understand how to prevent rape, we need to understand rape as a process, an interaction that unfolds in time between individuals who, from one moment to the next, are struggling over who will define the interaction and each actor’s place in it. I called the interactions between would-­be rapists and their targets the rape script for several reasons. First, I wanted to underscore that rape unfolds as a narrative. Many cultures have long perpetuated narratives that suggest that once a man decides to rape a woman, he will succeed in doing so, without incurring much physical or emotional damage himself. The key way Anglo-­American cultures imagine men suffering the consequences of rape revolves around male victims of false accusations by duplicitous women, as Leigh Gilmore (2017) has shown in Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. In recent decades, films such as The Accused (1988) have also explored the psychic damage endured by men who abet rapes as passive bystanders or whom other men goad into committing rape. But in general, the stories many cultures tell about rape assume that men decide whether or not to commit rape, and that those who decide to assault women need not fear their intended victims. Second, the concept of a script implies a gap between performer and role. I used the term ‘script’ rather than narrative because scripts, though often formulaic, can always be rewritten, often by the performers embodying them. I suggested that we think of a rapist as trying to convince a woman to audition for the role of rape victim, and that women targeted for attack think of ourselves as refusing that role and spend more time

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Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century  ­419 rehearsing for a more aggressive one. A rape attempt could and often does end in rape no matter what a woman does; but there is value to acting as though the script might end in a woman trying, and even succeeding, in preventing a rape from taking place. Finally, I argued that the rape script does not simply promote male violence against women. It also actively mutes and delegitimizes women’s capacity for violence, understood not in conventional terms as unwarranted, harmful aggression, but as strong and effective self-­assertion. Rapists attempt to deprive their victims of agency, and violence is a form of agency. Rapists capitalize on how sexism trains women to be victims by inscribing helplessness and fear in our bodies, minds, and souls. Sexism promotes rape culture by equating proper femininity with women who are considerate and polite, feeble and defenceless. Sexism also promotes rape culture by teaching women from a very young age to care more about the feelings of others than their own, while training men to be aggressive, strong, independent, even selfish, and punishing them for any signs of softness. What might I say differently if I wrote this essay in 2019? I would focus more on practice, on what women can do to learn self-­defense and self-­assertion. Happily, this is a field that has expanded considerably since 1991, along with bystander training, which encourages all people to intervene when they see sexual harassment or assault underway. Recent activism has offered women more ways to document harassment, but even more importantly to document effective responses to it. The website Everyday Sexism and a book by the site’s creator, Laura Bates, list many of the responses that women have made to street harassment, without any violent reprisals resulting (Bates 2014, pp.  184–185). The site and book also document creative tactics such as the one devised by a woman in Kolkata, India, who decided to exercise the right to take photographs in public by photographing every man who harassed her on the street (Bates 2014, p. 177). These tactics are not new; nor are they limited to the most privileged women. Danielle McGuire’s 2010 book At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power shows that self-­defense can work even in the most oppressive circumstances. The book is a searing catalog of how racism enabled white men to rape African-­ American women with impunity, secure in the knowledge that, until 1959, a white jury had never in the history of the United States convicted a white man charged with raping a black woman. But the book also documents several examples of African-­American women who successfully fought off their white attackers (McGuire 2010, p.136). McGuire also shows how, as African-­American women became more politically organized, they began

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420  Handbook on gender and violence to resist assaults, even by armed white policemen, in one instance telling them: ‘If you hit one of us, you’ll not leave here alive’ (2010, p. 127). I would spend more time connecting the concept of the rape script to theories of the performative. One meaning the performative evokes is that a doer never fully precedes a deed; instead, deeds create doers. That notion can help explain the idea that rape does not simply happen to beings already constituted as violent men and violated or violable women. Instead, rape is one of many ways that individuals embody and reproduce society’s dictum that men be violent and women be violated. I would clarify the argument I made against the rape continuum. In the original essay, I argued against collapsing rape and verbal harassment for a very specific reason: women were often cautioned not to challenge verbal harassers because that might provoke harassers to physically attack them. Although police and well-­meaning advisors often refused to take commonplace forms of verbal harassment seriously, they nonetheless contradicted their insistence that verbal harassment was not as serious as rape with their own particular version of the continuum theory. By warning women that resisting verbal harassment might lead to rape or battery, and that resisting rape might lead to murder, they proposed a clear link between minor and major aggressions, even as they denied that link for purposes of policing and prosecution. The result contradictorily envisioned so-­called ‘minor’ harassment as simultaneously too harmless to sanction and potentially lethal. My 1992 essay did not argue against the continuum theory; it argued against that particular use of it, which instilled enormous fear in women by warning them never to confront men directly about any form of harassment. I argued against that use of the continuum theory precisely because I believe that sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other forms of sexism are all connected and are all worth confronting, and that ignoring even minor harassment, especially out of fear, imposes its own costs and risks. Anyone interested in learning more about the continuum of sexual violence can turn to Everyday Sexism. The book is based on a social media project that Bates developed to encourage women around the world to share their experiences of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, experiences that include efforts to resist harassment and discrimination. Men are welcome to add their own observations, and some have shared their own experiences of being harassed for not being ‘manly’. Bates argues that there is a continuum linking ‘sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault’ because ‘[t]he daily, normalized suggestion that women are “other,” second-­class, inferior beings; the[ir] overwhelming sexualization and objectification [. . .] and the structural sexism that means that news, politics, and crime alike are all seen through a default male gaze [. . .] are all

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Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century  ­421 contributing factors to the crises of sexual violence we face’ (2014, pp. 167, 358). In another powerful passage, Bates compares how easy it is for her male partner to walk down the street, while she is constantly navigating a series of potential problems that include avoiding a cafe frequented by a waiter who repeatedly pesters her for her number and crossing the street to avoid another man who once followed her for blocks until she had to enter a store to escape him. If writing ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’ in 2019, I would also place more emphasis on the importance of making it easier to report, try, and convict rapists, and the need to impose sentences on convicted rapists commensurate with the seriousness of their crime. To be sure, research continues to show no clear correlation between convictions, sentences, and crime prevention. But we do not try and punish criminals only to prevent crime. We try and punish criminals to protect the dignity of the law and the dignity of crime victims. When rapists escape censure, we assail the dignity of every human being, because anyone can be raped. Because the majority of rapes involve men assaulting women, failure to punish rapists is especially damaging to women’s dignity. It is a problem when 60 million voters in the United States think that boasting about committing fourth-­ degree sexual molestation against multiple women does not disqualify someone from becoming president. One woman, asked why she voted for Donald Trump despite his notorious comments about grabbing women’s genitalia, replied: ‘If I turned down every candidate who objectified women, I’d vote for no one’ (Chira 2017). That statement falsely suggests that all political candidates objectify women, and that objectification was the sole offense Trump expressed in the leaked Access Hollywood footage. More importantly, the pervasiveness of an injustice is not a reason to do nothing about it. While increased convictions and harsher prison sentences may not significantly lower the incidence of rape, the failure to report, arrest, and convict rapists does encourage sexual assault and increases the traumatic effects on victims. I would also focus more on the ways that our culture and institutions attempt to suppress women’s efforts at self-­defense. Self-­defense can work. Since writing this chapter, I have heard many women’s stories of how they thwarted a rape attempt by being as non-­compliant as they could be. Their efforts did not require specialized training. They yelled, pushed, bit, scratched, ran, or stabbed someone’s hand with a fork. I have heard many stories of such minimal acts of self-­defense succeeding even when the woman attacked was very young and the man attempting to rape her was much larger and stronger than she was, and even when there were multiple attackers. Rapists are not omnipotent, and women in the US are now much more physically active, athletic, and stronger than we were

