Search Results

This chapter returns to the memory of the underground and the shelter to engage with women’s testimonies of sexual and domestic violence, and the politics of current remembrance, especially within a wider context of naming and silencing such forms of violence. Drawing on women’s oral and written testimonies, the first part details the kinds of threats that women encountered in normatively ‘safe’ spaces at the hands of their ‘own’ comrades. The chapter details the manner in which the Party responded—or not—to rape and other sexual offences. Women’s (and men’s) negotiations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence, explored in the second part of the chapter, are revelatory of their conflicting identifications with forms of heroic identity, idealized masculinity, and class. This chapter brings out the full costs and consequences of composing masculine cultural imageries through a repudiation of the feminine.

This chapter focuses on sexual violence by German troops, which was a widespread reality in the Soviet Union and included coerced disrobement, sexual torture, rape, and sexual enslavement committed by individuals or groups. Women and girls but also boys and men suffered bodily and psychological wounds. Many did not survive to tell their stories. The account draws on narratives by perpetrators, victims and bystanders and elucidates the forms that sexual violence took, in what situations specific manifestations occurred, and how the phenomena were dealt with within the military. Throughout this and the following chapters, it is discussed how the military commands of Wehrmacht and SS tacitly accepted sexual activities of their men, including sexual violence, while at the same time trying to implement measures of control and regulation. Ultimately, they regarded male sexuality as something that could and should be productively incited. While commanders seldom seem to have ordered the perpetration of sexual violence (as in cases when subordinates were asked to procure women), they assumed that their men would act in certain ways and exploited this behavior with regard to their own interests.

Though sexual violence is often cloaked in silence, the “Delhi bus rape” that led to the death of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey in 2012 incited an abundance of public discourse. One response was Priya’s Shakti, a comic created by Indian American documentarian Ram Devineni and a transnational team of producers and gender-based violence experts to expose and address gender discrimination and violence. Through a rhetorical analysis of Priya’s Shakti, contributor Valerie Wieskamp argues that the comic book models important feminist and postcolonial interventions in rape culture. Even as the international public depicts sexual violence as a consequence of Indian culture, the comic reverses the neocolonial tendency to privilege Western-centered responses by showcasing elements of Indian heritage as a solution to rape culture. Further, Priya’s Shakti begins to address publics excluded from international and Indian discourses by representing rural, lower class, and disadvantaged women.

This chapter sketches ideas on effective prevention and ways that different stakeholders may work toward reducing, and ultimately ending, domestic and sexual violence. It categorizes a few general pathways and charts issues that might facilitate or create barriers to preventing violence against girls and women. It draws on discussions from a 2014 violence prevention workshop as well as findings from prevention research on diverse populations in various cultures. Some of the prevention themes have emerged from a focus on systems-level reforms; others focus on larger cultural modifications that would transform whole communities and gender norms.

Prevention is a seductive concept. It has a wide range of positive connotations largely derivable from the medical world. However, in order to prevent, it is important to locate the cause and have an accurate picture of the associated epidemiology of the problem. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the extent to which either of these factors are present in what is known about sexual violence and further to explore the extent to which what is known informs preventive strategies. Starting from the position that violence (against women) is 'an everyday experience this chapter will consider the ways in which strategies designed to prevent sexual violence actually deny the ordinariness of such, but rather rely on rendering it extra-ordinary in order to render such strategies justifiable. These practices of denial, by implication, also deny what is known about its causes and its epidemiology. As a result, such practices tent to serve the interests of the professionals engaged in then rather than those so afflicted by such violence

This chapter provides an overview of best and promising practices for preventing dating violence and sexual violence among adolescents and young adults. The chapter highlights the need to create prevention curricula that address multiple types of violence; build links between prevention efforts over time, and across professional groups and various contexts; examine the intersection of violence prevention and prevention of other health problems; and connect prevention efforts across a target group’s social relationships.

Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as cell slavery. By narrating southern prisons’ shift from dormitories to cells, this chapter will show how the power and control of prisoner trustees was strengthened by the changes. Within the southern convict guard framework, prison rape is analyzed as a state-orchestrated design rather than as an individual act pf prisoner pathology. Through an analysis of sexual violence in male prisons as a social construct of the southern trustee system, this chapter joins in a historical turn toward placing sexual violence at the very center of racial oppression. Seeking to take prison rape seriously as evidence of evolving state control and orchestration, the chapter pushes against the criminological view that has cast prison rape as a timeless function of the prisoners’ own pathology. The chapter also considers how women prisoners experienced the southern trusty system and the state’s attempt to isolate and target women that the prison classified as the “aggressive female homosexual.”

Based on interactions with sexual assault victims in Baltimore this chapter explores the work of violence in renegotiating kin relations. Literature on sexual assault largely characterizes the sexual assault victim as inevitably alienated from her kinship and care network. In this framework, the force of violent events is singularly attributed with the capability of sundering relationships. These sunderings are particularly typical when focusing on marriage relationships. Shifting the analysis to focus on the victim’s relatives beyond their spouse or partner, the chapter argues that sexual violence can function to recast the very nature of intimacy between victims and their family members, thickening affinities and shifting them into new modalities of relatedness.

