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Racism, Militarisation and Policing: Police Reactions to Violence against Palestinian Women in Israel
Abstract
This article moves beyond the discussion of police racism to a broader account of the militaristic racism of policing in Israel. The highly permeable boundaries between the military, society and the political conflict all affect how violence against women is policed. Focusing on case studies of police officers' perceptions of abused Palestinian Israeli women -- members of an ethnic and indigenous minority -- this paper considers key features of the policing of violence against women in a militaristic context and during a continuous political conflict. Police officers' philosophies and actions in law enforcement concerning violence against women are critically scrutinised. The findings indicate that while some aspects of cultural difference between the indigenous ethnic group and the majority are relevant to policing, focusing predominantly on the 'cultural characteristics' or 'ethnic traditions or rituals' of the policed population and denying the effect of the political conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a factor in the militarisation of policing can reinforce rather than ameliorate ethnic prejudice, racism and discrimination.
... A common theme in the literature is that DV has historically been "under-policed" and not accorded the level of "seriousness" received by other crimes of violence (Barlow & Barlow, 2000). Under-policing of the Israeli-Arab community, particularly in DV cases, has been attributed to racism and occasional outbursts of hostility by the Jewish majority toward the Arab minority (e.g., Elbedour, Abu-Bader, Onwuegbuzie, Abu-Rabia, & El-Aassam, 2006;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). In response to recent deaths of Arab women (so-called "honor killings") in majority Israeli-Arab towns like Lod and Ramle, Arab community leaders accused the police of negligence and feigned powerlessness. 1 At the same time, Israeli police have been accused of over-policing the Arab community (relative to the Jewish population), both in general and in connection with violence against women, intervening when it is either unnecessary or unjustified (cf. ...
... Israel has been described as "a deeply-divided society" (Hasisi, 2008). Israeli Arabs have high rates of poverty, live mostly in segregated villages and towns, and report to racism, discrimination, or state patriarchal oppression (e.g., Sa'ar, 2007;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004), this rereading highlights the complex interaction between gender violence and policing in multicultural realms (Okin, 1998(Okin, , 1999. ...
... Similarly, "ethnicizing" the subject of DV by focusing on traditional culture as a primary cause of abuse led Kazakh police officers to consider DV a major challenge for intervention, which officers ultimately perceive as futile, particularly in rural areas (Snajdr, 2007). Research in Israel has documented that some police officers view Arabs as having a different "mentality" (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004, p. 182) or as "primitive" (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004, passim) in their approach to violence against women (i.e., backward, not Western or "modern"), presumably justifying police nonintervention in DV cases reported from Arab sectors (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). This line of research suggests that DV occurring in minority communities cross-nationally may be at risk of being constructed as a "non-problem" or as something that merits minimal police involvement. ...
... Similarly, during periods of harsh economic conditions, such as high levels of unem ployment or high social inequality, violent crime rates as well as property crimes tend to increase (Brenner, 1977;Herzog, 2005;Kramer, 2000;Melossi, 1998). Few studies, however, have analyzed the effect of security threats on domestic violence (Sachs et al., 2007;ShaloubKevorkian, 2004). ...
... The militarization approach also addresses domestic violence, specifically suggest ing that crime rates are higher in countries where boundaries between the military and society are highly permeable (Adelman, 2003;Albanese, 2001;ShaloubKevorkian, 2004). Accordingly, men who possess weapons obtained through their employment in the security forces may be more inclined to use them against their female partners (Sachs et al., 2007). ...
... Hypothesis 1: Intimate femicide rates are expected to increase significantly during the Second Intifada period. This hypothesis is based both on the legitimization hypothesis as well as on the militarization approach and previous research (Adelman, 2003;Albanese, 2001;Archer & Gartner, 1984;Fishman, 1983;Landau, 1998;Linsky et al., 1995;SelaShayovitz, 2005;ShaloubKevorkian, 2004). Hypothesis 2: Intimate femicide rates will be significantly higher among two groups of immigrants (from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union) than among Israeliborn Jews and Arabs during the intifada period. ...