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422  Handbook on gender and violence encouraged to be in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, most girls practice some kind of sport or exercise from a very young age. A sense of physical self-­ confidence is essential to what feminists called ‘embodied self-­defense’, which emphasizes the importance of women learning how to be more physically capable and of placing more trust in ourselves and our instincts. Self-­defense is not uncontroversial, not least because a culture that aims to transform women into beings who can easily be raped will also punish women who defend themselves against rape. Punitive suppression of female self-­defense is a logical extension of the refusal to punish rapists. Rape culture is only one of many forms in which states empower one group to oppress others by using the state’s monopoly on legitimate ­violence – ­its laws, its police, its courts, its ­prisons – ­to prevent or punish some criminal acts and actors while failing to punish others. Those whom the state does not protect are forced to engage in self-­defense, as well as in efforts to reform the legal system. If the state and other institutions are invested enough in maintaining inequality, they will criminalize or penalize even the most harmless acts of self-­defense. Bates (2014, p. 102) cites a girl in a British elementary school who got tired of boys in her class trying to pull off her clothes during recess. She headbutted one, and broke his nose. The harassment stopped (resistance works), but she was nearly expelled, while neither of the boys got in trouble for having attacked her in the first place. As always, the logic of rape culture appears most clearly when it operates across racial lines and two systems of unjust inequality operate in tandem. In At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle L. McGuire documents how Southern courts often refused to recognize African-­American women’s efforts to fight back against rape as exercising a legitimate right to self-­defense, especially before the Civil Rights movement began to take off in the late 1950s (2010, p. 82). She argues that one of the most important landmarks in the history of rape in the United States was the acquittal of Joan Little in 1975 for the murder, in self-­defense, of a warden who raped her while she was in jail. This trial was the first US case to ratify women’s legal right to defend themselves against rape (McGuire 2010, p. 275). It was also one of the first involving a white rapist and African-­American victim in which the jury did not consist entirely of white men; in this case six members of the jury were white, six were African-­American, and nine were women. I wrote at the end of ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’ that in a perfectly just world, our focus would be on making men less likely to be rapists or to support rapists, but that if we waited for men to stop rape, we’d be waiting a very long time. I would now spend more time writing about how rape culture affects men. At least three avenues for future research come

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Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century  ­423 to mind. First, as Carol Clover (1992) argued decades ago in her work on rape revenge films, rape is not only something that men do to women; it is also something that they allow, encourage, or even pressure one another to do. Often this is related to homophobic taunting that equates being a ‘real man’ with a willingness to dominate and coerce women. Second, many men are victims of rape, usually by other men, sometimes by women. Male victims have begun to speak out in larger numbers, and their testimony deserves to be incorporated into our frameworks for thinking about sexual violence. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many men do not rape anyone, have no desire to rape anyone, and disapprove of sexual harassment as well as sexual assault. In some cases, men even organize politically to protest not only the extreme crime of rape but even the most ordinary forms of sexual harassment, such as leering at women on the street or commenting on their body parts. I find this striking because so often public debates about rape end with both men and women dismissing sexual harassment, even sexual assault, as harmless fun, mere talk, just a joke. It takes a great deal for men and women to overcome this tendency, and men have no direct self-­interest in publicly opposing violence against women. Unfortunately, men are most likely to protest violence against women in situations when doing so allows them to assert some other kind of group identity: racial, national, religious. Men and women are most likely to acknowledge and condemn rape in situations that lend themselves to an ‘us versus them’ scenario in which male others attack ‘our’ women. For example, historian Mary Louise Roberts, in What Soldiers Do (2011), documents the frustration that French men felt after WWII when American soldiers started romances with French women or the US army set up brothels staffed with French women. In this situation, French men displayed an understanding of even the subtlest sexual micro-­aggressions worthy of the most radical ­feminist – ­but largely because they felt their own manhood being challenged. Arrogant US soldiers challenged the ability of French men to feel that they were secure owners of sexual property in women or male protectors able to guarantee women’s safety. This is not exactly heartening. But it is worth noting that men often prove very capable of understanding sexual violence when they are not being accused of it themselves, and when the men they accuse belong to groups they fear, resist, or seek to oppress. More recently, and more encouragingly, we have seen many men on college campuses actively organize against rape and identify as feminists and as women’s allies. I hope that someone does research to understand why some men display so much empathy for women and prove so able to ignore masculinist propaganda. Understanding what motivates these men may give us effective tools for educating others.

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424  Handbook on gender and violence I conclude here by asking how, if at all, the world has changed since I wrote ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’? The representation of rape in popular culture has changed enormously, and in very bifurcated ways. In mainstream films that play in movie theaters, or television shows produced by network and cable television channels, it is now much more common to see female heroines successfully fight off rape attempts. Many films today feature women who are as physically capable as even the strongest man, even to the point of being w ­ arriors – ­consider the Katniss Everdeen character played by Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games. Kelly Oliver (2016) injects a cautionary note about such figures in her recent book Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape, pointing out that few women in real life can exercise these superhuman degrees of strength and prowess, and should not be expected to. Focusing on female characters who are themselves quite violent can even become an excuse for filmmakers to portray violence against women onscreen. Balanced against this is another major change of the last 25 years: the proliferation of pornography on the internet allows millions of people to watch representations of rape under conditions that militate against any serious public discussion of their effects. The consumption of pornography is both utterly common and absolutely privatized: it is now normalized without enjoying any status as normative, which makes it almost impossible to discuss honestly in public. If there are currently any serious attempts to regulate pornography, or create communal norms around what is and is not acceptable to depict, I’m not aware of ­them – ­with the exception of pornography depicting sex with children, which is criminalized. Not only do we have more people than ever before in human history regularly watching audiovisual material that simulates rape; we also know that an extraordinary number of people have proven willing to watch footage of actual rape, and to react with approval and pleasure rather than outrage. All of this should be on the agenda for new research, and you can find some references to recent research on these issues in the Public Books rape culture syllabus available online (Ciolkowski 2016). On a more positive note, there is now much more academic research on rape than there was in 1991, and a new generation of popular authors, including Jessica Valenti (2016) and Lindy West (2016), continue to perform the valuable work of raising public awareness about rape and rape culture. Universities have become centers of anti-­rape activism. Despite the fact that sentences continue to be low and courts continue to put victims on trial as much or more than their attackers, women continue to bring charges against rapists and refuse to be silenced when they feel they have not received justice. We have the example of Emma Sulkowicz at my home institution, Columbia University, who in September 2014 created a

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Still fighting: rape prevention in the twenty-­first century  ­425 public art project on campus to respond to the university finding the man she accused of raping her ‘not responsible’ of rape (McDonald 2014). We have the example of the woman who did not receive anything approaching justice in what has become known as the Stanford Rape trial, when in 2016 a man named Brock Turner was given a mere six-­month jail sentence by a judge after a jury found him guilty of felony sexual assault and prosecutors asked for a six-­year prison sentence. The plaintiff responded by writing, and reading aloud in court, a letter addressed to her attacker that subsequently went viral (Baker 2016). At the end of the day, the fact that rape is a common enough occurrence for all women to fear it has one obvious, fundamental explanation. The society has yet to exist that sees women as full human beings who matter as much as men do. Many societies around the world tolerate and even promote actual violence against women; many tolerate and even promote the use of threats to suppress women’s speech online, a form of harassment that has replaced street harassment as a way to deny women access to the public sphere. Human beings have yet to unambiguously reject our enthusiasm for devaluing entire categories of human beings. When Jodie Foster won an Oscar for playing a rape victim in The Accused, she thanked her mother for teaching her ‘that cruelty might be very human, and it might be very cultural, but it’s not acceptable’ (Foster 1989). She also thanked her mother for teaching her not to be afraid. Twenty-­five years after I wrote ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’, we are still fighting. We will still be fighting 25 years from now. On every day that we have together, let us help one another other to learn how to resist cruelty and fear, in ourselves and in others.

REFERENCES Baker, K.J.M. (2016) ‘Here’s the powerful letter the Stanford victim read to her attacker’, Buzzfeed News, 3 June, accessed 16 November 2018 at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ article/katiejmbaker/heres-­the-­powerful-­letter-­the-­stanford-­victim-­read-­to-­her-­ra. Bates, L. (2014) Everyday Sexism, New York: St. Martin’s. Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, New York: Simon & Schuster. Chira, S. (2017) ‘“You focus on the good”: women who voted for Trump, in their own words’, New York Times, 14 January, accessed 16 November 2018 at https://www.nytimes. com/2017/01/14/us/women-­voters-­trump.html. Ciolkowski, L. (2016) ‘Rape culture syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October, accessed 16 November 2018 at http://www.publicbooks.org/rape-­culture-­syllabus/?utm_​content=buf fer77745&utm_​medium=social&utm_​source=twitter.com&utm_​campaign=buffer. Clover, C. (1992) Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davis, A. (1975) Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape, New York: Lang Communications.

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426  Handbook on gender and violence Davis, A. (1981) Women, Race and Class, New York: Random House. Foster, J. (1989) Acceptance speech, 1988 (61st) Academy Awards, Shrine Civic Auditorium, Los Angeles, 29 March, accessed 16 November 2018 at http://aaspeechesdb.oscars.org/ link/061-­3/. French, M. (1977) The Women’s Room, New York: Summit Books. Gilmore, L. (2017) Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, New York: Columbia University Press. Griffin, S. (1979) Rape: The Power of Consciousness, New York: Harper & Row. Mackinnon, C. (1982) ‘Feminism, Marxism, method, and the state: an agenda for theory’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7 (3), 515–544. Marcus, S. (1992) ‘Fighting bodies, fighting words: a theory and politics of rape prevention’ in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge, pp. 385–403. McDonald, S.N. (2014) ‘It’s hard to ignore a woman toting a mattress everywhere she goes, which is why Emma Sulkowicz is still doing it’, Washington Post, 29 October, accessed 16 mix/wp/2014/10/29/ November 2018 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-­ its-­hard-­to-­ignore-­a-woman-­toting-­a-mattress-­everywhere-­she-­goes-­which-­is-­why-­emma-­ sulkowicz-­is-­still-­doing-­it/?utm_​term=.a67817fa67e8. McGuire, D. (2010) At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, New York: Vintage. Oliver, K. (2016) Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape, New York: Columbia University Press. Rich, A. (1980) ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5 (4), 631–660. Roberts, M.L. (2011) What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Valenti, J. (2016) Sex Object: A Memoir, New York: Dey Books. West, L. (2016) Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, New York: Hachette.

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Index Abu Ghraib prison ‘gitmoization’ of operations at 303 mistreatment 302–303 sexual abuse 302 sexual humiliation 304 torture at 68, 302–304 abuse cultures of 82 denial of 103 intimate partner 35 sexual exploitation and 297 abusers 222, 224 academic debate, key features of 224–228 academic descriptors 227 accessibility 174, 182 accessing justice 378–379 accountability for crimes 396 for perpetrators of international crimes 407 for sexual and gender-based violence 395, 408 Ackerly, B. 174, 183 activism 268 on gender and violence 33 renewed, against violence 258–261 transnational 257 transnational feminist 162, 258 activists 134–137 feminist 249–250 acts of violence 382 Adur, S.M. 325, 333 advertising 190–194 advocacy regional 65 for sexual rights 69 transnational 65 Aerie 192 Afghan culture 313 Afghanistan law for violence against women 314

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda 312–314 women’s rights activism in 312, 314 Africa, HIV/AIDS crisis in 240 African-American women 44, 419–420 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Brownmiller) 34, 102 Agarwal, B. 323 age factor 46 agency 231, 232, 237, 240, 241 Agustín, L.R. 5, 29 Ahäll, L. 233 Ahmed, S. 175, 177, 181 Air Force Academy, sexual assault at 300 Altman, D. 69 Al-Tuhamy, M.K. 404–405 Amar, P. 61, 66 Ambuhl, M. 302 American independent filmmakers 210 Anglo-American common law 161 Anglo-American cultures 418 Anitha, S. 108, 110 anonymity 225 anorexia 192 Anthias, F. 46 Anthropology 2 ‘anthropomorphise’ gender 25 anti-feminists 167 anti-gender movements 357, 370, 371 anti-LGBT discourses 64 anti-racism movements 29 anti-racist movements 37 anti-violence movement 35 anti-violence policy 166 Aoláin, N. 287 Apprentice, The (television show) 196 Arab Mind, The (Patai) 303 Argentina, femicide case of 137–138 argumentation 78–79 ‘armed civil virtue’ 232 armed forces 295, 299, 300 Armstrong, L. 102, 103, 105

427

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428  Handbook on gender and violence Arnold, G. 164 art work 20–22 Asian-American servicemen, suicides of 296 Asian tsunami (2004) 236 Aslanbeigui, N. 350 assaultive gaze 205 asylum system, in United States 40 At the Dark End of the Street (McGuire) 422 attrition 381–382 Auchter, J. 5–6 authoritarian backlash, against feminist progress 254 AutoAdmit 228 auto-ethnography 98 autonomous mobilization, of feminists 163 Baaz, M. 68, 91–93 Bacchi, C. 55, 163, 165 #BalanceTonPorc 259 Baldwin, A. 223 Balkan wars 38 Ballinger, A. 387 Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Enloe) 89 Bandelli, D. 6, 131, 135 Bandura, A. 302 Banerji, R. 139 Banet-Weiser, S. 227 Bassel, L. 351, 352 Bates, L. 419–422 battered women 46, 386 shelters and services for 36 violence 47, 164 ‘battering’ 268 Beauty Myth, The (Wolf) 192 Beauty Solomon v. Spain 49 Beckham, D. 193 Beechey, V. 123 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995) 18, 219 Beijing World Conference on Women 365 Belkin, A. 67 Bellini, G. 239 Belotti, F. 131 Benedek, L. 209 Bergeron, S. 338–339, 350

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Berman, A. 380 ‘better masculinities’ 18 Biason, L. 308 biological absorption 39 biological essentialism 123, 124 bisexual women, in United States 64 black anti-racist movement 44 ‘Black Feminist Reflection on the Antiviolence Movement, A’ (Ritchie) 30 black men 38 black women 34, 38 #BlackLivesMatter movement 66 Blair, R. 217 Bleiker, R. 7 Blood Feast (Lewis) 211 Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development 168 BMI see body mass index (BMI) Bodies of Violence (Wilcox) 93, 96 Bodies That Matter (Butler) 96 the body 89 gender and violence 90–94 materiality and 90, 94–97 body mass index (BMI) 191 Boesten, J. 310 Boetticher, B. 206 Bohours, B. 381 Boko Haram 285, 401 Bolsonaro, J. 25 Borchorst, A. 48 Boserup, E. 348 Bosia, M.J. 64 Boulding, E. 296 Boyle, K. 6 Brice, M. 224 Brickell, K. 321, 343 Bring Me Men (Belkin) 67 #bringbackourgirls 227 Brod, H. 79 Broughton, L. 7 Brown, C. 189, 197 Brown, L.M. 128 Brownmiller, S. 6, 34, 102, 107–108, 112, 119, 125, 416 Bryson, V. 125 Bumiller, K. 106 Burke, T. 198 Burman, E. 54, 55 Bush, G.W. 39–40

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Index  ­429 Business Insider (Helen) 218 Butler, J. 9–10, 18, 26, 89, 95, 96, 417 Cabral, M. 70 Calavita, K. 378 Campbell, D. 3 capitalist system 116 CAR see Central African Republic (CAR) Caribbean feminists 260 Carpenter, J. 205 causal factors, in intimate partner violence 272–273 CEDAW see Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) CEDAW Optional Protocol 360 celebrity culture 196–199 Central African Republic (CAR) 396 Chant, S. 322, 323, 333, 343, 350 Charusheela, S. 346 Chaudhuri, S. 128 Chávez, K. 71–72 childcare policies 49 childhood sexual abuse 268 cisprivilege 61, 66 civil servants, in intergovernmental organizations 249 civil society groups, empowerment of 50 Clinton, B. 198 Clinton, H. 198 Clover, C. 204–206, 212, 213, 423 Coalition of Feminists for Social Change (COFEM) 165 coercive pregnancy 38 coercive sterilization 39 COFEM see Coalition of Feminists for Social Change (COFEM) Cold War 311, 315 collective violence 82–83 see also violence colonial violence 39 complementarity 406–409 complexity gender 20–23 theory 267 Composite Abuse Scale 272 conflict, gender-based violence in 2

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conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) 166, 281, 283 Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) 271 Connell, R.W. 79–80, 83, 107, 111, 165, 387 consciousness-raising process 118 ‘consumer masculinity’ 193 contemporary gender studies 32 contemporary policy discourses, of gender violence 167 contemporary popular culture 199 continuum of sexual violence 101, 107, 110 ‘continuum thinking’ 110–111 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 55, 135, 162, 339, 360, 370, 372 Conyers, J. 259 Cook, D.A. 208 Cooper, V. 351 co-optation, neoliberal challenges of funding and 254–256 Cornwall, A. 95 Corradi, C. 6, 131 Correa, S. 95 corrective rape, for lesbians 16 Corredor, E.S. 64–65 Cosby, B. 197 countering terrorism (CT) 282 countering violent extremism (CVE) 282, 285–287, 289 Counter-Terrorism Committee, United Nations 286 cowardice 296 credibility, feminist politics of 174–176 Creed, B. 205, 206 Crenshaw, K. 43, 44 crimes accountability for 396 against women 131 criminalization 71 of family violence 163 criminal justice system 378, 382, 383, 389–391 criminal justice workers 381 criminal sexual assault, charges of 189 critical race scholars 29, 31 critical race studies 32 Crofts, T. 387

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430  Handbook on gender and violence CRSV see conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) Cruells, M. 49 Cruelty to Animals Act 161 CTS see Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) cultural privacy 54 cultural relativism 54 cultural violence 253 culturalization empirical cases of 52 intersectional perspective 51–56 problem 52 risk of stigmatization and 51–56 of violence 51 culturally specific services 55 culture of abuse 82 of exploitation 82 of masculinity and violence 81–82 Currah, P. 70 current thinking, origins of 268 CVE see countering violent extremism (CVE) cyber-harassment 219 cybermisogyny 328 cybersexism 226–227 cyberspace 327–328 Daigle, M. 68 dalit women 37 Daly, K. 381, 390 Daniels, J. 221 DAPHNE program 254, 256 Das, V. 180 dating programs 195 dating violence 46 Davis, A. 34, 39, 416 Dawes, J. 183 Deadly Weapons (Wishman) 213–214 ‘death by culture’ 253 De Backer, C. 197 de Beauvoir, S. 16–17, 24, 25 Decade for Women (1975–1985), United Nations 258 de Castell, S. 224 decision-making processes 48 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) 34, 163, 270 decolonial queer critique 71

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decolonial research, for sexualities 71 decolonizing global activism, on gender violence 250–254 Defilers, The (Frost) 211 delimiting violence 382 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 91, 283, 396, 408 denial of abuse 103 denial of access 220 Department of Defense (DOD), US 300 Department of Peace-Keeping Operations, United Nations 177 Department of Veterans Affairs, US 297 Depression Quest game 223 Derteno, R.C. 210 DEVAW see Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) developed world 153 developing world 153 development, violence of 345–347 de Vos, D. 9 Diallo, N. 256 Dietrichson, P. 208 digital activism, and Women’s March 258–261 digital culture 191 direct harassment 220 disaster media coverage 231 discourse 96 ‘discrimination’ frame 251 discrimination, transphobic 218 distant disaster 240 documentary-style format television shows 194 Dolce & Gabbana 189 domestic accountability 408 domestic criminal laws 402 domestic massacres, perpetrators of 19 domestic partner violence 265 domestic violence 19, 29, 33, 35, 54, 140, 160, 199, 268, 274, 320–324, 343, 386 analysis of 44 definition of 321 in Mexico 128 vs. intimate partner violence 268–270 see also sexual violence

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Index  ­431 dominant crisis imagery 240 dominant masculinities 349 Double Indemnity (Wilder) 208–209 Douglas, S. 189 Dove 192 dowry 138–139 Dowry Prohibition Act 1961 of India 138 dowry-related femicide 139 doxxing 220 dramas 195 DRC see Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) drug production of 154 trafficking 154 Duncanson, C. 84 Dupont, I. 54 Duriesmith, D. 5 Dworkin, A. 24 eating disorders, development of 193 e-bile 226 Economic and Social Council, United Nations 132 economic inequalities 53 economic instability 349 economic opportunity 153 economic restructuring 351 policies of 351 and violence 347–352 economic security 148 economic violence 337, 351 defined 339 Edkins, J. 176, 179 Elman R.A. 253, 254 Elshtain, J.B. 155, 231, 232 Emejulu, A. 351, 352 Encuentros 252, 260 England, L. 302 Engle, K. 311 English language 182 Enloe, C. 89, 94, 177, 179, 181, 184, 231, 241–242 environmental degradation 153 Eschle, C. 233 essentialism 95, 250–254 essentialist identities 254 essentialized femininities 67–69 ethnic conflict 38

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ethnic genocide 38 ethnic minority women 54 ethnicity, and gender 47 EU gender violence policy 49, 53 European Court of Human Rights 49 European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) 339 European intersectionality studies 56 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) 218–219 Everdeen, K. 424 Everyday Sexism (Bates) 419, 420 evidence-based approaches 169 evidence-based practice 167 Evil Men (Dawes) 182–183 Evolution of Sex, The (Geddes and Thomson) 15 exceptional violence 325 exclusionary intersectionality 52 exploitation, cultures of 82 exploitation films 211–213 extra-legal military violence 295 family violence, criminalization of 163 Farries, E. 328 fashion advertising 191 Federici, S. 346 feelings 175 female activists 29 Female Eunuch, The (Greer) 24 female intimate partner homicide 133 female revenge films 213–214 female sexual agency 208 femicide 131 critiques and recommendations 140–142 declining 257 definitions of 132–133 globalization and contextualization of 133–134 case of Argentina 137–138 case of India 138–140 case of Italy 135–136 case of Mexico 134–135 Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (Radford and Russell) 134 feminine masochism 205

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432  Handbook on gender and violence femininity 92, 242 constructions of 386–387 heteronormativity through masculinities and 67–69 masculinities and 62 feminism 102, 370 global 249, 251 intergovernmental 250 nature and structure of 101 postmodern 95 work of 25 feminist 164, 267, 285, 308 activism 101, 112 activists 168, 249–250 analysis 105, 107 Anthropology 2 and anti-feminists 167 anti-violence movement 103 autonomous mobilization of 163 Caribbean 260 conceptualization of patriarchy 122–123 debate 101 discourses 165 Latin American 260 and LGBTQ approaches 63 North vs. South 251 organizations 256 feminist aesthetic 231 feminist groups, in Argentina 137 Feminist International Political Economy (FIPE) 341 violence and 341–343 feminist movements 38 and neoliberalism 255 feminist narrative approaches 178 feminist narrative scholars 179 feminist politics 241–243 of credibility 174–176 feminist research development of 105 methodologies 185 feminist researchers 177, 183 feminist research ethic 174, 182, 185 feminist scholars 29, 31, 94, 98, 116, 123, 174, 178, 180, 182, 184, 185 in International Relations 147 feminist scholarship 68, 180, 245 Feminist Security Studies (FSS) 341 feminist theorists 89

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feminist theory 117 continuum thinking in 110 development of 116 evolution and expansion of 118 of rape 103, 118 sexual violence and rape 101 Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Sylvester) 94 feminist thinking 359 non-linearity of 17 feminist tradition, of narrative research 173 feminized political imagery 242 femminicidio 135–136 Ferree, M.M. 45 fetishistic gaze 204 fictional television shows 194 50 Million Missing global campaign 139 Fileborn, B. 9 Filipovic, J. 228 film genres exploitation films 211–213 female revenge films 213–214 film noir 208–209 juvenile delinquency films 209–210 the Western 206–208 film noir 208–209 Findlay, M. 212, 213 FIPE see Feminist International Political Economy (FIPE) first-wave feminists 161 Fitzroy, H. 161 Flood, M. 77 food security 148 Forbes magazine 190 forced marriage 108 forced pregnancy 38 forced sterilization 39 in United States 39 Forman, M. 210 Foster, J. 425 Foucault, M. 175 Fragoso, M. 134 Freedman, J. 329 French, M. 416 French, P. 207 Freud, S. 203, 205, 206 Frost, L. 211

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Index  ­433 FSS see Feminist Security Studies (FSS) Fujii, L.A. 175, 176 Gamergate 218, 219, 221, 225 birth of 223–224 Gavey, N. 108–109 Gay, R. 176, 198 GDP see gross domestic product (GDP) gender 13 activism and scholarship on 33 analyses of 32 binary M/F form 15 biological determinist view of 15 the body and 90–94, 98 co-construction and structure of 31–33 concept of 2, 5 development of 16 emergence of 14 defined as 94 ethnicity and 47 in filmic terms 202 inequalities 45, 219, 241 and provocation 385–387 race and 29, 46 researching 1–5 reversal of conventional ordering of 25 selective feminist portrait 14–20 sex and 14–20 and sexuality 295 stereotypes about 68 through justice system 382 unravelling complexity 20–23 and violence 90–94 broad spectre of 232–233 connections between 23–26 in global political economy 338–341, 343 and violence on film 203–206 Gender and Power (Connell) 79 gender-based persecution 398 gender-based violence see gender violence gender civil war 324 gender (concept) 1, 3 development of 16 emergence of 14

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feminist portrait of 14–20 of intersectionality 43 of patriarchy 115 of security 146–151 of sexualities 63 gender equality policies 52 criterion for 48 quality of 50 gender identity 6, 64–65, 363, 366, 372, 377, 380 gender ideology 64, 258, 370 gender inequality 219, 241, 272 institutionalization of 45 gender justice 397 norms 406–409 gender lens 149, 151, 152, 155, 156 gender misrecognitions 397 gender norms 286, 289 Gender of Oppression, The (Hearn) 79 gender pluralisms 70 gender stereotypes 238, 240 in photographic representations of humanitarian crises 234–235 gender symmetry 271–272 gender theory 370 gender thinking 18 Gender Trouble (Butler) 18, 89 gender violence 2, 4, 30, 39, 45, 54, 63, 118, 121, 160, 169–170, 270–271, 283 in Afghanistan 312–314 culturalization of 40 decolonizing global activism on 250–254 defined as 162 educational perspective on 57 European Union policies on 49, 53 forms of 33–34 in global political economy 343 as human rights issue 365–371 as international policy problem 162–163 intersectional approaches to 53, 56, 57 intersectionality in policies on 46–51 against marginalized sexualities 66 patriarchy as conceptual tool in analyses of 126–128 and links to 116–117

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434  Handbook on gender and violence policy 51, 56, 164–166 as evidence-based practice 167–169 as policy problem 160–161, 163–164 emergence in West 161–162 race-ing of 33–36 racialization of 40 securitization of 279 targeting LGBTQ individuals 62 transnational activism on 250 United Nations indicators on 179 against women 358–365 gender violence online 219, 228 harassment to 220–224 gender+ equality project 44 gendercide 142 gendered harms 398–401 gendered ideas 174 gendered insecurities 152 genderedness criteria of 49 of policies 48–49 gendered violence see gender violence gendering 31, 40 racial violence 36–40 gendertrolling 225 genocide 36–37 ethnic conflict and 38 rape during 92 Genocide Convention of 1948, United Nations 36–37 Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) 340 Gerbner, G. 190, 196 Germany, inequalities 45 ghoulies 211 Gill, A. 108, 110 Gilmore, L. 174, 418 Ging, D. 228 Girl Gang (Derteno) 210 Giudice, T. 195 GIWPS see Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) Gjoni, E. 223 Glenn, E.N. 31 global feminism 249, 251 global informalization 349 global political economy 153 gender and violence in 338–341, 343

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global politics study and practices of 89 violence in 62 global studies, queer, trans and feminist interventions in 72 globalization femicide 133–134 case of Argentina 137–138 case of India 138–140 case of Italy 135–136 case of Mexico 134–135 Goetz, A.M. 340 Gordon, L. 164 Graglia, D. 327 Graner, C. 302 Grayson, N. 223, 224 Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp 147 Greer, G. 24 Griffin, P. 8–9 Griffin, S. 416 gross domestic product (GDP) 345 Gross, L. 190 Gross, R.D. 203 Grosz, E. 89 group cultures 82 Gulf War (1991) 301 Gun Crazy (Lewis) 209 Hagen, J.J. 5 Halley, J. 15 Halloween (Carpenter) 205 Hall, R.J. 255 Hall, S. 189 Hammersley, M. 168 Hancock, A.-M. 44 Hanmer, J. 120 Hannie Caulder 207, 215 Hansen, L. 150 harassers 222 harassment 218 definition 220 direct 220 online see online harassment street 109 see also sexual harassment Harman, S. 302 Harmes, R. 131 hashtag 223–224

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Index  ­435 Haskell, M. 208 Haslanger, S. 13–14, 24 Hays Code see Motion Picture Production Code Hearn, J. 79, 165, 166, 295 hegemonic masculinity 79–80, 85 Heise, L. 272 Helms, E. 177 Henry, N. 328 hermeneutic of trust 175 Hersh, S. 303 heteronormative 62, 67–69, 73 heterosex 113 violence of 106–112 heterosexism 252 heterosexual masculinity 107 heterosexual relationships 62 heterosexuality 63, 120–121, 190 high-level crimes 109 Highton, E. 137 Hill Collins, P. 43, 45 HIV/AIDS crisis, in Africa 240 Holden, E. 217 Hollywood films, violent behaviour in 202 homicide 64, 131, 385–387 homocapitalism 71 homophobia 63–66 homophobic violence 63, 64, 68, 372, 380 homosexual advance 387–388 homosexual agenda 358 homosocial groups 82 honour crimes 133 honour killings 138, 139, 150 honourable violence 296 hooks, b. 6 Hooper, C. 94 Hooper, E. 238 horror genre 211 human rights regime 36, 37 transnational and regional advocacy for 65 violation 358–365 against women 33–34 Human Rights Committee 361 Human Rights Council (HRC) 358, 360, 365, 367, 369, 370, 372 HRC Advisory Committee 368

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human rights issue, gendered violence as 365–371 Human Rights Treaty bodies 358, 360 Human Rights Watch 65 human security 148, 149 dimensions of 151 humanitarian crises gender stereotypes in photographic representations of 234–235 media coverage of 233–234 visual iconography of 234 humanitarian imagery 236–237 humanitarian law, international 281 humanities 146 Hunnicutt, G. 6, 125–127 Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (Oliver) 424 Hutchison, E. 7 hypermasculinity 77, 193, 315 hypersexual sluts 226 ICC see International Criminal Court (ICC) ideal ego 203 identity politics 254–256 illegal military violence 295 image-editing apps 191–192 imagery dominant crisis 240 feminized political 242 humanitarian 236–237 IMF see International Monetary Fund (IMF) imminent security threats 152 inclusionary intersectionality 52 inclusiveness 48 criteria of 49 inclusive policy-making 50 India, femicide case of 138–140 indigenous research, sexualities 71 indirect violence 126 inequalities diversity of 50 economic 53 gender 219, 241 institutionalization of 45 structural 48 theorization of 44

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436  Handbook on gender and violence INGOs see international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) insecurity, sexualities and 66–67 instability, economic 349 institutional violence 340 institutionalization of gender inequalities 45 of intersectionality 44 Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) 270 interference between inequalities 49 intergovernmental feminism 250 intergovernmental organizations, civil servants in 249 International Alert 68 International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD Committee) 361 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR Committee) 361 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR Committee) 362 International Criminal Court (ICC) 395–397, 399–401, 404, 406–408 international criminal law 395, 396, 402 International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) 398, 406 International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 398, 406 International, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association (ILGA) 65 International Labour Organization (ILO) 349 international law 281, 398 international migrants 47 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 177, 255, 256 international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) 135 international policy problem 162–163 International Political Economy (IPE) 96 International Relations (IR) 2, 89, 341 discipline of 95, 146–147

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international security 3 international terrorism 154–155 interpersonal violence 81, 83 see also violence intersectional approaches 31 to gender-based violence 53, 56, 57 intersectional feminists 29 intersectionality 29, 43, 250–254, 320 debates about 44 exclusionary 52 gender-based violence 56 in policies on 46–51 inclusionary 52 institutionalization of 44 normative element of 52 in policymaking 49 political 251 and analytic priorities in 56 intersectionality impact assessment 50 inter-sectoral working group 50 intersex individuals 62 intimate partner abuse 35 intimate partner femicide 133, 136, 138, 142 intimate partner sexual violence 283 intimate partner violence (IPV) 283, 343, 380 academic debates 271–274 causal factors in 272–273 defined 269 heterosexual 382 impacts of 266 outcome measures 271, 273, 274 prevalence of 265–266 rates of 272 responses in 267 spheres of 268 vs. domestic violence 268–270 IPE see International Political Economy (IPE) IPV see intimate partner violence (IPV) Iraq Abu Ghraib prison see Abu Ghraib prison Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (Lewis) 303 Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) 285, 286, 288–289, 297–298

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Index  ­437 Istanbul Convention 364 Italy, femicide case of 135–136 Jackson, P.T. 98 Jane, E.A. 226 Japanese Imperial Army 298 Jennings, R. 212 Jenson, J. 224 Jersey Shore (television show) 195 Jha, S. 325, 333 Jolly, S. 95 Jones, A. 142 Jones, R. 20, 21 Judd, A. 104 judicial litigation 49 justice accessing 378–379 victim-centred perspectives of 389–390 justice system criminal 382, 383, 389–391 gender through 382 Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (Gavey) 108–109 just warrior 232, 243 juvenile delinquency films 209–210 kaleidoscopic justice 389 Kandiyoti, D. 123, 313 Kantor, J. 102 Kapur, A. 408 Kardashian, K. 195 Kasturirangan, A. 53–55 Katz, J. 84, 193–194 Kavanaugh, B. 110 Kelly, L. 6, 101, 105–110 Kelly, R. 197 Kelly-Thompson, K. 7–8 Kickstarter campaign 222 Kilbourne, J. 191 ‘kinkies’ 211, 212 Kiss Daddy Goodnight (Armstrong) 105 Kotaku 223 Kotsadam, A. 272 Kranc, R.T. 296 Krystalli, R. 7 La Barbera, M. 49 Lacquer, T. 18 Lagarde, M. 134

