Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.     

Gendered insecurity in the Rohingya crisis

The purpose of this piece is to analyse the data on pregnant women and new mothers in the Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh to determine if it can be used as an indicator of increased conflict related sexual violence and ethnic cleansing. The reported data is problematised in the context of the notorious unreliability of data in emergencies. By comparing the available data with known birth rates among the Rohingya and the broad demographic patterns seen in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide the piece shows there is cause for the concerns of increasing conflict related sexual violence and ethnic cleansing. When taken with qualitative data from international organisations responding to the humanitarian crisis and refugee testimony, the paper reliably concludes the quantitative data can tell a reliable story of conflict related sexual violence and ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State. The paper also highlights the need for improved sex- and age-disaggregated data collection in emergencies.     

The aftermath of an election crisis: Kenyan attitudes and the influence of individual-level and locality violence

How does violent conflict affect social and political attitudes? To answer this question I pair Kenyan survey and violence data for the time period following the country's December 27th 2007 national election. I find that respondents who personally experienced electoral violence are less likely to express certain forms of inter-personal and institutional trust than those individuals who did not. The association is not universally powerful, however. First, noteworthy differences emerge between populations who relocated as a result of post-election conflict and those who did not. Differences between these groups suggest that internal migration in the wake of tragedy influenced the Kenyan social landscape. In addition to personal exposure to electoral conflict, I test how local level violence may indirectly condition Kenyan political attitudes. Across all models, individual-level exposure to violence has the most consistent influence upon opinions, although district level effects emerge in analyses without survey respondent ethnicity controls. This finding suggests that living in a setting of regional insecurity does not have as important an effect on certain political views as personal victimization.     

Understanding the spatialities of sexual assault against Indian women in India

Both domestic violence (DV) and sexual assault against women (SAAW) in public spaces continue to be significant problems facing Indian society. Moreover, the link between DV and SAAW is also commonly misconstrued. Adding to this confusion is the way in which forms of violence against women (VAW) – battering, rape, molestation and sexual abuse – lacks spatial and contextual analysis. There was nationwide outrage over the Nirbhaya incident of 16 December 2012, which escalated the issue of VAW to the centre stage of political debates. Indeed, the Nirbhaya incident has intensified the need for understanding the spatialities of SAAW in India and propelled the Government of India to pass the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013. Using a questionnaire survey supplemented by open-ended interviews, the research aims to understand how social and patriarchal norms allow SAAW to persist. The research narratives reveal that the contours of DV, leading to sexual exploitation of women, often spill over to the public spaces, thereby restricting women's mobility and creating fear of its (re)occurrence. Finally, I urge for reforms to tackle VAW while using Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 as an asset for reform.     

Rights to protection and the state: the Australian Government's National Plan to reduce violence against women and children and victim's justice

Due to increased awareness and impact of domestic violence, women's safety in the domestic sphere has become a prominent problem in Australian politics. In an analysis of criminal injuries compensation (CIC) processes in WA, this paper highlights a specific aspect of national policy failure in relation to safety for women who have experienced domestic and family violence. It establishes policy impetus to acknowledge a right to protection by the state within the domestic sphere, then discusses the history and relevance of state responsibility/obligations for victims of crime compensation and demonstrates how the failure to comply with the nationally endorsed plan to address domestic violence places some women at risk of further harm. The example of WA's victims of crime compensation processes highlights the high level of female domestic violence victims using the scheme and important intersectional issues pertinent for Indigenous women. The paper points to how a specific failure of policy implementation may be addressed.     

Hate-crimes as racial violence: a critique of the exceptional

Violence on the one hand is taken as something natural and normal. On the other hand, certain violent actions, such as hate-crimes, are portrayed as forms of exceptional violence, while systemic inequalities are rendered ordinary. In this paper, I de-naturalize the concept of violence through a critical evaluation of hate-crimes. I argue that the concept of hate-crimes has been, or is at risk, of being co-opted by a more sustained effort to ignore and downplay racial inequalities in society. Drawing on the philosophical distinction between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’, I contend that an exclusive focus on individual-based hate-crimes deflects attention from the systemic, structural inequalities of society; and that a narrow conceptualization of violence (as direct, intentional action) conforms to a more expansive neoliberal promotion of a ‘race-blind’ or ‘colour-blind’ criminal justice system.     

