Women's Views on News |
| Domestic violence archives now online Posted: 18 May 2015 11:27 AM PDT
During the 1960s and 1970s what we know today as 'domestic violence' was largely invisible in the British Journal of Criminology’s publications. Glimpses of the problem were – are – only provided by small and disturbing details in publications on other topics. This Virtual Special Issue of the British Journal of Criminology (BJC) brings together articles from throughout the archive that illustrate the long-standing concern of researchers with the problem of domestic violence – also referred to in the journal as wife abuse, intimate partner violence, gendered violence, and violence against women. In order to provide an international perspective and a comprehensive resource for scholars and students, a generous selection of relevant articles has been posted. The articles are presented in chronological order so as to identify the wide range of perspectives and methods brought to bear on this subject, to illustrate how research and discourse has evolved over half a century of study, and to highlight those topics and concerns which appear stubbornly resistant to the passage of time. As will become apparent, this Virtual Special Issue does not draw evenly from the 54 existing volumes of the BJC. In Moya Woodside's 1961 article, nearly half of her sample of women imprisoned for drunkenness (11 of 23) gave 'marital trouble' as the main explanation for their predicament. Some examples of abusive, controlling behaviour perpetrated by husbands against wives are found in C. Klein's 1962 article on mental sadism. Although Sarah McCabe's perceptive contributions appeared in the 1970s (a Review of Battered Spouses in 1976 and a Note on the Report of the Select Committee on Violence in Marriage in 1977), it is not until the 1980s that the first research article on domestic violence appears, written by Dobash and Dobash. Apart from being a fascinating exercise in its own right, reviewing this archive has revealed the following themes in domestic violence research, as published in the BJC: 1) The enduring importance of employing a gendered analysis in the consideration of how and why violence between intimate partners takes place, and what to do about it, is evidenced by early as well as later publications. It cannot be said that such a perspective informs the entire collection, however, and the role of gender in domestic violence remains a contentious issue amongst academics, practitioners, and policy-makers. 2) The articles demonstrate the challenge of responding effectively to domestic violence. Although many authors are critical of criminalisation as the primary form of response to domestic violence, much of the research focusses on evaluation of the performance of criminal justice agencies. 3) The research collected here is theoretically rich and methodologically diverse. No single canon dominates; many disciplinary traditions spanning multiple levels of analysis are employed instead. This is a sophisticated body of work, both conceptually and empirically. 2. Culture, Masculinities and Violence against Women 3. The Significance of Compellability in the Prosecution of Domestic Assault 4. Towards Safer Societies: Punishment, Masculinities and Violence against Women 5. Police Response to Domestic Violence 6. New Survey Methodologies in Researching Violence Against Women 7. Restorative Justice and Gendered Violence: Diversion or Effective Justice? 8. The Cost of 'Lost' Intimacy: The Effect of Relationship State on Criminal Justice Decision Making 9. Freedom and Integrity, Relationships and Assault 10. Making Justice Work: Effective Legal Interventions for Domestic Violence 11. The Management of Domestic Violence Cases in the Mode of Trial Hearing: Prosecutorial Control and Marginalizing Victims 12. Making Your Home a Shelter: Electronic Monitoring and Victim Re-entry in Domestic Violence Cases 13. Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug -Involved Women 14. Evaluating Domestic Violence Initiatives 15. What is to be Done About Violence Against Women?: Gender, Violence, Cosmopolitanism and the Law 16. ‘I had a Hard Life': Exploring Childhood Adversity in the Shaping of Masculinities among Men Who Killed an Intimate Partner in South Africa 17. Former Refugees and Community Resilience: 'Papering Over' Domestic Violence 18. Similar Punishment? Comparing Sentencing Outcomes in Domestic and Non-Domestic Violence Cases In closing, it is important to note that the focus of this Virtual Special Issue is domestic violence. Publications that focus mainly on sexual violence, rape, sexual harassment, trafficking, and other forms of violence and abuse that disproportionately affect women and girls are not included. While these crimes are often interrelated, inclusion of this broader sample of publications would have resulted in an unwieldy, less focussed collection. There are enough articles on rape, for example, to form the basis of a separate collection. Finally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the research presented here is British in origin, followed by that produced in member states of the Commonwealth such as Canada and Australia. Considered together, these articles offer an account of the way in which research can shed light on the problem of domestic violence, and what to do about it. There are many other stories in other parts of the world. Hopefully, by making this collection available in one focussed edition, the BJC will encourage more of them to be told.  |