Most studies dealing with the effects of security stress (e.g., stress caused by war or terrorist attacks) on crime rates have tended to focus on violent crime in general. This article adds to the existing literature by extending the focus to the effect of security and economic stressors during the Second Intifada in Israel on intimate femicide. In addition, the study investigates temporal patterns in the representation of intimate femicide rates among various groups in Israeli society. The results show that during the Second Intifada, intimate femicide rates among immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union were significantly higher than in the preintifada period. Furthermore, the findings indicate that intimate femicide committed with a firearm among immigrants significantly increased during the course of the intifada period.
... The term femicide is used in this article to refer to the murder of women and girls by a family member or members, whether this violence occurs within or outside of the confines of the home. In the Palestinian context, the concept of "femicide" was first used by Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2004) to denote "all violent acts that instill a perpetual fear in women or girls of being killed under the justification of 'honor'" (p. 10). ...
... Of these contexts, the one with which this article is primarily concerned is the intersection between formal and informal legal-social systems for the Palestinian minority in Israel. Significantly, these systems have become inextricably intertwined since the establishment of the Jewish state; while many informal legal systems have remained, Palestinians inside Israel have gradually shifted from accessing their own internal, informal systems to the formal Israeli legal system (Hassan, 1999;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004. Not only does this relationship between formal and informal legal-social systems help to construct the daily lives of Palestinians in Israel, especially those of women who are always located at the lowest rungs of the hierarchy of both, but, as we will see, it is also embedded strongly in the wider context of colonization. ...
... Formal and informal relations of power are diffused throughout society, and individuals are sites within which power is practiced (Foucault, 1980). It is, of course, important to acknowledge that Palestinian women have and continue to resist prevailing relations of power, whether they be Israeli colonization, Palestinian traditional rule, or the patriarchal structures inherent in both (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). Nevertheless, the mutually empowering relationship between the two systems places Palestinian women in a distinctly vulnerable position. ...
This article explores the murder of women and girls, which we name it Femicide, among the Palestinian community living in Israel. Specifically, it analyzes how the dialectic interrelationship between informal and formal legal-social systems constructs the murders of Palestinian women. The data revealed that femicide is a crime empowered by the wider context of colonization and the increasing spatial segregation of Palestinian communities. The study confirms the need to move beyond simplistic "cultural" explanations of femicide, and pay closer attention to the ways in which the structure, politics and economy of death function in colonized spaces and contexts.
... At the same time, the Palestinian people's history is deeply affected by the collective trauma of Al-Nakbah 1 (the catastrophe) in 1948, not only because of the resulting loss of life, but also because its impacts still shape Palestinians' daily lives (Sabag-Khoury, 2006). Al-Nakbah resulted in loss of land, the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and the exodus of many others, loss of language, poverty, unemployment, difficulties in coping with a hostile environment, and ongoing racial discrimination after they became an ethnic minority within Israel (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004;Sabag-Khoury, 2006). Such life conditions have an impact on the population's mental health: several researchers who examine the correlation between conflict violence and mental health have demonstrated that one third to one half of people suffering from political violence will experience some type of mental health problems (DeJong et al, 2003;Sousa et al, 2014). ...
... Until 1948, there was on the one side Zionism -a sophisticated political movement for the development of a Jewish nation -and the other side, Arab societies were traditional, characterised by tribal leadership and religious value systems. Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2004) argues that the establishment of Israel was achieved through military force and technology, leading Palestinians to abandon their lands and homes, fearing massacres. In Shalhoub-Kevorkian's perspective, Palestinians perceive Israel as a major source of violence on different levels, symbolically, physically and militarily. ...