Men and anti-violence initiatives: transnational feminist reflections from Afghanistan and Pakistan

Abstract

This article looks at how international development’s rhetoric for enlisting men to take up anti-violence against women’s work is translated into reality. Based on fieldwork conducted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I argue that whilst there have been success stories of men’s behaviour changing, the localisation of gender concepts and ideas into local frameworks has not been as successful. Furthermore, inattention to how gender relations are shaped by conflict and violence results in the dilution of feminist values around work on violence against women. This inattention also privileges middle-class men’s activism at the expense of activism by women and men from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds. The article concludes with a call for further transnational feminist dialogue and interventions in the area of men’s involvement, so that current and future initiatives are critical, reflexive and relevant.     

Promoting Women,Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the region's women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on women's contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the region's women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine women's security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.     

Structural change and wife abuse: A disaggregated study of mineral mining and domestic violence in sub-Saharan Africa, 1999–2013

Mineral mining may be a mixed blessing for local communities. On the one hand, extractive industries can be a positive economic driver, generating considerable revenues, and opportunities for growth. On the other hand, mining is often thought to be associated with negative effects, such as pollution, and violent conflict. Existing research has shown that mine openings trigger a structural change in employment patterns in Africa, whereby women shift from agricultural work to the service sector, or leave the labor force. However, few if any systematic studies have addressed whether this structural shift may impact the level of violence within the household. Drawing on various versions of resource theory, we argue that mining – through such structural change – may increase women's risk of being abused by their partners. Recent advances in the literature on domestic violence (DV) suggest that prevailing gender norms moderate effects of resources. We test this empirically by matching georeferenced data on openings and closings of 147 industrial mines to individual data on abuse for up to 142,749 women from the Demographic and Health Surveys in 15 sub-Saharan African countries. We find no overall statistically significant effect of mine openings on the risk of partner abuse, although there are heterogeneous effects across countries. Furthermore, mining is associated with increased DV in areas with higher general acceptance of such abuse.     

Beyond ‘Culture’ as an explanation for intimate violence: the politics and possibilities of plural resistance

This article interrogates simplified culturalist explanations of gendered violence, which evoke timeless ‘tradition’ and religiosity to locate violence in racialized places and upon ‘othered’ bodies. I examine structural processes that shape women’s experiences of and vulnerability to intimate violence. My analysis complicates culturalist narratives, but engages critically with culture as one context within which violence is embedded. Drawing on field research within Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India, I discuss the complexities of interwoven experiences of structural, state, and intimate gender violence. I draw attention to how anti-violence organizations working in marginalized communities theorize these complexities, and practices of what I am calling ‘plural resistance,’ which these organizations enact through equally complex responses to such violences. Plural resistance describes community-based strategies that simultaneously reject both gender violence and other forms of systemic violence, such as poverty born of uneven development. Embodied resistance to gender violence provides a critical lens for understanding articulations between regional patriarchies, exclusionary state practices, uneven development, and Islamophobia.     

Sheltering from domestic violence: Women’s experiences of punitive safety and unfreedom in Cambodian safe shelters

This paper explores the experiences of Cambodian domestic violence survivors who have fled their abusive partners to live in NGO-run safe shelters. Through in-depth interview research undertaken in 2016, we explore the stories of seven women whose experiences speak to tensions between having safety from violence and freedom to live as they choose. The pervasive impunity of the legal system means that Cambodian society operates as a safe space for perpetrators of domestic violence and spatially excludes survivors from it to guarantee their safety from injury and even murder. Just as violence against women has been described as a major area of ‘unfreedom’, we contend also that safe shelter provision in Cambodia, albeit essential, does not necessarily afford freedom from violence, but rather a punitive safety from it which can curtail women’s bodily integrity. Survivors are too often being excluded from decision-making processes in the shelter and treated as passive recipients of physical safety. Making the argument that safety and freedom are not coterminous, we contribute to recent feminist scholarship in geography and aligned disciplines focused on the significance and workings of safe space for marginalised groups. As such, the paper complicates singular viewpoints of safe spaces as enabling environments which can challenge oppressive forces both inside and outside of them.     

