Sylvia Burrow explores self-confidence as integral to autonomy development within everyday contexts threatening gender violence, arguing that self-defense training is significant to resistance and resilience. -/- Choice Reviews, December 2022 Issue: “Gender Violence explores the myths and realities of the threat of gender-based violence and active forms of resistance to it…. She advocates specifically for martial arts and self-defense programs rooted in feminist frameworks. These are the most successful because they resist rape culture while (...) increasing the capacities of women and other people with marginalized identities who face high risk for sexual violence. This book is a must-read for anyone working at the intersections of gender-based violence prevention and somatic practice. Essential. All levels.”. (shrink)

This article explores sex selective abortion as a form of structural violence within the broader notion of women's ‘protection’ in contemporary India. While SSA tends to be framed more generally within ethical and choice-based frameworks around abortion access and reproductive ‘rights’, and specifically in India around preference for sons as a discriminatory, cultural, technological misogyny, this article argues that sex selective abortion in India needs to be understood as an outcome of broader systemic economic, political and social processes. The (...) deepening of neoliberal values through state policies has impacted significantly on social relations, shaping SSA as a manifestation of structural violence. State-driven policies in India reflect a neoliberal governmentality through state patriarchy that is implicit within the neoliberal developmental, governmental and capitalist paradigm of contemporary India. This article argues that SSA is structurally produced and therefore cannot be remedied through awareness-raising strategies such as beti bachao or financial inclusion as a means to ‘protect’ or ‘save the girl child’. Indeed, it is neoliberal economic forces that actively, though seemingly inadvertently, promote anti-women, sex selective abortion as a reproductive strategy, which is then disciplined through neoliberal governmentality. This highlights SSA as a form of gendered and structural, rather than discriminatory, violence. (shrink)

Since the concept of “nudge” was introduced in 2008 by Thaler and Sunstein, proposing that small interventions based on changes in choice architectures can alter people’s behavior and make it easier for them to achieve their desired goals, the application in public policy of behavioral economics has gained significant attention. This has led to the emergence of different types of policies based on behavioral insights, which have been used in a variety of areas, including health or finance, with the goal (...) of promoting well-being and addressing social and economic issues. After providing a basic theoretical background as a frame of reference to understand gender violence, this study explores the use of tools from the field of behavioral economics as it is applied in public policy. Regulatory (paternalistic) and non-regulatory (libertarian) interventions based on behavioral insights will be considered: nudges, boosts, shoves, budges, or sludge audits, are examined as potential interventions to use in matters related to this type of violence. After evaluating these behavioral policy instruments and their potential effectiveness, the limitations of the behavioral perspective are recognized, and the need for a multifaceted approach to combating gender violence is acknowledged. The article concludes by arguing that public policies addressing gender violence should not only utilize behavioral tools but should also incorporate strategies related to education, legislation, and social norms. (shrink)

This article is a critical interrogation of how gender and power figure in Swedish child welfare policy and the discourses on violence in intimate relationships vis-à-vis children exposed to violence. Drawing on feminist violence research, critical childhood studies, and intersectional perspectives, we identify a differentiation with racialised undertones in the understanding of violence as a social problem when related to children’s exposure. While predominately gender-neutral discourses of social heredity and epidemiology run through the material (...) for the seemingly ‘universal’ child, forms of violence ascribed to the presumed cultural Others link to gender, structural power and sexuality. The article concludes that gendered articulations of violence are restricted yet pivotal if children’s exposure is to be linked to issues of inequality and power. However, when gendering interlinks with racialisation, problematic differentiations of violence, childhoods and children are produced. (shrink)

The concept of non-discrimination has been central in the feminist challenge to gendered violence within international human rights law. This article critically explores non-discrimination and the challenge it seeks to pose to gendered violence through the work of Judith Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s critique of heteronormative sex/gender, the article utilises an understanding of gendered violence as effected by the restrictive scripts of sex/gender within heteronormativity to illustrate how the development of non-discrimination within international human rights (...) law renders it ineffective to challenge gendered violence due to its own commitments to binarised and asymmetrical sex/gender. However, the article also seeks to encourage a reworking of non-discrimination beyond the heteronormative sex binary through employing Butler’s concept of cultural translation. Analysis via the lens of cultural translation reveals the fluidity of non-discrimination as a universal concept and offers new possibilities for feminist engagement with universal human rights. (shrink)