Despite the abundant literature concerning domestic violence against women, very little is known about battered Arab women in Israel. Using intersectionality as the overarching conceptual lens, this study drew from in depth-interviews with 36 battered Arab women and adopted a narrative approach to reveal how battered Arab women in Israel are trapped in abusive relationships within a conflicted society. Drawing from discourse analysis, the findings revealed that participants used the same words to describe themselves and to describe Arab society. This use of metaphorical language revealed the additional meaning of societal patriarchy. It illustrated Arab society’s way of dealing with its entrapment through projecting its difficulties onto Arab women who served as the society’s scapegoats, causing many to suffer not only from multiplied oppressions, but also to face life threatening situations.
Key messages
This article explores how the historical loss of land and the resulting contemporary circumstances for Palestinians in Israel who are known by the term ‘Israeli Arabs’ have affected men’s attitudes towards what they believe is left of their honour, which is now primarily symbolised by feminine chastity.
Understanding the contradiction of perceiving Arab society as oppressive towards women, yet at the same time being oppressed, is achieved through exploring psychoanalytical lenses such as projection, identification and split mechanisms.
Arab society’s mechanism to cope with its entrapment and traumas is mainly conducted through splitting and projecting its difficulties and losses onto a weaker target – the woman. </ul
... In addition, existing research on violence against women in the Arab world does not represent the unique political context of Palestinian women in Israel. Note here that the latter are part of an indigenous national minority living under Israeli rule since 1948, while women in Arab countries are part of their country's majority (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). ...
... We have emphasized that if IPV against Palestinian women in Israel is examined only in relation to personal variables or in terms of the cultural context, norms, and values of Palestinian society without considering the political status of these women and the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, researchers and therapists will develop partial or mistaken perceptions of the problem. This can encourage discriminatory policies and racism in law enforcement and prevention of violence against these women (Haj-Yahia, 2011;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). Moreover, the review in this chapter shows how belonging to an indigenous national minority in a complex political context can intensify the woman's distress and vulnerability-especially when she must contend with governmental and formal institutions (such as welfare authorities, the police) that represent the establishment and identify with the Jewish majority (Eisikovits et al., 2008). ...
... It has also been portrayed as an ethnic minority with a particularly complicated political situation, owing to its minority status in the country and the additional tensions between this population and the Jewish population. The political situation and the discriminatory policies of successive governments have negatively affected the well-being of Arab women (Carmi & Rosenfeld, 1992;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2007) in the context of domestic abuse. ...
... One significant difference between Arab women and Jewish women manifests itself in the barriers that Arab women encounter when they utilize services-for example, language barriers, inaccessibility of professional services, and stigmatizing treatment (Erez, Ibarra, & Gur, 2015;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2007). These difficulties are exacerbated by social norms that call for Arab women to endure violence, a situation which ultimately leads to their isolation and lack of support (Haj-Yahia, 2002). ...
This study examined whether there were differences in levels of depression between Arab and Jewish Israeli female victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) and how various personal and environmental variables contributed to depression. A total of 303 women were selected. T tests were conducted, and no significant differences were revealed. Hierarchical regressions were also conducted. Background variables (violence in childhood and employment status) and psychiatric treatment contributed significantly to the variance in depression, and a negative contribution was made by personal and environmental variables (sense of mastery and social support). The interaction between ethnic origin and psychiatric treatment was also found to be significant. The discussion highlights the theoretical contribution and implications for practice in the field.
... Generally speaking, Arab women living in Israel experience a quite complex political status compared with their Jewish counterparts. One particular difference between them, in the context of domestic abuse, is manifested in the barriers that Arab women encounter when they utilize services-for example, language barriers, inaccessibility of professional services, and stigmatizing treatment (Erez, Ibarra, & Gur, 2015;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2007). These difficulties are exacerbated by social norms that call for Arab women to endure violence, a situation which ultimately leads to their isolation and lack of support (Haj-Yahia, 2002). ...