| Women’s future under the Conservatives Posted: 18 May 2015 04:28 AM PDT
By Dawn Foster. With a Conservative victory in the UK election, even deeper cuts are looming for women already in poverty and at risk, and the suffering will become entrenched. The United Kingdom went to the polls on Thursday 7th May. The second polls closed at 10pm, the BBC were able to reveal the results of their exit poll. The projected outcome – a huge swing to the incumbent Conservatives, the decimation of their coalition partners the Liberal Democrats, and a sizeable loss of seats for the Labour party countered all previous opinion polling, which repeatedly projected a dead heat between Labour and the Conservatives, making a hung parliament seem a certainty for the second time in five years. Twelve hours later, as the results cascaded in, the BBC's poll looked too cautious in its predictions for the Conservatives. After an election campaign in which every politician, journalist and analyst was confident the UK would see a hung parliament, David Cameron had secured a majority, and returned to Downing Street, unfettered by his former coalition partners. When this reconfigured parliament sits for the first time, a change in make up will be evident amongst the new faces. More Conservatives, more Scottish Nationalists, but also more women. The number of women in the House of Commons rose by a third after all seats were returned. It's a cheering statistic on its own, but one that merits more scrutiny. Of the 650 seats elected last Thursday, nearly 100 had all male candidates on the ballot paper. Even with the significant hike in the number of women MPs, the proportion still dwindles below a third – 191 women in parliament, compared to the 147 elected at the last election. Of the big name politicians who lost, a large proportion were men, but for the Liberal Democrats, the loss of Jo Swinson and Lynne Featherstone means of their eight remaining politicians, none are women. Esther McVey, the Conservatives' employment minister lost her Merseyside seat, and has been replaced by Priti Patel, albeit still in a male dominated cabinet. But numbers aside, the outlook for women in the next government is far bleaker. Five years of cuts and austerity hit women in Britain far harder than men, with 80 per cent of public spending cuts affecting women. The Conservatives ran their campaign on an economic platform, arguing that they were the only party to continue to reduce the country's deficit. Whether a deficit reduction programme is necessary or desirable depends on your political outlook, but both the Conservatives and Labour bought the neoliberal argument that austerity was the only option throughout the campaign. Now in office, and with a majority, the Conservatives have to fulfil their election commitment to cut £12bn from the welfare budget – a sum that amounts to a 10 per cent cut in all non-pensioner spending. For those reliant on welfare benefits to make ends meet, the disabled, the low-waged, the families in poverty, this is almost unthinkable. The exponential rise in food bank demand, as a result of sanctions and stagnant wages, was arguably the most alarming fallout from the coalition's time in office. Further cuts will not just entrench, but deepen suffering. The Conservatives were curiously loathe to explain where the cuts would come from. To cut £12bn from the welfare budget requires some very deep cuts to benefits that have already been squeezed and reordered. Unconvincing mutterings from Conservative Party headquarters claimed the cuts would be achieved through behaviour change – but this is a canard, that is very revealing of the Conversative attitude towards poverty. People claim benefits because they need to – either their employer pays wages too low to live on and the state is forced to subsidise these business by paying benefits to their staff, or people are unable to work and feed their children, and need cash benefits to make ends meet. A 'change in behaviour' won't stop the need for benefits. Someone disabled won't suddenly decide they can work after all. A young mother won't wake up and decide she can afford to work, pay her rent and bills and shell out for extortionate childcare purely by force of will. Documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper mooted the shape of cuts considered by the Department for Work and Pensions. They include capping child benefit at two children, removing housing benefit for people