This article examines the construction of gender within men's accounts of domestic violence. Analyses of in-depth interviews conducted with 33 domestically violent heterosexual men indicate that these batterers used diverse strategies to present themselves as nonviolent, capable, and rational men. Respondents performed gender by contrasting effectual male violence with ineffectual female violence, by claiming that female partners were responsible for the violence in their relationships and by constructing men as victims of a biased criminal (...) justice system. This study suggests that violence against female partners is a means by which batterers reproduce a binary framework of gender. (shrink)

Through cutting-edge accounts and interdisciplinary critiques of shame, this collection responds to the epidemic of gendered violence that the world witnesses daily. Contributors expose and challenge how oppression and violence connect to regimes of injustice that have dominated modern times.

Within barely a year, two school shootings shook Finland. The school shootings shocked Finnish society, forcing media, academics and experts, police and politicians alike to search for reasons behind the violent incidents. Focusing their analysis on the two main Finnish newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet, authoritative sources of information for Finland’s two language communities, the authors maintain that the Finnish case contributes to research on school shootings by evidencing the intimate linkages between the state, gender and violence. The (...) authors argue that violence is to be understood through different discourses about the Finnish state. In particular, they discern three discourses about the state that produce gendered discourses of violence: the welfare state, the realist state and the neoliberal state. The authors conclude that these discourses produce different notions of rational and irrational violence thereby providing different legitimizations for male-embodied/masculine violence. (shrink)

This study establishes the influence of sex-based grammatical gender on gendered violence. We demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between gendered language and the incidence of intimate partner violence in a cross-section of countries. Motivated by this evidence, we conduct an individual-level analysis exploiting the differences in the language structures spoken by individuals with a shared religious and ethnic background residing in the same country. We show that speaking a gendered language is associated with the belief that intimate (...) partner violence is justifiable. Our results are consistent with the theoretical possibility that gendered language activates gender schemata in the minds of speakers, increasing the salience of gender distinctions and existing gender norms which legitimize gendered violence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process (...) of ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

Violence in sexual-affective relationships among teens and young people is recognized as a social, educational, and health problem that has increased worldwide in recent years. Educational institutions, as central developmental contexts in adolescence, are key in preventing and responding to gender violence through implementing successful actions. In order to scientifically support that task, the research reported in this article presents and discusses a psycho-educational intervention focused on autobiographical memory reconstruction that proved to be successful in raising young (...) women’s critical consciousness about the force of the coercive dominant discourse upon sexual-affective experiences and memories. We examined among a sample of young women (n = 32, age range 17-30) whether reading a scientific text about love, the Radical Love book, modified autobiographical memories of violent sexual-affective relationships in line with preventing future victimization. This group was compared with a control group (n = 31, age range 17-30). Memory reports were collected before and after the reading and coded to analyze their content, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Memory quality features were assessed with the Memory Quality Questionnaire. A focus group was also conducted to examine the personal impact of the intervention on participants. Compared with controls, the experimental group had stronger critical memories (of episodes involving violence), an average decrease in positive emotions induced by recall, and an average increase in negative emotions. The results show the effectiveness of the reading intervention designed in relation to gender violence prevention, as they indicate the ability of the psycho-educational action to debilitate the force of the coercive dominant discourse in young women’s memories. The findings both advance knowledge on the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memories of violent sexual-affective relationships in female youth and indicate the potential of memory-based interventions as an instrument to prevent and reduce gender violence in school contexts. Teachers and teaching staff, and educational psychologists, among others, can benefit from these results by expanding the tools they have to address gender violence among female adolescents and youth. (shrink)

