Eradication of Violence Against Women collection
In support of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, we put together a collection of free articles, chapters and open access titles. If you are interested in trying out more content from our Global Social Challenges collections, ask your librarian to sign up for a free trial.
Eradication of Violence Against Women collection
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Creative responses to societal issues can be used to highlight topics, provoke discussion, and encourage solutions. Art can take on a multiplicity of roles in response to gender-based violence from enabling individuals with personal experience sharing their stories to critiquing media/political representations. The ‘I’m terrified of becoming a headline’ exhibition (Munster Technological University Gallery Cork, Ireland, April/May 2022) deployed poetry and song, in written and recorded performance formats, newspaper headlines, and interactive spaces to further renew discussion of gender-based violence in Ireland. This article considers the installation’s role by connecting our reflections and feedback from participants with larger discussions of creativity as a process to foster progress in addressing gender-based violence.
Women’s experiences of conflict and their roles in its prevention have become an increasingly large focus for feminist scholars, particularly since the adoption of the Women, Peace and Security agenda in 2000. Iraq has been at the forefront of engagement with the Women, Peace and Security agenda, being the first Middle East state to adopt a national action plan. This article analyses Iraq’s Women, Peace and Security action plans, largely drafted by women’s civil society organisations, using the concept of the ‘continuum of violence’. In doing so, the article shows how a fuller breadth of violence is used by Iraqi women writing and working on Women, Peace and Security inside Iraq than what appears in Women, Peace and Security resolutions. The article therefore contributes to critical engagements with the Women, Peace and Security agenda by addressing two themes: the agenda’s limited capture of gendered violence in conflict; and the agenda’s top-down nature when it comes to reconceptualising the agenda, its limits and its opportunities.
Violence against Women (VAW) is considered a gender-specific human rights violation and is a form of discrimination that perpetuates women’s subordination and patriarchal structures throughout all levels of society. Research continues to demonstrate that the legal instruments dealing with sexual offences in Bangladesh have significant limitations and fail to meet international standards. This article identifies gaps between Bangladeshi domestic legal instruments and international legal instruments. In order to uncover and analyse the gaps, I employed thematic analysis techniques and a feminist legal theoretical lens. The findings of the study show that there are significant gaps and limitations regarding the conceptualisation of sexual violence, trial process, medical tests, variability of punishment, and protecting rights of victims in the present Bangladeshi legal instruments in comparison to the international instruments. This research provides insight into the alarming situation of sexual violence against women in Bangladesh and the problematic gaps within legal instruments in that nation, which governmental and academic authorities must consider if they are to be effective in preventing violence against women in Bangladesh.
An emerging body of research has shown that women who live in highly coercive settings characterised by poverty and housing instability face a heightened risk of intimate partner violence. We seek to contribute to this literature by exploring how multiple, overlapping social and structural factors shape intimate partner violence (IPV) risk among women who use drugs (WWUD). Analysis of 16 in-depth interviews with WWUD in Uyo, Nigeria, framed by intersectionality, reveals that intimate partnerships of WWUD were contextualised by socio-economic disadvantages, housing instability, and dependent substance use. Intimate partnerships motivated by women’s concerns to meet survival needs manifested as unequal exchanges that locked them in abusive relationships. Socio-economic deprivations, housing instability and dependent substance use operated at a more distal level to shape unequal relationships characterised by dependence and subordination of WWUD, the later factors constituting the proximal axis of IPV risk. WWUD sought to negotiate IPV risk through deference and acquiescence to male partners. Interventions aiming to reduce IPV risk within intimate partnerships of WWUD should seek to expand the space women have to negotiate risks within these partnerships in the short term. In the long term, they should focus on ensuring access to safe housing, economic support and drug treatment services.
Violence towards elected representatives violates the personal integrity and freedom of representation of the municipal officeholders, thus potentially harming democracy at large. An original survey of Danish municipal council members’ experience of psychological, sexual and physical violence shows that two thirds have experienced at least one of the five types of psychological violence enquired about, while a third have experienced sexual and physical violence, respectively. More violence is experienced by women, the younger, those living on their own and those with larger TV exposure and social media visibility. However, except for sexual violence and being single, gender does not interact with these variables. Turning to the effect of violence, whether representatives feel that they have freedom of speech is negatively correlated with their experience of psychological and sexual violence. In the case of sexual violence, the effect is gendered. In sum, violence experience is skewed and may harm both descriptive and substantive representation.
