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Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the problem of violence against women identified by women's movements, states, and international organizations. It explores prevailing definitions of violence against women, including the increasingly common term gender-based violence, and introduces the political economy approach of this book, which seeks to understand the broader context of violence and insecurity experienced by many women. The chapter also reviews the available assessments and data on the prevalence of violence against women and the many methodological and political challenges with measuring this violence globally.

This chapter explores understandings and experiences of gender-based violence and argues that GBV should be located along a broad, socio-culturally entrenched continuum of violence against women and girls, men and boys. Violence is so embedded within our cultural productions of masculinities and femininities that experiencing some form of GBV – be that through sexually objectifying images, sexual harassment, physical, domestic or emotional violence – is almost an ordinary rather than extraordinary life experience for many women and men in our society. Here the chapter returns to the framework set out in chapter one: the triad of violence played out along a continuum, considering how directly visceral violence intersects with Bourdieu’s (2001) symbolic violence which simultaneously works alongside Farmer’s (2004) structural violence. This chapter locates women’s experiences of violence both through their own narratives and through contemporary statistical and contextual data. The authors argue that women are situated knowers who articulate the impacts of overt and covert forms of gender-based subordination on the material conditions of their lives as well as on their sense of self and mental wellbeing. Recognising and identifying a problem, however, does not automatically equip us to eliminate that problem, especially when those problems have structural rather than personal roots

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global problem, causing injury and mortality, as well a range of physical and mental health problems, including HIV infection, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance abuse, and miscarriage. This chapter evaluates interventions to reduce men's use of violence and shows how mixed-method approaches are necessary to understand the full impact of the intervention on gender-based violence.

This book examines how social inequality functions within Peru's transitional justice process by focusing on the gender-based violence that occurred during the internal armed conflict of 1980–2000. It considers how Peruvian human rights and feminist movements, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Committee (PTRC), and a feminist nongovernmental organization—the Estudio por la Defensa de los Derechos de la Mujer, or Study and Defense of Women's Rights (DEMUS)—negotiated between implementing international human rights law and holistically addressing gender-based violence. It also explores how gender norms influence what violations the Peruvian human rights movement, and later the PTRC, prioritize; how gender norms influence dominant representations of women in the PTRC public hearings and sexual violence legal cases; and how the temporally bound nature of transitional justice exists in tension with the continuum of violence. Finally, the book discusses the influence of other social factors, such as ethnicity, language, class, and culture, on gender-based violence during the internal armed conflict.

Numerous cases of sexual harassment in French higher education institutions led to the creation in 2002 of a student association dedicated to anti-sexist action against sexual harassment in higher education (Collectif de Lutte Anti-Sexiste Contre le Harcèlement Sexuel dans l’Enseignement Supérieur, also known as CLASCHES). More recently, the French minister for higher education introduced a policy requiring universities to take steps to eradicate sexual harassment and commissioned a survey of violence and gender relations in universities. Focusing on one of the universities where the survey was conducted, this chapter presents key findings from the survey and discusses the university’s responses. Although the university governing body set up a Victim Support Unit and organized activities annually to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, it has not used the survey to develop a specific policy but has, in fact, tried to obscure the results. Students criticize the university’s governing body’s discourses for blaming victims and making perpetrators invisible.

Three ingredients underpin feminist campaigns against violence against women in universities: research, public activism, and political lobbying. Often discussed as if they are separate activities, this chapter demonstrates that conducting research constitutes activism resulting in and/or requiring lobbying and other activist activities. The chapter analyzes qualitative data collected in a UK national multimethod study exploring barriers and facilitators to implementing the recommendations of the 2016 Universities UK report on violence against women. Interviews with academics reveal how, in becoming cognizant of the power structures within their universities, participants identified how power operated to stall or block the gender-based violence agenda and pointed to transformative measures to circumvent barriers. These measures involve the three ingredients listed here. Collective action is apparent throughout their accounts with alliances being developed with students, external partners, and key individuals, as well as committees and services within their institutions. Cumulatively, the activism of these participants can be seen as transformative.

This chapter focuses on efforts to engage men and boys in preventing gender-based violence (GBV). We examine violence prevention efforts at the individual, family, community, and global levels. We highlight a range of innovative approaches from around the world, including restorative justice practices, online programs, culturally focused counseling, working with fathers and their children to recognize and prevent intergenerational violence, enhancing men’s capacity to support their pregnant partners, and involving men as allies in the effort to prevent violence against women.

The final chapter corrals common themes from the insights and lessons in the array of leaders, strategies, and places included in the book. With religion, spirituality, and antiracism as the focal points for the kaleidoscope of ideas gleaned throughout, it dwells on the process of how defiant Africana spirituality births hope for transnational solidarity. Offering particular cautions for U.S.-American Christian participation, the chapter outlines methodological characteristics of defiant Africana spirituality that enables hope for ending gender-based violence.

In the past several years, the U.S. feminist anti-violence social movement’s reliance on criminalization has weakened under the weight of mounting criticism of what is now known as “carceral feminism.” This recent shift towards the consideration of explicitly anti-carceral practices and policies within the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement signals a significant break in what has been a steady progression toward a solid pro-criminalization stance since the 1970s. This Chapter provides a timeline outlining some key moments contributing to the pro-criminalization position of the anti-domestic violence movement as well as countervailing events and initiatives that have constructed an anti-carceral alternative. The timeline demonstrates that the anti-carceral turn that is now redefining the mainstream movement is the result of two decades of resistance and counter-hegemonic movement building led primarily by women, gender non-conforming, and trans people of color.

