Eliminating Gender-Based Violence

Ann Taket, Beth R. Crisp, Ann Taket, Beth R. Crisp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138924338
• eBook ISBN: 9781317409144
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Gender Studies

While promoting access to resources and systems of support for those affected by gender-based violence is absolutely crucial, this new book focuses attention on the important question of how communities can take action to prevent violence and abuse.

Using examples of current research and practice, the book explores the actions that can be taken in individual sectors of society, our schools, faith communities, campuses, on our streets and using new popular technologies. The contributors draw on global examples to highlight the importance of learning from the study of the interaction between socio-political contexts and effective policies and strategies to address gender-based violence. Chapters take up the challenge of exploring the construction of effective programmes that address cognitive, affective and behavioural domains. They discuss what people know, how they feel and how they behave, and include the important challenge of how to engage men in working towards the elimination of gender-based violence, offering positive messages which build on men's values and predisposition to act in a positive manner. Importantly, such strategies place the responsibility for preventing gender-based violence on the society as a whole rather than on vulnerable individuals.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in gender studies, women's studies, social work, sociology, law and health studies. Its unique approach focuses on the achievement of prevention at the earliest possible stage and examines the issue through a society-wide, but community-focused lens.

1
FRAMING THE ISSUES

Ann Taket and Beth R. Crisp

Introduction

Gender-based violence is a significant public health and social welfare problem, as well as a fundamental violation of women’s human rights. It is rooted in gender inequalities and reinforces them. Gender-based violence harms women, families, communities and society. It is a major societal issue in every country and region across the globe, with enormous health, economic and social consequences for women, in the short, medium and long term. It also has significant consequences for any children involved in the relationships affected by intimate partner violence, again in the short, medium and long term, accompanied by increased risks of involvement in abusive relationships in the future. Societal costs, in terms of the service responses to health consequences as well as the economic cost in lost production, etc., are also extremely large.

There is a growing political consensus internationally about the need for action on gender-based violence. In 2008, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon issued a global call to action to end violence against women, by launching the UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign. The campaign aims to raise public awareness and increase political will and resources for preventing and ending all forms of violence against women and girls in all parts of the world. In March 2013, the agreed conclusions of the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women emphasised the importance both of addressing structural and underlying causes and risk factors in order to prevent violence against women and girls, and of strengthening multi-sectoral services, programmes and responses for victims and survivors (Economic and Social Council 2013).

The variation in the prevalence of violence seen within and between communities, countries and regions highlights that violence is not inevitable, and that it can be prevented (Conway et al. 2013). Knowledge about the factors that explain the global variation is growing and evidence is accumulating on promising approaches to the reduction of gender-based violence. This evidence highlights the need to address the economic and socio-cultural factors that foster a culture of violence against women and the importance of promoting equal and respectful relations between men and women. Challenging social norms that support male authority and control over women, and sanction or condone violence against them, is also important, involving promoting non-violent social norms. Reforming discriminatory family law, strengthening women’s economic and legal rights, and eliminating gender inequalities in access to formal waged employment and secondary education are all important areas for action. Challenges to sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and other types of discrimination based on personal characteristics are all required for a comprehensive approach to preventing gender-based violence.

To respond to the challenge posed by gender-based violence, and in order to ensure that its impacts are progressively reduced, each generation requires a society-wide approach. The elimination of violence occurs incrementally rather than with eradication all at once (Gilligan 2001). Hence, actions taken in settings such as education, workplaces, local government, health and community services, and in sports, as well as in residential and cultural communities, all contribute to society-wide efforts. However, unfortunately the emphasis of many such efforts has been only on limiting the impact of gender-based violence once it has occurred rather than on seeking to prevent it in the first place (for example, Day et al. 2009; Laing et al. 2013), or on minimising it as the action of an individual rather than a consequence of societal conditions and expectations:

It is therefore necessary to dispel the myth that acts of violence against women are simply unfortunate instances of individual men momentarily losing control. On the contrary, such acts are most often the end of a mindset congruent with the rules of patriarchal power, in which the perpetrator views the woman not as a person . . . but as an ‘object to be manipulated’.