The chapter investigates individual securityscapes that respond to gender-based violence. Indeed, large parts of Kyrgyz society remain structured around highly patriarchal norms and violence against women is commonplace. Academic literature on this problem has so far mainly considered the practice of 'bride kidnapping' in rural areas of the country. However, as this chapter demonstrates, it also concerns young women in the capital city of Bishkek. In order to avoid the ever-present prospect of sexual harassment or even rape, they need to adhere to specific security measures that determine much of their daily lives. This involves, for example, remaining inconspicuous and constricting their movements around certain times and places.

For many victims of sexual violence, the trauma does not end with the incident itself, but may be drawn out for several months or even years. Secondary victimisation caused by conscious or non-conscious promotion of rape myths, negative stereotypes, or empathy fatigue can happen at the hands of both the public, personal relations, or sadly even those who are meant to support and protect victims. For those few victims who do engage with criminal justice, secondary victimisation poses a serious threat to their wellbeing, with the potential to negatively affect both mental health and future willingness to report crime.Sexual victimisation is seriously under-reported by both male and female victims. The social stigma attached to sexual victimisation, the trauma of police interviews, court proceedings, and medical examinations, as well as the psychological implications of victimhood, are all significant motivations to avoid reporting, especially in cases of sexual violence. The risk of experiencing this secondary trauma is so severe that some go so far as to suggest that victims may be better off not reporting their ordeals to the police at all.This chapter will firstly introduce the data on the under-reporting of sexual crimes, review current explanations and discuss the dismal prosecutorial success rates in relation to sexual violence in Scotland. It will then present evidence regarding the traumatic nature of the criminal justice system for victims of sexual violence, drawing on the academic literature including a critique of existing policy and practice, ongoing qualitative research with victims of crime in Scotland, as well as some highly publicised recent cases in the British media. Finally, the chapter will end by providing suggestions for reducing the risk of secondary victimisation and making the criminal justice system more victim friendly

This chapter contains the most relevant academic knowledge relating to this study of restorative justice and survivors’ justice needs. This provides an accessible introduction to the evidence underpinning this study, while introducing readers less familiar with restorative justice to its main principles and its application in cases of sexual abuse. The author presents her own definition of restorative justice for sexual abuse, and in doing so shows it is theoretically and conceptually possible to conduct restorative justice processes with enablers of abuse. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the research which illuminates survivors’ justice needs, and how restorative justice can fulfil them.

This chapter details the ways in which Thai attitudes to homosexuality and transgenderism are not homophobic but nonetheless reflect persistently sexist, male-centric and often misogynistic views. Forms of male sexual violence against boys, young men and kathoeys are also detailed.

At some time towards the end of the first/seventh century, a relatively trivial incident took place.1 An Arab of the tribe of Tamīm called Hammām b. Ghālib visited a clan not his own, the Banū Minqar, also belonging to Tamīm. A woman, waking up her daughter called Ẓamyāʾ, found that a snake had crept into her clothes. She cried for help and Hammām, who happened to be nearby, chased the snake away by throwing some dust at it. The snake had probably been attracted by the warmth of the girl’s body; Hammām was attracted to it in turn: he touched the girl and kissed her, but she resisted and he left, making a mocking epigram on her and her clan. When her relatives heard this, they were angry and one of them called ʿAmr (or ʿImrān) b. Murra, who was sent to play a trick upon Hammām’s sister, Jiʿthin. ʿAmr lay in wait for her and approached her unawares when, at night, she left her tent ‘to do her business’. He put his hands on her hip and her leg and dragged her along for some distance. She cried out and when her tribesmen hastened to the scene ʿAmr fled. In another version, there were, in fact, three other men, who together with ʿAmr/ʿImrān dragged Jiʿthin from her tent.

This chapter provides a critical overview of historical and contemporary approaches to preventing sexual violence. It also presents an overview of all chapters, outlining their contribution to the field and provide a clear message related to the coherence of the book.

This chapter considers the politics of naming sexual violence not simply as a categorical tool, but as a political tool. In other words, while naming has certain legal or social implications—by naming rape, victims can prosecute their rapists and then identify and seek treatment as a rape survivor—it also has certain political implications related to broader narratives of power, identity, morality, and consent. By tracing cultural panics about “sexting” and sex offending combined with women’s own often-ambivalent accounts of naming sexual violence, I argue a rather radical claim: Because sexual violence is so pervasive—where men internalize the perpetration of such violence as normal and women internalize sexual violence done to them as normal—categories of rape and sex offending obscure the pervasive qualities of perpetration and victimhood in the culture at large. The “rape victim” and the “sex offender” become categories of “Otherness”—often seen as outside the norm and outside of ourselves—that blur and erase the way many different iterations of sexual violence disrupt, traumatize, and circulate within women’s lives. As such, categories of “rape victim” and “sex offender” encourage a widespread failure to recognize, act upon, or become disturbed by the overwhelming numbers of women who experience some sort of sexual violence (“named” or not), and the overwhelming numbers of men who use violence in their “normal” and “everyday” sexual practices with women. Further, experiences outside these dichotomies—for example, sexual violence between women, men as rape victims, those who both perpetrate and are victimized by sexual violence—fall further and further out of focus.