under the age of 25, and making it harder for sick people to claim state aid when out of work. Some floated cuts affect women directly, such as making employers contribute more to the cost of statutory maternity pay, or as an alternative, abolishing it entirely. Often women's rights are seen as a continuum. Once fought and gained, it can be easy to assume those rights are secure, accepted as a societal duty and more, and the next battle can be fought. But threats to maternity pay can't be seen as anything other than an attack on women's position – if women have to choose between reproducing and working, we are intrinsically seen as second class citizens. During the last parliamentary term, huge cuts to legal aid and the introduction of fees for employment tribunals attacked women's right to work free from discrimination. Women sacked for getting pregnant, or sexually harassed in the workplace only had access to justice if they also had access to capital. The poorest women were hung out to dry – this will only be compounded by attacks on maternity pay. For women who do have children, and can't find work, the leaked documents also propose forcing single parents, predominantly women, on benefits to seek work when their youngest child reaches the age of three. Currently, single parents have a duty to seek work once their youngest child reaches five years old, the age when they start full time education. At the age of three, any mother seeking work will need to find a job that pays for the extortionate childcare costs necessary for her to start work. But as well as fresh cuts, the poorest women in the UK will experience more of the same. And "business as usual" for women in the United Kingdom since the recession has meant deep cuts and entrenched inequality. Prior to the election result, the abolition of the bedroom tax looked quietly imminent. The Labour party had promised to abolish it if elected, and Liberal Democrats had come out against it, meaning even a Conservative coalition government may have had to agree to a deal to scrap the controversial policy. Instead, the Conservatives will leave it in place. One in four households affected are single parent families, predominantly women, losing around £800 a year in benefits, and being forced deeper and deeper into debt and poverty. In total, 60 per cent of all people affected by the bedroom tax are women. Over 340,000 of the families hit by the Bedroom Tax are single women, compared to 160,000 single men and 160,000 couples. For the two years the policy has been in place, many households have just about managed to keep their heads above water, through applying for emergency grants from councils, to selling belongings. But those survival tactics only last so long: the discretionary housing payments for councils are temporary payments that are rarely permitted for longer than one or two years. On visiting a woman in Bradford affected by the bedroom tax, it was stark how bare her home was: barely any furniture, no electronics, just large, sparsely decorated rooms in an area with no smaller homes to move into. "I've sold it all," she explained. "There's nothing left." Equally, the rollout of Universal Credit – a much botched consolidation of multiple benefit payments – will continue. Many women's groups and domestic violence charities have raised concern about the policy, which pays benefits to one person in a household. The potential for financial abuse and manipulation is heightened as a result: for women at risk of abuse, having all benefits paid to your partner leaves you completely financially dependent. The policy is a gift to abusers, and overlooks the many reasons benefits were paid directly to women for so long. Breaking down the statistics, of the British population living in relative poverty, 40 per cent are women and 23 per cent are children. Five years of the worst cuts since Margaret Thatcher's government saw many people clinging desperately to a semblance of a life. A Conservative majority government promising deeper cuts that Thatcher looks set to rip that away, leaving a lost generation of women disenfranchised and alienated by poverty. When you speak to the women affected, two things are stark – the anger and the fact that they are very aware that, contrary to right-wing ideology, poverty is neither something that passively happens to an individual, or a symptom of personal and moral failings. It is structural and economic violence inflicted on a section of society. The attempted atomisation of the poorest in society may not work though – when individuals reach a breaking point, rather than give up, they often fight back. Five years of cuts has pushed the women's sector and the poorest women to the brink. Further cuts may act as the touch paper for wider resistance and fightback. A version of this article first appeared in openDemocracy on 11 May 2015.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Women's Views on News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |