Handbook on Sexual Violence (4 page)

Gendered realities

One of the conundrums addressed in this volume is whether anything has really changed in the three decades in which attention has been paid by states to the issue of sexual violence, with a number of chapters documenting contradictory processes. The greater willingness of women to report is one theme here, but we need to reflect more on the complexity of speaking out. It is not simply a question of whether responses are effective and appropriate, which all too often they are not, but what it means to make private troubles

public. In much of Europe violence and abuse is no longer ‘unspeakable’,
8
yet

to speak in some contexts can create further danger/vulnerabilities. Where women come from families in which ‘honour’ is a strong cultural value, to

reveal sexual violence risks more than reputation or social exclusion; it can place the woman herself at risk of further, potentially lethal, violence (Hossain and Welchman 2005). Being ‘dishonoured’ could be considered a continuum, with its meanings more or less explicit depending on cultural contexts. Here the example of women who give public testimony, including to human rights campaigners, about rape in conflict is instructive. Rather than being viewed as heroines in their own communities, the all too frequent response is rejection and exclusion, resulting in many finding the only livelihood option is selling sex (Stiglmayer
et al
. 1994). These are more extreme examples of the potential negative consequences of telling; as some chapters in this volume note, women continue to weigh the benefits and losses, including being seen and treated differently by friends and family, in deciding whether and who to tell. ‘To be a victim’, for a woman, continues to carry stigma and reputational risks, which persist despite feminist efforts and agency engagement.

Gender inequality is a durable inequality (Tilly 1998) with efforts to address it stalling across Europe, and potentially deepened by aspects of globalisation (Walby 2009). The barriers to progress are many, but include a failure to locate violence as one of the core ‘pillars’ of gender regimes/orders (Walby 1990). Exploring sexual violence in this way is revealing. There is no simple link between women having more financial autonomy/economic resources and decreasing violence – in fact the reverse appears to be the case in the short term across a range of societies. The Nordic countries, for example, are consistently rated at the top of all conventional measures of gender equality (equal pay, paid employment, political representation), yet the levels of violence against women are as high, and on some measurements higher, than in countries where less progress has been made. Similarly, development programmes are increasingly aware that channelling economic resources through women, while more effective in promoting income generation, often has the unintended consequence of heightening tension and violence in interpersonal relations. These examples raise the troubling policy issue that violence might actually increase in response to efforts to create more gender equality, at least in the short/medium term. These disturbing examples illustrate that neither recognition nor redistribution (Fraser 2003) provide an adequate framework for understanding the persistence of gender inequality, VAW and the intersections involved. Nor are they sufficient to explain why decades of reform, new policy and practices have made such little difference in the overall picture, albeit that for many individuals having access to safety and support, and being treated with respect, makes a considerable difference in their lives.

To analyse these tensions and contradictions, we need new theoretical framings which place the continuum of violence at the core of gender inequality, while allowing for change, retrenchment and unintended consequences at multiple levels. In the MA on Women and Child Abuse at London Metropolitan University we encourage students to draw on and develop Connell’s (2009) theoretical framework which distinguishes between the overarching ‘gender order’, ‘gender regimes’ (more localised within institutions, including the family) and ‘gender relations’ between individual women and men. While the levels are connected, convergences and

divergences between them are not only possible, but to be expected and explored. This is just one potential framework; we undoubtedly need more, if we are to create conceptual maps which enable us to make sense of the paradoxes of violence against women in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. I wrote this in the weeks after the death of my life partner, Dr Corinna Seith. It was remembering her insistence and desire that I should return to theory and conceptualisation that gave me the strength to complete what on many days seemed an impossible task.
   

2. In
   Surviving Sexual Violence
   (SSV) (Kelly 1987) the concept of ‘sexual violence’ is
   

   used, within a gender analysis, to mean all forms of violence against women, albeit that not all forms were researched explicitly: subsequently in the Nordic countries the term ‘sexualised violence’ has been used in a similar way. In the intervening years ‘sexual violence’ tends to be used more narrowly and ‘violence against women’ or ‘gender-based violence’ have become the preferred overarching terms.
   

3. I continue to use impacts and consequences rather than the more limited concept of ‘effects’ for reasons that were outlined in
   Surviving Sexual Violence
   .
   

4. In some parts of her discussion she vacillates between critique and accepting some core parts of the conceptual analysis – that everyday sexism is connected to more obvious assaults, that flashing and harassment are intrusive and exacerbate women’s fear, especially in public space.
   

5. Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, has been charged with sexual offences against two Swedish women – one charge of rape, two of sexual molestation and one of unlawful sexual coercion. While there is no dispute as to whether sex took place, the legal charges turn on refusal to wear a condom and having sex while one woman was asleep. Much of the resistance to the possibility that there might be a case to answer conflates the issue of the US contemplating charges for publishing thousands of classified documents with his sexual behaviour. As with the Bill Clinton case, an either/or position proposes that either there is a case to answer or the accusations are being used solely for political ends – the possibility that both may be the case is seldom contemplated.
   

6. This is done to an extent in the British Crime Survey (Smith
   et al
   . 2010), and was
   

   done in more depth in an Irish study (Watson and Parsons 2005), and it is these analyses which reveal gendered disproportionality in victimisation and perpetra- tion. The headline figures, however, which are those that enter popular and media discourse, continue to be based on those reporting any incident – which can be limited to a push – producing similar prevalence findings for women and men. The one in four headline prevalence finding is rarely accurately qualified, meaning it is widely misunderstood as referring to repetition and multiple forms of violence.
   

7. In
   Yemshaw (Appellant)
   v.
   London Borough of Hounslow (Respondent)
   [2011] UKSC 3, the
   

   Supreme Court ruled that ‘domestic violence’ in section 177(1) of the Housing Act 1996 includes physical violence, threatening or intimidating behaviour and any other form of abuse which, directly or indirectly, may give rise to the risk of harm. This has yet to be extended to criminal law.
   

8. Swati Pande (2009) has shown that in Hindi there are literally no words with which to name sexual violation.
   

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