Based on 30 in-depth interviews with Ladina women and field work conducted in a rural town in eastern Guatemala, I examine the physical expressions that violence can take on the women's bodies, such as common physical ailments that result from emotional distress as well as sicknesses that are caused directly by the conditions in which they live. A central theme in the discussion is the embodiment of violence as it is expressed in the control of the women's body (...) in the social milieu, such as the control of their socializing and visiting. I use a sociologically- and anthropologically-informed lens to situate corporeal questions within structures of social inequalities and human suffering and, thus, this examination contributes to debates about the relationship between body and society, macro and micro processes in the social world, as well as explorations between the women's lives and their rights. As such, this examination permits to unveil embedded structures of violence that assault the women's dignity and provoke suffering, as well as those instances in which gender solidarity is created. This examination allows us to explore implications for gender-based social justice. (shrink)

Despite a “spatial imaginary” which constructs Europe as a location of sexual and gender freedom (Rao, 2014), presently, twenty countries in Europe require sterilisation in order to legally recognise transgender people’s gender identities, including four of the seven countries in the INFERCIT study: Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Cyprus (but not Spain, which since 2007 does not require sterilisation for gender identity recognition [see Platero, 2008]. In Bulgaria and Lebanon no gender identity recognition for trans people is (...) provided by law; the latter lies outside the “European” region) (TGEU, 2014). Compulsory sterilisation—classified as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (UN General Assembly, 1998: art. 7.1)—is widely in force against transgender people, who constitute “the only known group in Europe subject to legally prescribed, state-enforced sterilisation” (Hammarberg, 2009: 19). However, forced sterilisation of trans people is not generally conceptualised as a eugenicist or genocidal policy, in part because sterilisation is conflated with gender reassignment surgical interventions which, widely considered as that which brings transgender bodies into being, are in turn conflated with embodied transgender subjectivities. On this view, transgender individuals could not exist except through a medicalised process that, by design, precludes their “natural” reproductive capacities and is generally not accompanied by fertility preservation or the provision of assisted reproduction technologies (Plemons, 2014: 38; De Sutter et al., 2002; De Sutter, 2001). Sterilisation laws are justified through a pathologising discourse on transgender lives which constructs gender reassignment interventions as medical “treatment” of gender identity disorder (Suess, Espineira & Crego Walters, 2014: 73-76). Adopting a depathologising perspective enables us to contextualise compulsory sterilisation (which naturalises the sexually dimorphic, cisgender, heterosexual body) as a form of “gendercide” which has historically been instrumental in the imposition of a Euro-colonial binary gender system (Miranda, 2010; Lugones, 2007). The state-imposition of medical interventions on trans people not only has deleterious effects on their reproductive rights, “effectively undermin[ing] their right to found a family” (Hammarberg, 2009: 21; see OHCHR et al., 2014)—as “family” is hegemonically defined by a heteronormative and bio/ logical kinship order (Butler, 2002; van Anders, 2014). I argue that state regulation of transgender reproduction constitutes a form of institutionalised gendered violence inasmuch as it impedes transgender people’s ability to exercise inherent first-person authority over the materiality and meanings of their gendered embodiments (Bettcher, 2009; Spade, 2013). Efforts to renaturalise gender and kinship inextricably intersect (Kantsa, 2006) in the biopolitical attempt to regulate transgender embodiments and reproduction, which conditions the emerging legal recognition of transgender subjects as a rights-bearing minority (Stryker, 2014). (shrink)