... Theorists who have studied crime, violence, and policing in minority groups, and in the Israeli Arab world specifically, have argued that gendered racism and racialized sexism play a role in shaping victim, police, and authority responses (Adelman, Erez, & Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2003), perhaps resulting in increased crime rates. Moreover, Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2007) had suggested that the political conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a factor in the militarization of policing which may reinforce rather than ameliorate ethnic prejudice, racism, and discrimination and, again, lead to higher crime rates in this sector. And, indeed, in recent years, public figures in the Israeli Arab population have called on the legal authorities in Israel to take action against the sharp increase in the use of illegal weapons, substance abuse, and criminality among Arab men ("Manhigim batzibur ha 'aaravi," 2005), as revealed in a national survey conducted by the Israel Anti-Drug Authority (2011). ...
The aim of the current study was to address a gap in the literature by determining prevalence, specific types of violence, and risk factors of intimate partner violence (IPV) among Israeli born Arab women compared with Israeli born Jewish women. The following measures were compared: demographic and socioeconomic measures; measures relating to the characteristics of the violence, that is, the three types of violence (physical, emotional, and verbally threatening), sense of danger, and history of violence in childhood; family support levels; and perpetrator characteristics. The sample consisted of 154 Israeli born Arab women and 149 Israeli born Jewish women who were staying in shelters for victims of domestic violence in Israel. A comparison of the two groups revealed that the Arab women were exposed to more physical violence and received less family support than did their Jewish counterparts. The proportion of Arab perpetrators with access to weapons was higher than that of Jewish perpetrators, whereas the proportion of police complaints against Jewish perpetrators was higher than that against Arab perpetrators. Arab women were also younger, less educated, and less a part of the workforce than Jewish women. The contribution of the woman’s age to the variance in levels of physical violence was negative and significant. In contrast, the contribution of her sense of danger, and various perpetrator characteristics, was positive. Moreover, the interaction between sense of danger × ethnicity contributed significantly to levels of violence. This study extends the existing knowledge about the contribution of ethnicity as one of many variables that play a role in the lives of women who are victims of domestic violence and highlights the need to develop, in particular, unique individual, community, and social interventions for Arab women in Israeli society.
... The police response to domestic violence (DV) has been a subject of scholarly inquiry for more than three decades in the United States and other countries, including Israel. to racism, discrimination, or state patriarchal oppression (e.g., Sa'ar, 2007;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004), this rereading highlights the complex interaction between gender violence and policing in multicultural realms (Okin, 1998(Okin, , 1999. ...
... Similarly, "ethnicizing" the subject of DV by focusing on traditional culture as a primary cause of abuse led Kazakh police officers to consider DV a major challenge for intervention, which officers ultimately perceive as futile, particularly in rural areas (Snajdr, 2007). Research in Israel has documented that some police officers view Arabs as having a different "mentality" (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004, p. 182) or as "primitive" (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004, passim) in their approach to violence against women (i.e., backward, not Western or "modern"), presumably justifying police nonintervention in DV cases reported from Arab sectors (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). This line of research suggests that DV occurring in minority communities cross-nationally may be at risk of being constructed as a "non-problem" or as something that merits minimal police involvement. ...
This article addresses the challenges posed by state intervention in a multicultural society characterized by intense political conflict, juxtaposing the voices of batterers, victims, community members, and the officials who are involved in policing domestic violence (DV) in the Arab community in Israel. A meta-analysis of interview-based data excerpts appearing in published studies shows how the response to DV in the Arab community, though consistent with Israeli law and policy, creates a sense of paralysis for the police and frustration for the parties to the violence as well as the affected communities. The cultural, social, and political forces that underlie the dynamics, tensions, and pressures experienced by the various parties are analyzed in the context of everyday life amid concerns about the Israeli-Arab conflict. The implications for policing DV in minority communities, and for police-community relations in political conflict zones, are highlighted.
... Notably, there has been a growing body of studies on Israel, primarily qualitative, that does look at the mutual influence of gender, militarism, and democratic culture (e.g., Adelman 2004;Chazan 1989;Emmett 1996;Golan 1997;Helman 1999;Herzog 2004;Klein 2002;Robbins and Ben-Eliezer 2000;Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2004a;Sharoni 1999). Yet in quantitative studies the constructionist approach, namely the understanding of gender as embedded in broad mechanisms of power, has not yet been internalized. ...