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language English 182 fluency in 181 Latin American feminists 260 Latman, J. 194 Lawrence, J. 198, 424 Lee-Koo, K. 292 Lépinard, É. 52 lesbian corrective rape for 16 in Nigeria 67 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) 358 human rights 64, 69 transnational advocacy for 65 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) 61–62 challenges, lives of 67 heteronormativity 67–69 homophobia as a form of violence 63–66 human rights 70–71 lived experiences of 72–73 politics 66, 73 (in)security 66–67 sexualities 62–63, 66–67 key feature of academic debate 69–72 violence against 63, 379–380 vulnerabilities 65 see also sexualities lethal violence 140–142 levels of analysis 89 Lewis, H.G. 211 Lewis, J.H. 209 LGBT see lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) LGBTI activism 370, 372 human rights 366 LGBTQ see lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) Liberia gender violence 315–316 post-conflict period 315 Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda 315–316 Libyan Internal Security Agency 405 Lievore, D. 381 Lifton, R.J. 302

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438  Handbook on gender and violence Ling, L.H.M. 2 Logie, C.H. 47 Lombardo, E. 5, 29 Lombroso, C. 23 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) 403 Lusvardi, A. 7–8 Lynch, J. 243 MacKinnon, C. 103, 106–107, 111, 112, 416 Mahon, B. 212 mainstream services 55 Making of Masculinities, The (Brod) 79 male aggression 78 male-on-female violence 202 male-on-male violence 202 male victims 423 sexual violence against 404 male violence against women 33, 115, 117–118, 121–127, 253, 419 Malkin, M. 290 Malkki, L. 181, 237 Manigault, O. 196 Mantilla, K. 225 Manzo, K. 235 Marcus, S. 9–10 marginalization 32 marginalized sexualities 71 gendered violence against 66 marginalized women 34 marital rape exemption 102 Markson, S.L. 209 Marshall, G. 207 masculine group cultures 82 masculine homosocial cultures 82 masculinist discourses, of security 308 Masculinities (Connell) 79 masculinity 20, 242, 295–296 crisis of 213 cultures of 81–82 defined as 80 development of 80, 81 dominant norms of 391 and femininities 62 heteronormativity through 67–69 framings of 78 heteronormative 62, 73 metrosexual 193 microculture of 296

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in military institutions and operations 296 model of 193 neoliberal 84 non-violent 84–86 peaceful 84–86 role of 81, 83, 86 and violence 77–79 see also violence Massad, J. 303 materialist feminists 116 materiality and the body 90, 94–97 debate over 94 sex and gender in 95 in study of world politics 96 matrix of domination concept 43 Mawra, J.P. 212–213 McCall, L. 56 McDonnell, A. 7 McEvoy, S. 66 McGlynn, C. 111, 389 McGowan, R. 104 McGuire, D.L. 419–420, 422 McIlwaine, C. 322, 323 McKie, L. 166 ‘mean world syndrome’ 196 ‘measuring silences’ 181 media coverage, of humanitarian crises 233–234 media representation 199 Meger, S. 8, 341 Mellgren, C. 326 men hyper-masculinity in 315 and military violence 295–297 muscle dysmorphia and eating disorders in 193 ‘normal’ and ‘aberrant’ for 111 sexual assault against 299, 403 Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) 227 Meriluoto, L. 331 Merry, S. 37, 179 Meth, P. 8 #MeToo 102, 104 backlash against 110 campaign 161, 259, 320 hashtag 198, 259 movement 109–110, 199, 258, 259 Me Too Congress Act 259

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Index  ­439 metrosexual masculinity 193 Mexico domestic violence in 128 femicide case of 134–135 Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) 349 microculture of masculinity 296 Mies, M. 116 migrant women 36, 47, 52 migrant women workers 55 Migrant Workers Convention (MWC) 55 Milano, A. 198 Milgrim, S. 302 militarism 84, 90, 233 militarized masculinities 67–69, 232 construction of 93 material outcomes of 93 military rape within the 299–302 and war 296 military comfort women 298 military institutions, masculinity in 296 military violence extralegal/illegal 295 men and 295–297 women and 297–304 Miller, A.L. 195 Millett, K. 117, 124 Miltner, K.M. 227 misogyny, online 228, 229 Mitchell, J. 117 modern suicide terrorism 91 Moffett, H. 324 Mohammed, A. 67 Mohanty, C.T. 251 Moi, T. 16 #MoiAussi 259 Monsen, K.P. 301 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States 1933 147 Montoya, C. 5, 253–255 Morgan, W. 210 Morning After, The (Enloe) 94 Morton, J. 211 Mosher, D. 193 mother–child metaphor 236–241, 244

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Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings system 202 Motion Picture Production Code 202, 203 MRA see Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) MSEs see Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) Mügge, L. 56 Mulvey, L. 203, 204, 206 Mundkur, A. 340 muscle dysmorphia 193 Muslim migrants 40 Muslim migrant women 351–352 Muslim minorities 52 Muthaura case 404 MWC see Migrant Workers Convention (MWC) myriad factors 227 Myrttinen, H. 68 NAFTA see North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Nagel, J. 8 Nair, S. 346 NAPs see National Action Plans (NAPs) narcotics industry 154 narrative approaches discomfort with 175 feminists employing 179 to research on violence 185 resist framing 185 weakness of 176 narrative research, feminist tradition of 173 narratives 173–174, 182–185 National Action Plans (NAPs) 284 National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) 192 national political dynamics 207 national security 2, 147–149, 156 discourse of 151 nationalism 295–296 NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Naumes, S. 98 Nayak, M. 40 Nazi Germany 207

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440  Handbook on gender and violence NEDA see National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) neoliberal co-optation, challenges of funding and 254–256 neoliberal globalization 347 neoliberal masculinities 84 neoliberalism 250, 330 feminist movement and 255 ‘networked misogyny’ 227 Newsweek magazine 191 ‘New Dimensions of Human Security’ report 148 NGOs see non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Nigeria, lesbian women in 67 NiUnaMenos (Not One Woman Less) movement 137, 138 ‘No More’ campaign 135 Nölke, A.-I. 190 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 252, 256, 365 non-heterosexual identities 67 non-normative gender identities 62 non-violent masculinities 84–86 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 349 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 309 Northern feminists 251 ODA See overseas development assistance (ODA) Oduro, A.D. 344 Office of the Prosecutor 400 Olga’s House of Shame (Mawra) 212–213 Oliver, K. 424 O’Neill, D. 351 ‘one sex’ model 15 online harassment 220–224 online misogyny 228–229 Oosterveld, V. 403, 406 Opotow, S. 31 ‘oppression Olympics’ 45 Orban, V. 25 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 348 Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) 366–368

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Otto, D. 9 Outright Action 65 over-generalizations 124 overseas development assistance (ODA) 258 Paez, C. 137 Pain, R. 321, 324, 328 Panda, P. 323 Papanagnou, G. 168 Park, C. 347 ‘partner abuse’ 269 partner violence 273 geographical distribution of 272–273 ‘partner violence’ 269 Patai, R. 303 patriarchal violence 127 patriarchy 90, 115–116, 128–129 in academic work on gender and violence 122–126 criticism of 123–124 feminist conceptualization of 122–123 gendered violence 118–121 conceptual tool in, analyses of 126–128 and links to 116–117 perpetuation of 120 re-emergence of 126–127 theorizations of 117 patriotism 296 peace camps, at Greenham Common 147 peaceful masculinities 84–86 Peeping Tom (Powell) 211 performativity 96 persecution 399, 400 gender-based 398 Peterson, S. 155 Peterson, V.S. 340, 348 Pettman, J. 89, 97, 98 Pew Research Center, US 218 Phipps, A. 106 photographic representations, gender stereotypes in 234–235 physical embodiment 94 physical violence 90, 128, 380–381 against women and girls 291 see also violence