The goal of this study is to identify the extent to which a set of risk factors from the ecological model are associated with intimate partner sexual violence victimisation in Mexico.
To achieve this goal, a structured additive probit model is applied to a dataset of 35,004 observations and 42 correlates.
Findings indicate that age at sexual initiation, women’s sexual and professional autonomy, and social connectedness are associated with their victimisation risks.
The findings provide evidence of factors that were previously unknown in Mexico or were solely based on theory but lacking empirical analysis. There are four key contributions. First, findings indicate that factors closer to the individual, such as personal experiences and interpersonal relationships, are more influential in explaining the women’s risks of IPSV victimisation. Second, significant factors were identified, including age at first sexual intercourse, autonomy in sexual and professional decision-making, and social networks. Third, it was possible to identify high-risk population subgroups that are often overlooked, such as women who had their sexual initiation during childhood. Finally, the introduction of some emerging indicators allowed for the examination of the experiences faced by women in various aspects of life, such as decision-making power and social networks.
In this article, we introduce the concept of a policy cascade, which describes the process of creating policies to address the consequences of other policies. Using the concept of wicked problems introduced by Rittel and Webber in 1973, we trace state and federal policies to address domestic violence to show how they form a policy cascade and decenter survivors. By treating social issues as wicked problems, upstream approaches that bypass compounding effects of policy may help recenter survivor needs.
Specialist domestic and sexual violence and abuse support services routinely collect administrative data about victim-survivors’ experiences of violence, interventions, and individual- and service-level outcomes. When used effectively, such information has the potential to enhance understanding of patterns of violence in society and ensure that responses are evidence-based. However, the extent to which insights from specialist services’ administrative data can inform policy and practice on violence reduction is limited by three interrelated challenges: different approaches to the measurement of violence and abuse; the issue of disproportionate funding and capacity of services, and the practicalities of multi-agency working. This article contributes to a gap in knowledge by explicitly addressing the challenges of using such data. It is hoped that it will encourage further discussions into how services collect and use data, which would greatly enhance knowledge in this area. To gain a more accurate picture of violence and abuse, their consequent harms in society, and where resources and interventions should be targeted, it is vital that specialist services data is integrated with other sources of data on violence.
In the context of on-going high rates of domestic abuse in England, the voluntary and community sector increasingly provides specialist domestic violence and abuse (DVA) services to support women in local community settings. This article discusses a qualitative evaluation of one programme, working to support females with mental health needs. A locally based support programme worked with women in one city in England over a two-year period; 34 service users, and eight professionals contributed to interviews and focus groups in support of the evaluation. Our framework analysis identified key themes using survivor voice in respect of the importance of trauma-informed support, adding to the evidence base about effective recovery work in the voluntary and community sector. The defining features of trauma-informed support, safety, trust, choice, collaboration and empowerment were evident in the service model, which led to positive outcomes for survivors who engaged with the programme. The model of provision discussed here is transferrable beyond the voluntary and community sector. Learning from the programme suggests that DVA services can focus on the mental health needs of survivors, using trauma-informed support to enhance recovery.
This article reports on how young people (aged 18–24) and stakeholders working in the area of violence against women (VAW) in Ireland, perceive young men’s role in addressing VAW. We find that men are considered well positioned to intervene as active bystanders and to engage in feminist allyship. However, several barriers to men’s active bystanding and engagement with the issue of VAW, as well as ethical, theoretical and practice issues, need to be considered. These include: the privileging of men’s willingness to listen to other men, thereby devaluing women’s perspectives; pluralistic ignorance where men feel other men do not share their discomfort of violence-supportive practices; and a tendency for men to default to confrontational modes of active bystanding. We highlight how these issues are even more pertinent to address given the presence of political forces that seek to stymie men’s support for feminist activism and causes related to gender politics.