(Filemoni-Tofaeono and Johnson 2006: 11)

While promoting access to resources and systems of support for those affected by gender-based violence is absolutely crucial, this book focuses attention on the important question of how communities can take action to prevent violence and abuse. Using current research and practice, it explores actions that can be taken in different sectors of society. We draw on research and developing practice across the globe, highlighting the importance of learning from nuanced study of the interaction between socio-political context and effective policies and strategies to address gender-based violence. Chapters take up the challenge of exploring the construction of effective programmes that address cognitive, affective and behavioural domains – what people think, how they feel and how they behave – including the important challenge of how to engage men in working towards the elimination of gender-based violence, and offering positive messages which build on men’s values and predisposition to act in a positive manner. Importantly, such strategies place the responsibility for preventing gender-based violence on the society as a whole rather than on vulnerable individuals.

This chapter begins by introducing the theoretical frameworks that underlie our understanding of gender-based violence, including: the socio-ecological model; Hagemann-White et al.’s (2010) multi-level model of factors at play in the perpetration of violence against women and children and sexual orientation violence; intersectionality; and the multi-systems life-course perspective. As should be clear from the frameworks included, the chapter draws on perspectives from a variety of different disciplines. It will then discuss the society-wide approach required to prevent gender-based violence, examining examples of research and practice drawn from around the globe. This will offer a chance to ensure that the coverage in the book as a whole is truly global, by including more detailed sections on gaps that remain uncovered by Chapters 2 to 11. The chapter will end by introducing the remaining chapters in the book, in the context of both the theoretical frameworks introduced and society-wide approaches.

Gender-based violence: understanding the causes

Gendered violence does not exist in isolation, and is intertwined with other forms of power, privilege and social exclusion.

(Shahrokh 2015: 1)

The above quote succinctly summarises the fundamental stance taken in this volume that gender-based violence does not occur in a vacuum, and that attempts to eliminate gender-based violence without taking into account issues of power, privilege and social exclusion are fanciful and unrealistic. Furthermore, as Article 1 of the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women recognises, there is a multitude of ways in which gender-based violence occurs and the resulting impacts of such violence:

any act of gender based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.

(UN 1993: Article 1)

We have adopted this definition for a number of reasons: first of all it subsumes different types of abuse into the single term violence, including unethical and immoral behaviours which may not be illegal in addition to those which are illegal (Messina-Dysert 2015). Second, it emphasises not only enacted violence, but also threats of violence and forms of ‘entertainment’ which result in ‘the annihilation of connectivity, the dulling and erasure of human relationality through objectivication’ (Cooper-White 1995: 18). Third, it explicitly refers to both public and private domains, which is particularly important as it is vital that violence and abuse is not excused on the grounds of it happening in the domain of the private.

It is also important that this definition is understood as including anyone who identifies as female. Violence is experienced by people whose experience and/or identity does not conform to binary definitions of sex and gender, and while this book does not explicitly discuss preventing violence against transgender, gender diverse and intersex people, it should be noted that such violence shares some similar drivers to violence against women (particularly rigid, binary and hierarchical constructions of gender, sex and sexuality).

Finally, although the UN definition refers to ‘women’, experiences of gender-based violence are not confined to adults but can occur at any age, although the ways in which it occurs can vary for infants, children, adolescents, adults and elderly persons (Filemoni-Tofaeono and Johnson 2006).

The roots of the current understanding of factors underlying gender-based violence lie in the ecological models proposed to link behavioural analysis that focuses on the individual in their local setting and the analysis of whole societies. One of the best known is Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Framework for Human Development (Bronfenbrenner 1979, 2005). Ecological approaches were applied to understandings of child abuse and neglect (Belsky 1980) and later to domestic violence (for example, Carlson 1984; Dutton 1988; Edleson and Tolman 1992). In 1998, Heise built on these earlier efforts to provide an integrated ecological approach to gender-based violence (Heise 1998). This was taken up in the 2002 World Report on Violence and Health (Krug et al. 2002), which included an ecological model of violence, reinforcing the connections between causation and prevention of all different types of violence. This is discussed further below.