Using 10 women's narratives, participant observation, archival research, and a focus group, this article analyzes women's social activism in a settler community in northern Mexico near the border. I argue that women's activism and emerging political consciousness provides a lens through which women critique structural violence and intimate partner violence and that ultimately provides new women-centered subjectivities. This article contributes to gender and social movements literature by examining the generation of a political consciousness engendered from women's grounded (...) experience of living on the U.S./mexico border. Furthermore, despite the unique sociopolitical conditions of the border, this article demonstrates that border residents have the agency to challenge, and more importantly, change their situation. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the friction between xenophobic discourses on migration and the crisis caused by the politics of austerity in Greece. On the one hand, an ‘excessive’ influx of migration is managed through violent means by the state and the para-state; on the other, a ‘scarcity’ of domestic resources is blamed for a ‘rise’ in racist attitudes, and the political ascent of a fascist movement-cum-parliamentary party, Χρυσή Αυγή (Golden Dawn). ‘Crisis’ is said to give rise to ‘austerity’—and hostility. (...) Inverting the inverted causal relationship between crisis, austerity and hostility, I problematise representations of hostility toward migrants which construct racism as a consequence of economic conditions or even as the antidote to the ‘bitter pill’ Greeks have been forced to swallow. I examine how racialised and gendered violence secures the politics of austerity in Greece. Specifically, through an examination of three eruptions of violence (the feminicidal acid attack on Konstantina Kouneva, the murder of Shehzad Luqman, and the drowning of eleven refugees near the island of Farmakonisi), I make concrete connections between the politics of austerity and what, drawing on Sara Ahmed, might be termed an ‘affective economy of hostility’ that articulates racialised and gendered modes of belonging and estrangement. Some bodies are rendered vulnerable and precarious, while others assert an entitled relation to national space while being economically disentitled by austerity measures. (shrink)

This article argues that the specifically sexual nature of the political violence of the 1947 Partition of British India installs women's bodies as unambiguously sexed and ethnic. Through an analysis of Kirti Jain's 2001 theatre production of Aur Kitne Tukde (How Many Fragments?), I consider how Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs appropriate colonialist and nationalist ideologies surrounding the notion of ‘woman’ as repository of cultural value. The women in Jain's play are not a priori subjects who experience violence but (...) rather the experience of violence makes (and unmakes) them as gendered, ethnic and national subjects. I argue that they come into subjecthood after a violent objectification and are re-constituted by their experience of national and sexual violence. The performance of nationalism – through embodied acts of sexual violence, conversion, martyrdom and state violence – is enacted upon female bodies that are transformed into political artefacts. I ask how bodies are staged and commodified by acts of political violence and argue that marking female bodies through acts of political violence constitutes a mode of transcription to communicate with other men that will encounter this body. (shrink)

Adolescent gender-based violence prevention and sexuality education is a topic of current concern given the increasing numbers of violence directed at girls. International organizations indicate that one in three girls aged 15 to 19 have experienced gender-based violence in their sexual relationships that this risk may be as much as 3–4 times higher for girls with disabilities. Following the good results obtained in the research project “Free_Teen_Desire” led by the University of Cambridge and funded by (...) the Marie Curie Actions Program in the prevention of gender violence in adolescents through Dialogic Feminist Gatherings, the aim of study is to analyze Its transfer and impact on adolescent girls with intellectual disabilities. The DFGs are here understood as generators of a more dialogic environment for girls in general and we wonder if and how It is extended to the context of girls with disabilities. Thus, the research takes the form of a case study with a communicative approach on a DFGs. The intervention is carried out in a special school located in Valencia during the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 academic years with a group of 19 non-mixed female students, female teachers, and the mother of one of the students. The study analyzes which are the transfer criteria to incorporate the DFGs in a special education context and what is their impact on the prevention of gender violence in girls with disabilities. The data collection techniques consist of two in-depth interviews, analysis of the field diary of 24 intervention sessions and a focus group with seven teachers. It is demonstrated that DFGs are successfully transferred to the special education context of the case study. The results show how contexts of safety, solidarity and friendship are generated which protect adolescent girls with disabilities from relationships with gender violence. (shrink)

Azul y no tan rosa was the first Venezuelan film to win the Goya for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film. It was also the first Venezuelan film to feature a kiss between two men, as well as an openly transgender character. At the heart of the film is a scene which cross-cuts between transsexual Delirio performing the 1980s Venezuelan pop hit ‘No soy una señora’ and a vicious homophobic attack. This scene exemplifies the film’s preoccupation with the performance of (...) class='Hi'>gender, its denunciation of machista violence, and its call for acceptance of difference. (shrink)