... Following the theoretical framework presented above, we set to explore multiple aspects of women's insecurities, namely injuries caused not only at the hands of Palestinians from the PA, but also ones indirectly affected by the armed conflict. These include a broad range of gender-based and sexual assaults that are legitimated and exacerbated in a militaristic culture (Mazali 2005;Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2004a), intensification of domestic care work in response to stress experienced by family members, and coping with a deteriorating domestic economy. ...
This research presents an initial documentation of Israeli women’s sense of insecurity during the Second Intifada (2001–2005).
Drawing on feminist security theory and the intersectional approach to gender, we hypothesized that women’s familiar tendency
to develop high levels of stress following political violence would be related to previous sexual and domestic victimization,
to economic distress and ethnic discrimination among minority women, and to the cultural role of care workers among women
of all socio-economic backgrounds. A sample of 552 women self-completed a cluster of questionnaires addressing a broad array
of topics, and results confirmed most of the research hypotheses. The discussion highlights the multiple articulations of
gender, militarism, and security and their possible implications for policies of conflict resolution.
... This study examined IPV perpetration among both Palestinian men and women in Israel, based on the premise that stress can be a stimulus for perpetration and expression of aggression and violence (Agnew, 2002). Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2007) suggested that the Israeli-Palestinian political conflict is a factor in the militarization of policing, which may escalate ethnic prejudice, racism, and discrimination, thus leading to more violence and crime in the Arab society in Israel. Exposure to political stressors was identified as the main predictor of most family violence patterns, including IPV among Palestinians (Gibbs et al., 2021;Haj-Yahia & Clark, 2013). ...
Objective: The prolonged and continuous conflict of the Palestinian minority in Israel with the Jewish majority and its cumulative sociopolitical stress (e.g., national incongruity, racism, community, and political violence) may put this minority at risk for psychological distress. This experience may lead to maladaptive behaviors, such as perpetrating violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV). This study examined the relationship between exposure to sociopolitical stressors (i.e., interpersonal racism, collective racism, and national minority stress) and psychological and physical IPV perpetration among Palestinians in Israel. It also examined cognitive appraisals of stress and psychological distress as serial mediators in this relationship. Method: A self-administered questionnaire was completed by a systematic sample of 770 Palestinian adults (64.9% were women and 35.1% were men), aged 21–66 (M = 38.7, SD = 7.84). Participants were sampled from urban, rural, and Bedouin areas in Israel. A serial mediation model was conducted using path analysis. Results: Interpersonal racism directly predicts IPV perpetration. Minority stress and interpersonal racism, however, indirectly predict IPV perpetration via psychological distress. Further, each chain of cognitive appraisals of sociopolitical stress (i.e., uncontrollable and challenge) with psychological distress serially mediates the relationship between sociopolitical stress and IPV perpetration. Conclusions: Exposure to sociopolitical stressors directly impacts the dynamics among Palestinian men and women, but also likely indirectly, through psychological distress and serially through cognitive appraisals and psychological distress. Cognitive appraisals of sociopolitical stress may be important psychological resources or risk factors that practitioners can consider to combat psychological distress and IPV.
... 65 Shalhoub-Kevorkian points out that the concept "femicide" denotes "all violent acts that instil a perpetual fear in women or girls of being killed under the justification of 'honour'". 66 The 'honour killing' to which some men resort in order to cleanse their honour 67 can be understood through Connell's concept of "masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations" 68 , and is defined as "the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women". 69 ...
