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With this article we question the universality of the popular truism that intimate partner violence (IPV) between adult partners is transmitted from generation to generation. We illustrate how the concept of ‘intergenerational transmission of IPV’ fails to capture the complex social processes that are likely to influence individuals who experience IPV as children and as they grow. Building on a feminist application of ecological systems theory, how multiple systems have evolved to differently influence children who grow up with IPV is considered. This approach offers understanding of perspectives that promote social change and the self-worth and positive agency of children who grow up with IPV. We offer a unique contribution by exploring ways intergenerational transmission of IPV is rebutted in the twenty-first century, and how change is facilitated so that children who grow up with IPV can achieve healthy relationships when supported by all levels of the ecological system.
Six unarmed men were shot dead by the British Army in the New Lodge area of Belfast in the North of Ireland on the 3rd and 4th February 1973. Collectively, these men are known as the New Lodge Six. There has never been a public inquiry into how or why they died. Eyewitnesses were not interviewed and there was a terrifying absence of police investigation into why six unarmed men were killed by British forces. No British soldiers were ever prosecuted in relation to this case. This intervention outlines what happened to the six unarmed men and how the British Army claimed the New Lodge Six were involved in a gun battle with troops. The intervention has three interlocking aims. Firstly, the aim is to draw attention to the case following the 50th anniversary of the shootings. Secondly, the intervention calls for a public inquiry into the New Lodge Six killings, which share troubling similarities with the shooting of unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday twelve months earlier. Finally, the aim is to position the case within the context of other conflict-related killings and to highlight the injustice of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, which is currently making its way through the British Parliament.
The aim is to show how digital financial services are used to perpetrate digitally facilitated economic abuse. The article is based on interviews with women in Sweden who are survivors of intimate partner violence and economic abuse.
The use of digital financial services is rapidly expanding and in Sweden they are used by the majority of the population. They are available on smart devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops and have become a part of everyday life. Research on technology facilitated abuse and research on economic abuse have not addressed the risks for economic abuse via digital financial services. To bridge this gap, we suggest a merging of these fields to focus on what we call digitally facilitated economic abuse.
Findings show that digital financial services constitute risks for economic abuse and facilitate abusive behaviours. Smart devices serve as digital bank books, wallets and identity cards, all rolled into one neat little package, opening up for new methods for economic abuse. Abusers use digital financial services to limit and restrict the woman’s access to money, to monitor and control her use of money by breaching her financial privacy, to economically exploit her and to put her in debt.
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a practice that consists in the partial or full removal of the external female genitalia. This article, guided by Glaser and Strauss’ ‘grounded theory’ approach, and based on semi-structured interviews with Eritrean women immigrants in Italy, aims to show qualitatively the process of how migration and a new socio-cultural milieu influences the ideas and attitudes surrounding FGM. Our findings show a clear abandonment of the practice and a refusal of the idea of continuation of it among participants. A newly acquired awareness of sexuality in a new culture was pointed out as important by the majority of the participants. It is however noteworthy that simply moving to and living in a country where FGM is not practised does not ensure abandonment. A great level of integration into a new culture is an answer. That said, participants expressed the need for, and suggested the creation of, anti-FGM sensitisation programmes. This study contributes to qualitative research on this harmful and sensitive practice, and suggests ways to ultimately end it.
This article critically analyses the assumptions and effects of the ‘daring to ask approach’ to gender based violence (GBV), as expressed in the policies that govern social services’ work in Sweden. We show how GBV is constituted as a sensitive issue connected with shame and as something that will not be brought up spontaneously; GBV is something that women who had experienced it carry with them as an ‘untouched truth’ waiting to be discovered by social workers while women’s worries about the consequences of telling are not made intelligible. The very speaking as such is seen as emancipatory, and the social worker is understood as a facilitator. With this approach follows standardised questions, aiming for neutrality and equity. However, these are so wide and unspecific, that the risk is that no one thinks the questions are directed to her. By making the assumptions and effects of a seemingly self-evident strategy visible, we demonstrate areas in need of further research and policy development, such as barriers to help-seeking (beyond stigmatisation) and effects of standardisation. This is an important undertaking since without critical scrutiny of the policies there is a risk that stakeholders assume that merely asking will resolve the problem of GBV.
