SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
Goal 5: Gender Equality
You are looking at 51 - 60 of 2,357 items
The policing of racially minoritized communities has a chequered history in the UK: institutional racism, over-policing and under-protection are rife. While several studies have been conducted on policing and race, little research has examined how the intersections of race, gender and policing may contribute to the low rate of sexual abuse reporting by racially minoritized women – this cannot be solely attributed to some aspects of community policing that still suffer from institutional racism, as the literature suggests. This chapter uses empirical research, conducted within a feminist framework, to examine these issues in relation to how four British police force areas currently respond to sexual abuse incidents involving female survivors from the British South Asian community. The chapter offers an intersectional feminist analysis of what more the police and other statutory agencies can do to increase sexual abuse reporting from British South Asian and other racially minoritized women.
The introduction to the collection begins by outlining the aims of the book – broadly, to document a series of feminist interventions into criminology; to discuss injustice as a feminist issue; and to promote responses built on feminist praxis. It examines where we are currently in relation to issues outlined forty years ago by seminal feminist texts including Dobash and Dobash’s Violence Against Wives: A Case against the Patriarchy (1979). To do this, the chapter addresses what can be achieved through feminist praxis and traces significant theoretical and methodological developments. Next, the chapter considers a number of persistent issues with the process of gendered victimization through an exploration of prevailing cultural norms, contemporary regimes of truth and the enduring role of the state. Finally, the chapter attempts to map the ground for resistance and consider the (necessarily limited) harms towards women and girls which the collection discusses, and the vision of justice articulated, indeed demanded, by the contributors.
The concept of social justice is fundamental to refugee status. That one might be subjected to or fear persecution, but offered protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention, was a monumental addition to post-Second World War responses to the injustices of both the Holocaust and of broader violations of human rights and human dignity. Thus, for survivors of persecution, the prospect of rebuilding a life in perceptively safe states – through the sanctuary offered by such protections – is a central form of justice.
This chapter outlines injustices women disproportionately face as part of a continuum of violence prior to seeking asylum and through the process itself. Sanctuary is, I argue, perforated with the diffusion of controls through asylum by trial; the use of immigration detention; and in the centralization of criminal justice responses to sexual trafficking in place of truly humanitarian interventions. In all, the process of seeking asylum is itself a kind of Kafkaesque trial, and as such this chapter offers interventions which might truly centralize an alternative feminist social justice.
On any feminist reading, men ‘getting away’ with murdering their women partners and former partners is self-evidently unjust. But could it be that when feminists demand justice for femicide victims they fall into a binary trap of assuming justice to be the self-evident opposite of injustice? This chapter explores that question in relation to feminist advocacy of criminal law reforms curtailing victim-blaming defences to murder that reinscribe historically mandated excuses for killing women and which have, until recently, frequently resulted in manslaughter verdicts that diminish victims by holding them account for contributing to their own deaths. In short, the reforms, now implemented across several Anglophone jurisdictions, were designed to counter a perceived injustice in the criminal justice system’s handling of intimate partner femicide cases. Have they had its intended effect of stopping men getting away with murder, thereby delivering justice to victims?
This chapter explores how reproductive rights were denied in both the legal jurisdictions after partition in Ireland and how the state institutions stonewalled legislation. It examines how ‘biopower’ of the Church reached into almost all aspects of life and was thoroughly gendered and served as a disciplining force for the working class. It explores how activists confronted the inaction of the state(s), forcing bodily autonomy onto the legislative agenda. Through a range of methods, many with a focus on personal testimony, campaigns served to neutralize the grip of Church and state institutions. These had previously monopolized debate through narratives of ‘deviance’ and ‘shame’. While abortion was legalized in the south of Ireland and decriminalized in the north of Ireland, the denial of access in many areas remains. At a time when access to abortion is being threatened globally it is clear that only sustained confrontation with the state will secure provision of comprehensive reproductive healthcare services.
From the denial of abortion rights in Ireland to sexual violence against British South Asian women in England, the state and its institutions continue to fail women. This book offers a counter-narrative to contemporary injustices and a persistent culture of victim-blaming. The academic and activist contributions to this collection explore contemporary research areas and pursue new discursive directions in order to present a feminist criminology, built on feminist praxis, for the 21st century. Providing a direct challenge to regressive and ineffective theory, policy and practice, this book resists the politics of gendered victimization through extending feminist analyses of the state and documenting feminist interventions into contemporary injustices.
This chapter is concerned with utilizing feminist methodology and theory to critique the dominant discourses surrounding self-harm and death in women’s prisons. First, it provides a critical overview of the data concerning harm and deaths in women’s prisons. Second, it considers how a feminist epistemology built on ‘feminist praxis’ can be used to ‘unsilence’ the voices of women in prison, and their families, and place their experiences directly at the centre of knowledge production. Third, it develops a feminist, theoretical perspective in order to critically conceptualize the nature of life and death in women’s prisons. Finally, the chapter outlines a number of feminist-based strategies and interventions for the prevention and elimination of self-harm and deaths in prisons. These strategies are put forward to contribute to the radical transformation in, and eventual abolition of, a pain-inducing institution which is dangerous to women.
This chapter presents findings from research which explored the nature and extent of women students’ experiences of sexual violence at one university in England and the institutional responses to this violence. It considers students’ experiences in the context in which they took place and explores the dominant discourses which shape university responses to sexual violence. A feminist poststructuralist framework is utilized to explore the ways in which the exercise of power, via discourses, constructs a ‘truth’ about sexual violence which shapes students’ behaviour and university responses to sexual violence. Alongside this, the chapter asserts that feminist epistemologies, and feminist praxis, are essential in order to understand women students’ experiences and to create an alternative ‘truth’ about sexual violence. The chapter develops radical, theoretically informed victim- and survivor-led responses which directly challenge current policies and practices in the neoliberal university which are failing women students.
A central message of this afterword is that HIV is not over and that the lives of people living with HIV are not over. Yet they continue to live with the stigma associated with HIV, as though their lives should be over. The critical gaze of caregivers, policymakers and researchers must be focused not on people living with HIV, but on people, policies and providers who stigmatise and marginalise. That is the central theme of all the stories we have heard, from all over the world, in this book. A goal of this book has been to encourage caregivers and policymakers not to participate in HIV stigma by assuming that the emotional, sexual and relational lives of people living with HIV in later life are over. Part of what living with HIV has done is to encourage people to reclaim all of their lives, including sex and sexuality, free from judgements and assumptions of otherness. The chapter concludes by drawing parallels between HIV and COVID-19.
As HIV treatment and prevention have advanced, the HIV response has become increasingly biomedicalised. However, biomedical solutions are insufficient to address the social, psychological and relational impacts of HIV. Drawing on a participatory qualitative study, this chapter discusses the views and experiences of older women living with HIV in the United Kingdom to explore the barriers HIV can pose for intimacy. Women living with HIV do not live single-issue lives, and different intersecting factors influence their experiences and views of sex and intimacy. These factors include ageism, sexism, anti-trans discrimination and past experiences of sexual and gender-based violence. Partners’ attitudes, wider society and diverse life experiences all influence sex and sexual behaviours in women ageing with HIV, indicating the limitations of an increasingly biomedicalised HIV response.