The socio-ecological model

The socio-ecological model places the individual in the centre of their world, surrounded in turn by their interpersonal, community, societal and global environments. The interpersonal includes family (defined by biology, adoption, choice) and friends, whereas community refers to the different settings of everyday life, including schools, workplaces, and various different settings for leisure and service use. At a societal level, social relations are affected by social and economic policy as well as by the media. In the wake of increasing globalisation and internationalisation, to capture the influence of the work of international organisations such as the UN and its various bodies, as well as bi- and multi-lateral factors such as trade, development aid and so on, a global level has been added to the original model to represent supranational factors.

Gender-based violence occurs in interpersonal, community, societal and global contexts, and can impact on individuals, groups and communities, and their relationships with each other and more generally with humanity. Hence, a range of responses is required in both responding to violence which has occurred and preventing further violence from eventuating. For example, the Prevention Institute’s Spectrum of Prevention distinguishes six levels at which prevention efforts operate, ranging from micro-level approaches aimed at raising awareness and changing violence-related attitudes among individuals to macro-level strategies that attempt to shift broader social norms and enact policy supporting violence-free societies (Davis et al. 2006).

Perhaps one of the most highly detailed multi-level ecological models is that developed for the European Commission as part of a feasibility study to assess the possibilities, opportunities and needs to standardise national legislation on gender violence and violence against children. Hagemann-White et al. (2010, n.d.) have produced an interactive model of the factors at play in violence against women and children and sexual orientation violence. Based on the existing body of research into perpetration, they distinguish nine different categories of violence, which could be influenced by policy or practical intervention, and show the factors implicated in each of them (see Table 1.1). Table 1.2 summarises the main factors that have been identified as being associated with gender-based violence at macro- (society), meso- (institutions, agencies, social environments), micro- (face-to-face social groups) and ontogenetic (individual life history) levels.

TABLE 1.1 Nine categories/types of violence

1 Rape/sexual coercion 2 Partner violence/stalking 3 Sexual harassment 4 Trafficking 5 Harmful traditional practices 6 Child abuse and neglect 7 Child sexual abuse 8 Child sexual exploitation 9 Violence based on sexual orientation

Source: Compiled from Hagemann-White et al. (n.d.).

TABLE 1.2 Factors conducive to violence against women, violence against children and sexual orientation violence, by four levels

Ontogenetic	Micro	Meso	Macro
Poor parenting	Stereotypes	Failed sanctions	Devaluing women
Early trauma	Obedience code	Honour codes	Masculinity
Emotions	Family stressors	Hate groups	Children’s status
Cognitions	Rewards	Entitlement	Media violence
Masculine self	Opportunity	Discrimination	Impunity
Depersonalised sex	Peer approval	Poverty pockets
Stimulus abuse

Source: Compiled from Hagemann-White et al. (n.d.).

For each of the nine types of violence distinguished, the different factors at each of the levels associated with them are identified, together with whether the influence is weak, moderate or strong (according to the available evidence); this is the perpetration perspective. The factor perspective summarises the size of the effect of each factor on the nine different types of violence. A separate page gives access to the path models for different forms of violence. For each form of violence the models show the particular factors and pathways by which they are influenced; this enables interactions between the different factors to be seen, which are different for each form of violence.

Protective ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• 1 Framing the issues
• 2 Working with parents and young families
• 3 Respectful relationships education: a case study of working in schools
• 4 Meeting adolescents ‘where they’re at’: the use of technology to prevent violence and abuse in adolescent romantic relationships
• 5 Violence and abuse in young people’s intimate relationships: interface of gender, prevalence, impact and implications for prevention
• 6 Campus Safety Project: strategies, recommendations and obstacles in addressing gender-based violence on campuses
• 7 Prevention, resistance, recovery, revolution: feminist empowerment self-defence
• 8 Engaging bystanders in violence prevention
• 9 Faith communities as a setting for the prevention of gender-based violence
• 10 The potential contribution of health and social care professional practice to primary prevention
• 11 Asset-based approaches for preventing gender-based violence in the workplace
• 12 Power, progress and pink pussy hats: rising resistance
• Index