Published in 2008, Slavoj Žižek’s Violence: Six Sideways Reflections provides critical insight into the structures of power which dictate our perception and comprehension of violence in society. In particular, Žižek’s conception of the distinction between the subjective and objective modes of perceiving violence is particularly illuminating. This paper utilizes Žižek’s distinction to recontextualize and reframe a classic of Australian theatre, David Williamson’s The Removalists. [i] This approach puts Žižek’s seminal work on violence to task, teases out (...) new meanings from Williamson’s text, and most broadly, explores new methods for understanding the playing out of violence on stage. (shrink)

This paper examines the vagaries of war and peace discourse which seek to legitimise the notion of brutality over the principle of morality. In recognition of the limitlessness of brutality the just war tradition was developed to take account of the reasons for going to war and of the conduct of war. Nevertheless, the just war solution can invoke a mode of binary thinking dictating the imperative of brutality over morality during a conflict situation. Feminist scholars argue that traditional just (...) war theory is inadequate to the task to which it is directed. The political theorist Laura Sjoberg is one such scholar who attempts to reformulate just war theory from a feminist perspective. I assess the contribution made by Sjoberg as it relates to the gendered impact of war on women arguing that Sjoberg’s reformulation of just war theory fails to deliver a sufficient rejoinder to the problem of gendered violence in war. (shrink)

This article presents a new measure for intimate partner violence, the Gendered Violence in Partnerships Scale. The scale was developed in the Middle East with the aim to contribute to the global perspective on IPV by providing a contextual assessment tool for partner violence against women in violent-torn settings embedded in a patriarchal social structure. In an effort to generate a scale including IPV items relevant to the women of the population, a pragmatic step-wise procedure, with focus (...) group discussions and expert panels, was performed. The study’s analyses resulted in an 18-item checklist featuring four subscales of the GVPS that are based on a new typology of male-to-female partner violence presenting an alternative to the commonly used classification by type of abuse. Therein, dominating behaviors, existential threats, impulsive aggression, and aggravated physical assault were identified as reflective of the lived realities of women in the war-torn Middle East, which was confirmed in factor analysis. The scale’s psychometric properties were assessed with data from 1,009 displaced women in Iraq, and associations with measures of psychopathology were determined. Implications for IPV assessment and prevention possibilities in humanitarian contexts and beyond are discussed. (shrink)

The article explores the potential “healing” role performance art can have when representing disabling trauma, and engaging, as part of the creative process, participants who have experienced in their lives significant trauma and physical, as well as mental health concerns arising from gender violence. It focuses on the show cicatrix macula, performed during the exhibition Speaking Out: Women Healing from the Trauma of Violence (Leicester, 2014). The exhibition involved disabled visual and creative artists, and engaged participants in (...) the process of performance making. It was held at the Attenborough Arts Centre in Leicester (UK), a pioneering arts centre designed to be inclusive and accessible. The show cicatrix macula focused on social, cultural, mental, and physical representations of trauma and disability, using three lacerated life-size puppets to illustrate these depictions. Working under the direction of the audience, two artists attempted to “repair” the bodies. The creative process was a collaborative endeavour: the decision-making process rested with the audience, whose privileged positions of witness and meaning-maker were underscored. Fayard demonstrates the significance of cicatrix macula in debunking ablist gender norms, as well as in highlighting the role played by social and cultural enablers. She calls attention to its potential for mobilizing positive identity politics, including for viewers who had experienced trauma. For example, the environment of the participatory performance space offered some opportunities for the survivor to become the author or arbiter of her own recovery. In addition, the constant physical exchange of bodies within this space of debate was well-suited to the (re)connection with the self and with others. (shrink)