Digital technologies are increasingly being used within the context of domestic and family violence (DFV) to facilitate coercive and controlling behaviours – also known as digital coercive control (DCC). Drawing on the perspectives of a small sample of nine DFV practitioners and scholarly experts, this article examines the barriers victim/survivors of DCC encounter as they seek help in Victoria, Australia. We find that DCC has distinct impacts on victim/survivors who are socially and geographically isolated. DFV support services also experience a range of challenges in detecting and responding to DCC, including in risk assessment and management, highlighting a requirement for further training of frontline workers to better respond to DCC.
Association has become a central aspect of surveillance and a key practice of making information matter. It is critical to any kind of profiling that we experience on an everyday basis. To associate is to join, to make a connection ‘in an interest, object, employment or purpose’ (Harper, nd). One of the most widespread ways of analysing information is indeed to make a connection between different datasets. In her work on data derivatives Louise Amoore speaks of an ‘ontology of association’ (2011: 27). This means that associating data is not just a knowledge practice, but it describes a specific way in which data materialize and come to exist together. The most common approach of associating different datasets with each other follow a Boolean logic (Kitchin, 2016), named after the mathematician George Boole. We know them as if-then rules, that is: when if is true, then is executed. By means of if-then instructions disaggregated data are associated ‘to derive a lively and alert new form of data derivative – a flag, map or score that will go on to live and act in the world’ (Amoore, 2011: 27). The aim of associative practices is to connect different sets of information and to derive patterns from them (Kaufmann, Egbert, and Leese, 2019). What is more, such patterns, again, are likely to be associated with actions that matter to society. Whether a pattern is considered meaningful and actionable depends on many aspects, not least those involved in associating.
Association is a classic analytic practice, which is also used to process analogue information. With the rise of digital information, however, association has shifted in terms of reach and quality.
Hacker Kate90r13 summarizes the upsurge of associative information practices. He observes powerful routines in analysing, revealing, and disclosing insights based on digital information and in engineering these insights into new products and socio-technical procedures. Kate90r13 is not the only one who watches these developments with a growing unease. Self-critical journalism problematizes our role as consumers in this development as our clicks, swipes, and likes are analysed by those with the privileged overview (New Scientist, 2018). The vocabulary of the ‘frightful five’ (referring to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft; coined by Manjoo 2017) or worries about China’s ‘digital authoritarianism’ (Erixon and Lee-Makiyama, 2011) were early indicators of a rising awareness about the consequences of sharing information online. By today, countless reports, citizen and legal initiatives as well as entire research programs address how public and commercial actors practice the collecting, storing, curating, and processing of information. Policies for opting out of digital services (Burgess, 2018), personal choices of ‘un-facebooking’ (Evans, 2014) and ‘digital detox’ (Syvertsen, 2020), as well as ‘non-participation’ (Casemajor et al, 2015) are attempts to answer these trends. Yet, not everyone agrees with such radical reactions: "Pulling the plug is not an option”, says hacker jE2EE. He prefers to engage critically with the rise of association without abandoning the Internet as such. An opt-out of online services is almost impossible as it produces social, financial and utility costs that are hard to afford (Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2011, 2016; Morozov, 2017).
What ethos informs engagement, and what possibilities for activity are realized in making? What material effects play out in informationalization? What matters?
When we theorize and study different information practices one thing becomes clear: in this dance of information, infrastructures, tools, and ourselves, it makes a difference what matter gains liveliness and how. What information is generated, how matter matures, decomposes and re-emerges, and at what point it stops being a possibility (Steyerl, 2013) creates effects for everyone involved. Ethics is central to the ensemble of this ‘spiral dance’ (Haraway, 1991: 181). Or to put it differently: what matters is ultimately an ethical concern. Ethics is present making: it implies the act of doing something consciously. It involves the ethicality of making something of consequence, contributing to something that matters. As a result of that, ethics is also present in matter. It is embodied in the very materiality that emerges and exhibits agency. In our case, the ethicality of materials can refer to what kind of information appears and how a tool performs normativity, values, and sometimes very concrete understandings of the world. This ethicality is not merely about morality and responsibilities, but about co-creative values and ‘ethical forces that operate like analytic frames for ongoing experiments with intensities that need to be enacted collectively’ (Braidotti, 2019: 158). This book’s argument is thus also relevant to ethical considerations: the ethics of making matter are performed in collective, embodied material practices that acknowledge passing (Braidotti, 2019), and transience, but also make anew.