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Index  ­441 Pick-Up Artists (PUA) 227 Picq, M. 63, 71 Pitt, B. 193 #Planebae 217, 218 Pleck, E. 163 Poland, B. 226–227 policies on gender-based violence 46–51 intersectional perspective in 51 policymaking process 45, 50, 55, 57 intersectional approaches to 54 policy problem, gender violence as 160–161, 163–164 emergence in West 161–162 as international policy problem 162–163 political economy, violence in 343 ‘political homophobia’ 64 political intersectionality 44, 251 political organization 168–169 political violence 173 politics feminist 174–176 and power 184 popular culture 189, 190 celebrities part in 196 post-colonial feminists 29, 176 post-conflict moment 310–312 post-conflict societies 311 post-conflict transitions 311 postmodern feminism 95 post-9/11 security era 39 poststructural approach 165 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 297 Potter, H. 35 poverty 46 Powell, A. 328 Powell, M. 211 power 182, 184, 185 pragmatic justice 390 pregnancy, forced/coercive 38 print advertisements 193 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, torture and sexual abuse 302–304 ‘pro-family/traditional values’ 365–371 Prosecutor v. Al-Tuhamy Mohamed Khaled, The 405 Prosecutor v. Bosco Ntaganda, The 396, 405–406

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Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen, The 399, 403 Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali, The 404–405 Prostitutes Protective Society (Mahon) 212 provocation 387 defence of 386 gender and 385–387 psychoanalysis theories 204 psychological assault 38 PTSD see post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) PUA see Pick-Up Artists (PUA) public military sex scandals (US), modern era of 300 public space 320, 323, 325, 326 public testimonies 406 Putin 371 queer 62, 64–65 LGBTQ see lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) scholarship 73 sex workers 66queer migration, in United States 71–72 queer questions 72 queer scholarship 73 queer theory 62, 72 ‘queer wars’ 69 queering 62, 72 Quek, K. 6 Quinn, Z. 219, 223–224 race analyses of 32 co-construction and structure of 31–33 and gender 29, 46 gendered violence 33–36 in Germany 45 in United States 45 race-gendered analysis 32–33, 39, 40 of violence 36 race-gendered approach 30 race-gendered patterns 34 race-gendered processes 35

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442  Handbook on gender and violence race-gendered reproductive violence 38 race-gendered violence 38 racial oppression 29, 37, 39 racialization 31, 37, 40 processes of 32 racialized communities 36 racialized female victims 36 racialized men 35 racialized violence 30 racialized women 34 racism 252 racist 218 Radford, J. 131, 134, 136 radical concept 13 radical feminist analysis 123 of sexual violence 120 radical feminist scholars 125 radical feminist theorists 116 Rai, S. 346 Ramakrishnan, K.B. 385, 388 Ramsay, G. 195 Randall, M. 90 Rao, R. 71, 72 rape analysis of 102 charges of 189 effectiveness of 310 feminist framing of 103 feminist reconceptualization of 118–120 feminist theory and research 101 feminist theory developments on 118 during genocide 92 language of 101 legal definitions of 383 militarized masculinity, material outcomes 93 within the military 299–302 research on 91 as a tool of war 91 as torture 111 trauma of 104 as violence-not-sex 106 in war 297–299 see also sexual violence; violence rape culture 103, 112, 422 rape laws 385 in United States 34 rape prevention 414–425 self-defense 422

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rapists 421 Ratele, K. 331 Ray, N. 209–210 ‘reactive gaze’ 205 ‘real’ rape 104 Rebel Without a Cause (Ray) 209–210 reductionism 123 reflexive narration 185 refugees 180, 329 regional advocacy, for human rights 65 renewed activism, against violence 258–261 representation 1 of gender and violence on film 203–206 of gender violence 3 photographic, humanitarian crises 234–235 scope of 196 of violence on reality TV 196 reproductive rights 38 reproductive violence 37–39, 397, 399, 401, 410 research of gender and violence 1–5 sexual violence and rape 101 research ethics, feminist 185 research methods 168 revolution graffiti, women in 243 Rich, A. 416 Richardson, T. 197 Richter-Montpetit, M. 68 Rihanna 189, 197 risk-seeking behaviour 81 Ritchie, B. 30, 35 Roberts, M.L. 423 Robinson, S. 380 Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest (Armstrong) 105 Roof, J. 13, 24 Rosenmann, A. 193 ‘roughies’ 211–212 Rowbotham, S. 117 Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) 289 Rubin, G. 17 RUSI see Royal United Services

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Index  ­443 Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) Russell, D.E.H. 119, 131, 134, 136 Rwandan genocide 175 Sabo, D. 80 sadism 204 safe cities 320 SafetiPin 333 Salter, M. 98 same-sex relationships 65 Sampaio, A. 31, 40 sanctioned violence 296 Sarkeesian, A. 219, 221–222, 224 Satterthwaite, M. 55 Schneider, E.M. 164 scholarship, on gender and violence 33 Scotland, feminist anti-violence movement in 103 Scott, J.W. 9–10, 26, 417 Scum of the Earth (Lewis) 211 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir) 16–17, 24 second-wave feminism 128 ‘secure state’ 2 securitization 148, 150 of gendered violence 279 politics of 285 of sexual violence 284 securitization theory 150 securitizing sexual violence, in WPS agenda 283–284 securitizing women, in WPS agenda 287–291 security 146–151, 156–157 concept of 146–151 insecure conditions 151–155 interrelated dimensions of 151 LGBTQ 66–67 masculinist discourses of 308 providers of 155–156 source of 156 security actors 155 Security Archipelago (Amar) 66 Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325  4, 18, 279–282, 284–286, 292 1888 281 1889 281 1960 281

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2122 281 2242  282, 284–287, 289–291 security threats 285 self-defense 422 self-doubt 92 self-oriented violence 80 see also violence self-presentation 193 Sellers, P. 396 ‘sensitivity to intersectionality’ 48 sex binary M/F form 15 defined as 94 and gender 14–20, 25 pervasive understanding of 16 sex ratio, in India 139 sex workers 330 violence against 331 vulnerability of 329 sexism 419 sex-role theory 79 sexual abuse childhood 268 and exploitation 298 ‘real’ victims of 104 Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes Policy (SGBC) 404 Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes Policy in 2014 (SGBC Policy) 398 sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) 395–397, 399, 403, 404, 407–409 crimes 397, 398, 401, 408 domestic accountability for 408 sexual assault 33, 38, 97, 198, 199 dismissal of allegations 110 against men 299 publicly accused of 197 in United States 93 sexual exploitation, and abuse 297 sexual harassment 301–302, 416, 419, 420, 423 allegations 259 and violence 324–327 in workplace 46 sexual mistreatment, of women soldiers 299–300 sexual orientation 62, 64, 65, 132, 366, 367, 372, 380

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444  Handbook on gender and violence sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) 65, 67, 367 sexual politics 70 Sexual Politics (Millett) 117, 124 sexual rights 65 advocacy for 69 sexual slavery, in war 298 sexual violence 19, 29, 37, 38, 119, 128, 231, 268–270, 383–385, 398 cases 404–406 characterization of 34 definition 324 hyper-visibility of 283 radical feminist analysis of 120 recognizing male victims of 402–406 securitizing in WPS agenda 283–284 sex of 101–102, 106, 107, 112 in United States 37 during wartime 92 sexual violence against men 402–406 sexualities 46 homophobia as form of violence 63–66 and insecurity 66–67 key feature of academic debate 69–72 LGBTQ 62–63, 66–67, 69–72 postcolonial/decolonial critique of 71 scholarship 61, 70 in US military 302 Seymour, K. 166 SGBV see sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. 36 Shepherd, L.J. 89, 165, 173, 177–178, 233, 337, 340 silences 181 Simpson, M. 212 single-axis analysis 34 single-axis approaches 29, 30 Sirkin, M. 193 Sirleaf, E.J. 315–316 Sjoberg, L. 68 slavery 34 in United States 38 smartphones 227 SNOQ 135 social control, of women 118–121 social justice movements 16

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social media and celebrity culture 196–199 rise of 196 social movement initiatives 45 social science disciplines 146 socialist feminists 116 societal gender norms 327 socio-political system 115 SOGI see sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) Sokoloff, N.J. 54 Solanos, V. 24 ‘soldierness’ 22 South Africa, colonized women in 34 Spivak, G.C. 181, 252 Stanford Rape trial 425 Stanko, E. 377, 378 Stanley, E.A. 70 the state analysis of 121 feminist theory of 122 stereotypes, gender 68, 234–235, 238, 240 Stern, M. 68, 91–93, 156 stigmatization cases of 52 risk of 49, 51–56 Stoller, R. 16 storytelling dilemmas of 177–178 politics of 176 of violence 176–178 street harassment 109 Strid, S. 48, 55 strong women 209 structural analysis 105 structural inequalities 48, 52, 54 structural violence 83–84, 237, 340 see also violence ‘struggle concept’ 116 Stubbs, J. 386 stuckness 20 Sturm, T. 328 Suez Crisis 207 suicide rates 296–297 Summerfield, G. 350 surveillance, violence and 64 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 163, 261 Swaine, A. 310, 316