RESUMEN: Los cambios en la nueva concepción del Estado Democrático de Derecho que surgen a partir de la toma de conciencia de la existencia de determinados derechos que se consideran como fundamentales por la comunidad internacional, influyen de modo directo en el diseño de políticas públicas, de creación de normas jurídicas y en el modo de resolver los casos judiciales. Es así que se presenta a la Teoría Neoconstitucional como una nueva teoría del derecho que permite integrar los derechos con (...) sus respectivas garantías, y que se ocupa tanto de las normas como de los principios y los valores de Derechos Humanos y de su internalización en los ordenamientos de los Estados, es decir, se ocupa del fenómeno de mundialización de estos derechos. Dentro de los derechos fundamentales encontramos los que poseen las mujeres en lo que concierne a vivir una vida libre de toda violencia en la que se respete su dignidad y autonomía de la voluntad, amén de que los índices de violencia contra ellas aumentan día a día en todos los países del mundo. De este modo los Estados deberán cumplimentar con las medidas de acciones positivas tendientes a garantizar el efectivo goce de los derechos reconocidos por los Pactos internacionales de Derechos Humanos.ABSTRACT: The changes in the new conception of the Democratic State of Law that arise from the awareness of the existence of certain rights that are considered fundamental by the international community, have a direct influence on the design of public policies, the creation of legal norms and how to solve judicial cases. This is how the Neoconstitutional Theory is presented as a new theory of law that allows integrating rights with their respective guarantees, and that deals with both the norms and the principles and values of Human Rights and their internalization in the legal systems. of the States, that is, deals with the phenomenon of globalization of these rights. Within the fundamental rights we find those that women possess in what concerns to live a life free of all violence in which their dignity and autonomy of the will is respected, in addition to that the indices of violence against them increase every day in all the countries of the world. In this way, the States must comply with the measures of positive actions tending to guarantee the effective enjoyment of the rights recognized by the International Covenants on Human Rights.PALABRAS CLAVE: violencia, género, derechos humanos, neoconstitucionalismo, EstadosKEYWORDS: violence, gender, human rights, neoconstitutionalism, States. (shrink)

This article considers what the implications of decertification would be for single-sex services such as domestic and sexual violence support. Some reform options attached to decertification could (re)allocate authority away from the state to organisations or individuals to determine gender criteria. What would the consequences of such re-allocation be in determining eligibility to receive or access services or excluding people on the basis of a characteristic protected under equality law? Engaging with this in the context of domestic and (...) sexual violence support service provision raises a number of questions. Firstly, does the existence of gender-based violence and/or of the effects it produces require a stable category in order to address them? What benefits may emerge from providing single-sex spaces that could not be replicated in other settings? And finally, what criteria of exclusion and inclusion are currently used to determine access to spaces beyond legal gender status? (shrink)

In the summer and autumn of 2015, I met with activists in Athens and Thessaloniki, with the aim of collaboratively producing a conceptual mapping of LGBTQ social movement discourses. My point of entry was the use and signification of “racism” in LGBTQ discourses (and more generally in common parlance in Greek) as a superordinate or “umbrella” concept that includes “homophobic” and “transphobic” but also “misogynist,” “ageist,” “ableist,” and class- or status-based prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, in addition to that, of course, (...) based on “race” or “ethnicity.” As a political theorist whose work over the past decade has focused on the concept of intersectionality, its origins in US Black feminist thought, and its transnational travel beyond the Anglo-American context in which it originated, I wanted to examine how this use of “racism” relates to the concept of “intersectionality” which is now emergent in the Greek social movement context, in particular in LGBTQ and feminist discourses, yet which has not been engaged by academics, neither in the nascent and struggling field of gender studies, nor in legal theory. How do LGBTQ activists define the referential scope and semantic contents of these concepts, based on what knowledges grounded in lived experiences, and on what kinds of social movement strategies? How do these concepts and their theoretical underpinnings reflect or direct activists’ political resistance to the widespread violence that they identify within and on the borders of Greek society? Do they enable coalition-building with other minoritised groups targeted by institutional and interpersonal “racism”? In approaching these questions, I wanted to trace the ways in which my interlocutors produce theories, through which social conditions of racial and heteropatriarchal power are made visible, are explained, and are contested—conditions that they identify with the institutions—“nation, religion, and family”—that make up what they termed the “triptych” or the “syntax of power.” What emerged in my conversations with activists were vivid accounts of the atmospheric violence facing LGBTQ people in Greece, its institutional and interpersonal manifestations, both banal and extreme. Indeed, many activists defined violence as the quintessence of oppression as such, and as what links various systems or forms of oppression—or, “racisms”—to one another. In what follows, I draw on these conversations not to answer the questions with which I set out, but, primarily, those that my interlocutors generated, which concern, ultimately, the unlivability of queer and trans lives—the violence LGBTQ people face and resist, particularly at the intersections of youth, poverty, disability, rurality, racialisation, criminalisation, and patriarchy. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 2 Seiten: 285-319.