Violence on bodies: Space,social reproduction and intersectionality

Abstract

Social categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, caste, and class have been analyzed by feminist geographers, who collectively argue that as individuals we experience and live the effects of these social categories simultaneously. Violence as a result of living these categories is not specific to certain spaces or contexts. Nor can violence be imagined as only social – it is also political, economic and institutional. Silvia Federici’s work can assist feminist geographers in understanding how this violence plays out in various contexts. Federici's detailed archival searches and empirical analyses of bodies and reproduction show parallels with contemporary forms of direct and structural violence of the state, patriarchy, and capitalism through unequal power relations and unequal life chances. Refining the scarce scholarly acknowledgement of women (and men) who are exploitable or labeled as irrational and vulnerable, and of human and non-human populations that have been relegated to the realm of surplus and expendable bodies – explain how the organization of capital facilitates and, indeed, relies on violence. In support of this argument, the authors in this collection seek pathways within Federici’s ground-breaking works Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero, which could enrich existing works in the discipline. The contributors reflect on how these particular books have been pivotal to feminist thought generally and their own research, analysis, and pedagogical practice specifically. Through their disparate studies the contributors have intertwined the geographies of structural, institutional, and/or state-sponsored violence with themes arising in Federici’s work.     

Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England

In the early modern period, the inapplicability of certain discourses of sex and violence impeded allegations of rape whilst facilitating denials of rape. Women who asserted rape (and men who spoke out in support) engendered those same discourses which incriminated them with their own semantic and expressive intent. Male violence was stressed and feminine agency discursively denied in these accounts. Sex was largely occluded, except when it appeared in particular forms: when rape was conceptualised as the tragic antithesis of healthy, procreational sex; through metaphors which implied the violation of a woman's most private boundaries; and as a brutal expression of unrelenting, and often obsessive, masculine love. Rape narratives produced in legal contexts cannot provide evidence of repressed memory. But they can demonstrate how, from a position of weakness, women nevertheless attempted to negotiate their way through a web of cultural restrictions.     

Is It Always Good to Talk? The Paradoxes of Truth-Telling by Rwandan Youth Born of Rape Committed during the Genocide

Social scientists have extensively debated the virtues, pitfalls, and practical effects of open dialogue and truth-telling versus silence and concealment in global post-conflict endeavours for justice and reconciliation. This article addresses these debates not by endorsing practices of either talk or silence, but by investigating the practical dilemmas faced by Rwandan youth born of rape committed during the 1994 genocide as they find themselves caught in dual cultural imperatives to reveal and to conceal the circumstances of their origins. On the one hand, the post-genocide moment has seen the rise of truth-telling and self-revelation through testimonial practices in settings like post-genocide trials and reconciliation or peace-building workshops. On the other hand, silence and concealment are accepted and expected modes of dealing with hardship in Rwandan cultural practice, and youth participants struggled with the stigma of having been born of genocidal rape. We argue that the youths’ ambivalent and sometimes contradictory moral evaluations of talking about versus hiding their origins highlight the challenges and complexities of identity and belonging in post-genocide Rwanda, since their very existence draws them, their mothers, and their perpetrator-fathers into ongoing relationships. These youths’ lives and experiences speak to larger and powerful conundrums at the heart of what it means to live with legacies of violence, including what should be said or remain unsaid, and how the very opposition between revealing and concealing can be confounded by social and cultural variances in the meaning of “truth.”     

Detecting hidden violence: The spatial distribution of excess mortality in Rwanda

Existing sub-national studies on the geography of armed conflict mainly focus on observed battle events. Other dimensions of the conflict cycle, including battle events that remain undetected in news reports, one-sided violence against civilians and the indirect death toll, have gone largely unstudied due to lack of systematic data. This article demonstrates how these different dimensions of a conflict cycle can be detected and how their relative importance can be assessed. The basic tools include population census data, principal component analysis and spatial analysis. When applied to the Rwandan case, the method reveals high excess mortality from the civil war, genocide, (counter)insurgency and the refugee crisis. Hidden violence is detected by presenting the first quantitative evidence to date of high excess mortality in Gisenyi, the northwestern province which was the location of (counter)insurgency and served as a corridor for more than a million refugees. The spatial regression analysis indicates that both the refugee crisis and (counter)insurgency contributed to a high death toll in Gisenyi. This latter finding is important because it provides empirical weight in support of contentious qualitative reports by various human rights groups.     

Ending sexual violence in conflict: the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and its critics

During the past year, the UK Government has become the lead advocate for a perhaps surprising foreign policy goal: ending sexual violence in conflict. The participation of government representatives from more than 120 countries in a London Summit in June 2014 was the clearest manifestation of this project. This article offers an early assessment of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI) and situates it within the history of global action against sexual and gender‐based violence from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 onwards, with a particular focus on three key developments. First, the PSVI has embraced the already common understanding of rape as a ‘weapon of war’, and has stressed the importance of military training and accountability. This has exposed the tensions within global policy between a focus on all forms of sexual violence (including intimate partner violence in and out of conflict situations) on the one hand, and war zone activities on the other. Second, the Initiative has placed great emphasis on ending impunity, which implicates it in ongoing debates about the role of international and local justice as an effective response to atrocity. Third, men and boys have been foregrounded as ignored victims of sexual and gender‐based violence. The PSVI has been crucial to that recognition, but faces significant challenges in operationalizing its commitment and in avoiding damage to existing programmes to end violence against women and girls. The success of the Initiative will depend on its ability to navigate these challenges in multiple arenas of global politics.     

Finding mobility: women negotiating fear and violence in Mexico City’s public transit system

Feminists have long known that a woman’s confidence, sense of possibility, aspirations, and personal growth depend on their ability to be mobile. Yet gender-based violence and sexual harassment against women commuters greatly limit those freedoms. How then should cities adapt in order increase women’s equal access to mobility? To address this question, this article looks at the case of Mexico City, investigating how women pursue mobility despite hostile and violent conditions that immobilize them. Based on women’s testimonies, comments made on online debate forums, and surveys among women commuters in Mexico City, this article maps the ways women cope with violence and harassment on public transportation. The analysis also pays particular attention to how women’s coping strategies are restructured through state interventions, including women-only transportation. The data reveals that gender-based violence in Mexico City’s public transportation limits women’s mobility and reinforces gender inequality. It also shows, however, that under the right circumstances women-only transportation can be used as a place to create a rights-based movement. The article concludes that Mexico City is an example where women-only transportation has played a role in changing the traditional gender norms which have reinforced violence against women commuters.     

Between ‘here’ and ‘there’: family violence against immigrant and refugee women in urban and rural Southern Australia

The purpose of this article is to investigate how (dis)connection with place influences immigrant and refugee women’s experiences of family violence in regional/remote and metropolitan southern Australia. We draw on research from the ASPIRE project (Analysing Safety and Place in Refugee Experience) in the states of Victoria and Tasmania. A participatory research approach was used to interview immigrant and refugee women who had experienced violence, and providers of family violence services from eight locations in the two states. Both inner urban, regional and remote locations were included in the study. The findings present new insight into how geographic isolation and the scarcity of specialized services affected the experiences of immigrant and refugee women in regional/remote areas. Across all settings, participants described experiences of social isolation associated with both distance from community networks and being ostracized or seeking to avoid the proximity of perpetrators and their social networks. Notably, the experiences of women living in regional Tasmania and regional Victoria shared more similarities than did those of immigrant and refugee women in regional Victoria and inner-urban Melbourne despite the different legislative environments in the two states.     

Temporal trends in violence during the Mississippian period in the Middle Cumberland Region of Tennessee

This study utilizes a biocultural approach to investigate skeletal evidence for violence among Mississippian communities in the Middle Cumberland Region (MCR) of Tennessee. Bioarchaeological evidence for violence is placed within the local environmental and cultural context in order to better understand temporal trends in regional conflict. Bioarchaeological analyses were conducted on the crania of 599 adult individuals from 13 sites in the MCR. Approximately 7.2 percent of the sample (43/599) showed evidence of violent cranial injuries in the form of scalping, sharp force trauma, and blunt force trauma. While overall trauma frequencies appear to increase during the later Mississippian period, this may reflect a shift in the nature of violence, rather than simply an intensification of intergroup conflict. More fine-grained temporal comparisons are made for samples from the late Mississippian Averbuch site. The variability in the frequencies and types of violence observed within the MCR demonstrates the issues inherent in the reliance on broad generalizations about human behavior in the past and highlights the importance of utilizing both a regional and diachronic approach.