Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands

Lois Bastide, Denis Regnier, Lois Bastide, Denis Regnier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367705077
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000683882
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Pacific Islands have some of the highest rates of family violence in the world. Addressing the contemporary mutations of Pacific Island families and the shifting understandings of violence in the context of rapid social change, this book investigates the conflict dynamics generated by these transformations.

The contributors draw from detailed case studies in a range of Pacific territories to examine family violence in relation to the social, economic and political situation of native populations as well as individual, collective and institutional responses to the development of violence within and upon the family. They focus on vernacular understandings, conflicting social norms, the emergence of different types of violent patterns, the impact of violence on individuals and communities, and local attempts at mitigating or combating it. Combining ethnographic expertise with engaged scholarship, this volume offers a vivid account of ongoing social change in Pacific Island societies and a crucial contribution to the understanding of family violence as a social process, cultural construct, and political issue.

This book will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of violence and the family, Pacific studies, development studies, and the social and cultural anthropology of Oceania.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: family, violence, and social change in the Pacific Islands
• 1 Settler violence, family, and whānau violence in Aotearoa New Zealand
• 2 Placing the children: fostering native Hawaiian children in an American state
• 3 Transferred children and the production of family violence in French Polynesia: social change and the adaptations of fa’a’amura’a
• 4 Familialism and gender violence in New Caledonia families
• 5 Naming violence: forms of economic violence in highland Papua New Guinea
• 6 Culture-based counselling at the domestic violence shelter of the Sisters of the Anglican Church of Melanesia in the Solomon Islands
• 7 Women-only households in Port Vila, Vanuatu: sites of social resistance
• 8 From structural violence to family violence: insights into perpetrators’ experiences in French Polynesia today
• 9 ‘This is not Vaelens!’: naming and reacting to physical abuse in a Vanuatu school
• 10 Quarrels, corporal punishment, and magical attacks: what is ‘family violence’ in Kiriwina?
• 11 Contexts and levels of community violence in highlands Papua New Guinea
• Postface – analysing violence: lessons from a collective reflection
• Index