Gender discrimination and sexual harassment of female police officers by their male counterparts remain areas of liability where police departments appeared to have failed to effectively confront the nagging issues. However, the appreciable level of research conducted on these issues in the global North has not been matched by the South, where issues bordering on sexual violence have cultural underpinnings. Drawing from the case of the Nigeria Police Force, feminist analysis was used to explore the lived reality of (...) 43 female officers in a qualitative study. Participants expressed distress in abiding by structural discriminatory regulations against female officers which include non-admittance of married women into the force, forbidding unmarried officers from getting pregnant, and a stipulated minimum of three-year work period before a female officer can marry. Findings also indicated that participants suffer a variety of sexual harassment, intimidation, and, violence from their male colleagues, while they feel constrained in reporting their victimization. Important policy and practical implications requiring the Nigerian police to address hegemonic masculinity and promote gender equality were provided. (shrink)

Gender-based Violence is a huge concern in many African countries such as Zimbabwe despite the preventative and mitigatory interventions that have been proposed and implemented by various stakeholders. The interventions applied range from policies and programmes that are government initiated as well as those interventions by social actors such as non-government organisations and Faith-based Organisations like churches. Gender-based violence as a social structural issue is sustained and perpetuated by cultural norms, values and beliefs that are fed (...) by patriarchy, among other things. To effectively respond to the situation, interventions should target multiple social levels, including policy, government officials’ attitudes, individual men and women, families, community leaders and structures and social institutions such as churches. Churches are a critical community social institution that could play a pivotal role in addressing GBV. To position churches as players on public issues such as GBV, the questions that emerge are: ‘What is the role of the church in a public problem such as GBV? How could churches conceive and perform a public ministerial role that addresses GBV?’ To respond to these questions, this article employs the idea of public pastoral care as a nexus that churches could utilise in performing a community and public role function in contributing towards addressing GBV. Firstly, the article sketches the context of GBV in Zimbabwe and the various efforts to address it. Secondly, it outlines the ambivalent role of churches in GBV. Thirdly, it conceptualises the notion of public pastoral care as an approach that could be employed by churches to address GBV. Lastly, it proposes some public practical approaches that could be employed in addressing GBV by churches. (shrink)

A large and important part of social relations is gender relations between men and women. Over time, the manifestation of such relations has often been one of violence, particularly violence against women. Different approaches have been deployed to deal with the experience of gender-based violence (GBV). One popular approach is the human rights framework that suggest that GBV can be addressed by granting certain rights to women. We argue that while a human rights framework holds (...) some promise in resolving GBV, it is limited in some ways because it does not take the cultural perceptions of gender relations that envision gender duties into account. As part of our argument, we show that social relations in African communities ought to be primarily based on the principle of duty to the other, rather than an emphasis on rights. We conclude that there is a need to complement the rights-based approach with a duty-based approach to effectively address GBV. (shrink)

This article is a response to the Lancet Commission on the Legal Determinants of Health from gendered perspectives and focusing on gender-based violence and abuse. The Lancet Commission sees the role of law as positive, indeed central in providing justice in global contexts, and this contribution explores and unpacks this assertion, drawing on some examples from India and elsewhere. Some feminists have argued that law and justice are incompatible for women, and this is sometimes borne out when we (...) look at legal reforms and interventions in the field of gender-based violence. However, we also explore the ways in which some women have used legal reforms in creative ways to destabilize patriarchal norms, and more broadly, how absence of legal protection can undermine access to rights. We conclude that law can have a symbolic relationship with justice. (shrink)