This chapter examines young people's understandings of gender based violence (GBV) and the ways in which they talk about the acceptability of violence. It reviews research on secondary school pupils' views and experiences of gender based harassment and violence, showing the pervasive normalisation and acceptance of GBV by young people as well as the centrality of heteronormativity to their justifications of violence. Building on the concept of a continuum of violence, the chapter argues that we need to re-theorise young people's views on violence in terms of a ‘continuum of acceptability’. Finally, it considers how young people's acceptance of sexual harassment, coercion and sexual violence can be used to understand why some women engage in, or normalise and accept, ‘lad culture’.

This chapter critically discusses the importance of coalition-building in challenging gender-based violence (GBV) in universities and for laying the groundwork to facilitate and support cultural transformation in the complex and risk-averse environment of higher education. Drawing on the example of a cross-institutional, multipartner coalition initiated by student organizations in collaboration with security, service, and academic staff in two Scottish universities, local service providers, and police, this chapter critically discusses the tensions encountered and challenges posed in creating a “whole-university” approach to preventing and responding to GBV. In so doing, it highlights the centrality of student leadership for developing an informed response and driving forward meaningful change and the importance of internal/external partnerships for prevention work, root and branch reform of university policies and practices, the provision of training and awareness-raising, and the delivery of a thorough institutionalized response to tackling GBV.

This chapter examines the policy context of prevention work on gender based violence (GBV) in UK universities, with a focus on Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It first provides an overview of the current situation facing UK universities as they develop their responses to GBV before contextualising this by identifying the key factors that influence GBV policy in each country using a three-point conceptual framework. It then reviews current developments in universities' approaches to the issue of GBV in their national context and concludes with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges facing the UK higher education sector as it develops its approach to GBV prevention. The chapter proposes a theoretical framework that involves a gendered analysis and a whole sector response, along with intervention and prevention programmes that include universities getting involved in local coordinated community responses to GBV and adopting a whole systems approach to GBV.

Chapter 2 traces the global emergence of the concept of violence against women in politics. It outlines how the first efforts to name the problem of violence against women in politics emerged in parallel across different parts of the global South: Working inductively, locally elected women in Bolivia theorized their experiences as “political harassment and violence against women” in the late 1990s; networks of elected women across South Asia, with support from global organizations, mapped and condemned manifestations of “violence against women in politics” in the mid-2000s; and state and non-state actors in Kenya recognized and sought to tackle “electoral gender-based violence” in the late 2000s. The chapter then goes on to show how inductive theorizing planted important seeds subsequently taken up by a wide range of international practitioners, who in the late 2000s and early 2010s actively worked to craft a global concept of “violence against women in politics.”

This chapter examines how the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) reinforces a logic that upholds social hierarchies while also opening new spaces to consider a gender analysis. When the PTRC began its investigation in August 2001, a gender analysis was not included. However, the commission was compelled to integrate the issue of gender into its investigation due to international pressure coupled with funding sources that required a gender component, as well as Peruvian women's and feminist movements' advocacy. This chapter analyzes the struggle for inclusion within the PTRC by focusing on the debate around the meaning of gender, its methodological operationalization, and incorporation into the final report. It shows how the push to document direct human rights violations against women led the PTRC to make a concerted effort to include a gender analysis and to address gender-based violence, specifically sexual violence.

This chapter presents the asylum cases made by women from Central America who claimed intimate and sexual violence as persecution from the late 1980s to the present. While these women struggled early on for recognition, a number of the claimants have seen recent success. The chapter demonstrates how shifting political and economic dynamics between the United States and Central American countries, and transnational publicity in the form of “women's rights as human rights” activism, provide the rhetorical pressure needed for the state to recognize intimate gender violence as sufficiently political and public to warrant these women's incorporation. The asylum grants also enable the United States to mask a history of violent involvement in Central American affairs to position itself as a pastoral state that protects and defends women from sexual violence.

Conversations with NGO activists in this chapter demonstrate how racial dynamics in sex tourism and sex trafficking in Salvador Brazil can assist in defining the harm of gender-based violence and in revealing direct transnational connections to U.S. consumerist desire and antiviolence strategizing. West criticizes the ways in which Christian moral judgments about sinfulness and normative sexual expression calibrate whose gendered bodies among the economically marginal are seen as precious and whose are not, though resistance to Christian sexism is also highlighted in the ideas of one Christian anti-trafficking activist. In sum, the argument stresses that intercultural learning and activist resistance to sexual violence and exploitation necessitate an antiracist understanding of vulnerability as well as holistic engagement of mind, body, and spirit.

This chapter discusses the rationale and evidence base for routine screening in the health care sector for gender-based violence (GBV) among patients who present for care. The evidence indicates that the impact of screening without subsequent intervention is limited. The chapter also discusses the policy context for GBV screening and makes recommendations for harnessing the potential of the health and other sectors to create safe environments for identifying and assisting GBV victims.