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Index  ­445 Swanton, B. 6 Sylvester, C. 94, 95 ‘symbol of distress’ 236 Symons, J. 69 Tailhook incident 300 Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (Gilmore) 418 Taliban 312–314, 400 Tallack, M. 173 targets of violence 296 Tasker, Y. 208 Taylor, C. 315 ‘technology-facilitated sexual violence and harassment’ 328 television 194–196 temporary masculinisation 204 terrorism 154–155, 286 Theidon, K. 179 Theorizing Patriarchy (Walby) 124 Thiel, M. 63 Time magazine 194 Tomsen, S. 387 torture 296, 302–304, 312, 315 prohibition of 361 rape as 111 ‘toxic masculinity’ 77 trans individuals 61, 62, 64 trans scholarship 73 trans sex workers 66 transnational activism 257 on gender violence 250 against violence 258 transnational activist networks 250 transnational advocacy for human rights 65 for LGBTQ rights 65 transnational antiviolence movement 34 transnational feminist activism 162, 258 networks 249, 250 transnational organizing, against violence 249–250, 252, 262 transphobic discrimination 218 transphobic violence 63, 68, 372, 380 trans-sex identification 204, 205 Tripp, A.M. 311 ‘trolling’ 225

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‘Tropes vs. Women in Video Games’ 222 Trouillot, M.-R. 181 True, J. 174, 183, 338–340, 344–345 Trump, D. 25, 40, 110, 198, 258–260, 421 Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru 179–180 Turner, B. 425 Turner, G. 196 Turton-Turner, P. 227 Tuska, J. 207 Twohey, M. 102 Tyner, J. 31, 32, 330 UDHR see Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) UN Development Programme (UNDP) 339 United Kingdom (UK) anti-radicalization initiative 286 austerity policy-making 351 patriarchy in 124 policy reform 161 United Nations (UN) 18 Counter-Terrorism Committee 286 Decade for Women (1975–1985) 258 Department of Peace-Keeping Operations 177 Economic and Social Council 132 gay rights and 65 1948 Genocide Convention 36–37 indicators on gender-based violence 179 peacebuilding discourse 4 SCR see Security Council Resolution (SCR) Security Council 281, 286, 292, 309 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 163 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 141 United States (US) asylum system in 40 bisexual women in 64 criminalization of family violence 163 Department of Defense (DOD) 300 Department of Veterans Affairs 297 domestic violence analysis in 44

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446  Handbook on gender and violence filmmakers in 202 forced sterilization in 39 inequalities 45 mainstream media in 190 policy reforms 161 queer migration in 71–72 rape laws in 34 sexual assault in 93 sexual violence in 37 slavery in 38 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 358, 364, 367, 371 Upton, K. 198 urban safety 332–334 US–Iraq war, sexual assault of women soldiers 301 Valenti, J. 424 Valentine, G. 321 van Staveren, I. 344 van Zoonen, L. 203 VAW see violence against women (VAW) Vera-Gray, F. 109 Verloo, M. 44, 49, 54–55 victim-centred justice responses 389–390 victimhood 118, 124 politics of 173, 184 Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru and 180 victim-survivors 381 justice 389 Vidor, K. 207 Vietnam War 235 violence 13, 29–30 activism and scholarship on 33 the body and 90–97 co-construction and structure of 31–33 connections between gender and 23–26 cultures of 81–82 definitions of 161 economic 337, 339, 351 on film, representation of 203–206 gender see gender violence gendered and racialized aspects of 35

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in global politics 62 global studies of 35 of heterosex 106–112 homophobia as form of 63–66 against LGBTQ 63, 379–380 against LGBTQ individuals 63 masculinity and 77–79 narration of 176–177 patriarchy 90, 118–121 perpetrators of 78 race-gendered analysis of 36 racial oppression and racialized forms of 29 researching 1–5 risk of 64 sexual see sexual violence stereotypes about 68 and surveillance 64 against women see violence against women (VAW) World Health Report about 63–64 violence against LGBTQ communities 379–380 violence against women (VAW) 33, 38, 107, 133, 136, 138, 163–166, 169, 194, 249, 253, 256, 257, 270–271, 279, 358–365 British policies analysis on 48 and domestic violence 140 international activism on 106 and killing of women 140 male 115, 117, 122, 125, 127 patriarchal state and 121–122 in prostitution 103 race (and class) analysis of 35 violence-not-sex framing 104 violence-not-sex position 102–106, 112 violence of ‘development’ 345–347 violent extremism, WPS and combating 284–287 violent extremist groups 285 Violent Years, The (Morgan) 210 virtual rape, defined 328 visual iconography, of humanitarian crises 234 visual representations 231, 241, 243–245 Vlachová, M. 308 Volatile Bodies (Grosz) 89 ‘voyeuristic gaze’ 204

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Index  ­447 vulnerability 49, 128 LGBTQ individuals 65 of sex workers 329 vulnerable women 322, 330 Walby, S. 44, 124, 125, 381–382 Walker, G. 164 war gender dimensions of 155 military and 296 rape in 297–299 war-fighting 155 war violence 82–83 see also violence Warrington, M. 322 Wartnaby, J. 103 Wayne, M. 351 weapons of war, women as 302–304 Weber, C. 72 Wedeen, L. 174 Weed, E. 26 Weinstein, H. 102, 104, 111, 112, 189 Weiss, M.L. 64 Weldes, J. 341–342 Weldon, L. 7–8, 56 West, L. 424 The West, concept of 206–208 Western developmentalism 348 Western-led LGBTQ advocacy groups 66 Western/Northern knowledge systems 168 Westmarland, N. 389 Whisnant, R. 103 white feminist movement 44 white men 37 Whitworth, S. 92 #WhyIDidntReport 110 Whyte, D. 351 Wibben, A.T.R. 233 ‘wife abuse’ 268 wife battering 163 wife beating 164 Wilcox, L. 93, 94, 96 Wilder, B. 208–209 Wild One, The (Benedek) 209 Wilkinson, C. 66 Willis, M. 381 WINGOS see Women’s International NGOs (WINGOS)

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Wishman, D. 213–214 Wolf, N. 192 women femicide see femicide gendered violence against 358–362 invocation of 92 killing of 132 and military violence 297–304 protection of and from 284–287 rape within the military 299–302 in war 297–299 in revolution graffiti 243 rights 38, 162–163 securitizing in WPS agenda 287–291 sexual and domestic violence against 19 social control of 118–121 soldiers 22 transnational activism 257 violence against 38, 90, 121–122, 270–271, 343–345 race (and class) analysis of 35 as weapons of war 302–304 Women and War (Elshtain) 232 ‘Women and War: An Un-Silencing’ workshop 20–22 Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) 349 ‘women of colour’ 30 Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda 8, 18, 279–280, 284–287, 308, 311, 340, 343 Afghanistan 312–314 Liberia 315–316 securitizing sexual violence in 283–284 securitizing women in 287–291 violence in 280–284 Resolution 1325 280–282 Resolution 1888 281 Resolution 1889 281 Resolution 1960 281 Resolution 2122 281 Resolution 2242 282 women safe 274 women soldiers, sexual mistreatment of 299–300

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448  Handbook on gender and violence Women’s International NGOs (WINGOS) 258 Women’s Liberation Movement 101, 115 Women’s March, digital activism and 258–261 women’s oppression, naturalization of 340 Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970) 348 Women’s Room, The (French) 416 Working Group on Discrimination Against Women in Law and Practice 372 World Health Organization (WHO) 191, 265, 269 ‘wound fetishism’ 177

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WPS agenda see Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda Wynne-Hughes, E. 341–342 Yao, S. 7 Yearbook of international Organizations 258 Yogyakarta Principles 65 young black men 329, 331, 332 Young, I.M. 31, 155–156 Zalewski, M. 2, 5, 94, 95, 181 Zein-Elabdin, E. 346 Zero-Tolerance Policy on Sexual Harassment 327 Zimbardo, P. 302 Zine, J. 90

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