In recent years, dozens of families in Palestine have publicly disowned male relatives who have transgressed social or sexual norms in some way. In this article, we contend that such acts of disowning are, for Palestinian families, a means of protection from public shaming. We contrast the discourse of disowning transgressive males with the ‘honour killing’ of transgressive females. Disownment is almost never an option for female relatives who commit similar transgressions. By severing contact with male relatives who have violated hegemonic ideals of loyalty to one’s nation, self-control, and sacrifice, families can deflect accusations of complicity. The hegemony of these ideals is maintained by punishing those who ally themselves with the Israeli occupation, are homosexuals, or are seen as ‘transgressive’ women. The article demonstrates that familial relations can be regarded as discontinuous: biological ties can be severed both linguistically and physically. The discourse of disowning, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been scrutinised in contemporary Palestine will be analysed within the interrelated webs of traditions, religion, and politics.
... As such, police fail to investigate when death threats against women and girls are reported. Concerns over "security" further tend to obfuscate police o cers' response to these threats (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). When murders do take place, police characterise them as "cultural" and private family matters that are outside their purview. ...
... These perceptions are supported by previous studies suggesting that Arab women and girls who are victims of violence represent the complex reality of daily life or their victimization from a political, economic, personal, social, cultural, ideological, and patriarchal perspective. These institutional and political structures in Israel ignore these elements in their discussion of the politics of violence, including its causes and policies of prevention and intervention (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). Alongside difficult experiences in the self-identity construction, some of the young women described that later in young adulthood, they were able to change their self-perception through an internal discourse process. ...
Exposure to violence in childhood and adolescence may lead to negative self-identity construction in young women. These phenomena are exacerbated in the context of Arab young women, who belong to both a national minority in Israel and to a gender subject to exclusion, oppression, and discrimination in society in general and in Arab society in particular. The aim of this qualitative study was to examine how Arab young women abused in childhood construct their self-identity within their gender, cultural, class, and national context. The study was based on 20 semi-structured interviews with Arab young women in Israel, who were victims of violence in childhood (aged 18–26). Construction of self-identity, as described by participants, included: harmed self (self under guilt; lack of confidence in one’s abilities and giving up; insecure self; belittling of self); self divided between loyalty to the family and society and a desire for self-realization; the self versus the other. In addition, some participants, later in young adulthood, were able to change their perception of self and see themselves as capable, strong, and not guilty of the violence directed against them. These women transitioned from absent to present femininity. The study provides a broader definition of self-identity construction among young women abused in childhood, including Arab young women in Israel in their intersecting contexts and the limitations imposed by multiple marginality. This broader understanding enables the design of context-informed therapeutic intervention practices.
... In the case of Palestine, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2004) reminds us that patriarchal politics silence women as violence is enacted onto their bodies. As their voices and narratives are negated, and the occupation exasperates patriarchy, the occupation also reveals the tensions of the gender-biased world (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). ...
This study addresses communicative performances of Palestinian resistance through hip-hop as sites of resistance across the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Through theorizing cultural sites of performance, the author reflects four domains of resistance within Palestinian hip-hop while simultaneously weaving in her own performative voice. Thus, the goal is to create global connections and communication through performance with both the diasporic Palestinian population and Palestinians living inside Palestine in relation to larger dominant structures.
... 104 While I am not examining the particular situation of Palestinian women in Israel in this book, an account of the multifaceted discrimination faced by women in Israel is a source of immense insight for understanding the Israeli incorporation regime. For strong feminist analysis of gendered citizenship in Israel see Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2004. See also Kanaaneh (2002); Kanaaneh and Nusair (2010);and Herzog (2004). ...
... . The struggle of Palestinian women in the occupied territories: between national and social liberation. Arab Studies Quarterly, 13-26.17 Wing, A. (1993). Legal decision-making during the Palestinian Intifada: embryonic selfrule. Yale J. Int'l L., 18, 95. 18 Golda Meir was the fourth Prime Minister of Israel and the first woman to hold the title.19Shalhoub-kevorkian, N. (2004). Racism, militarisation and policing: police reactions to violence against Palestinian women in Israel. Social Identities, 10(2),171-193. ...
... The first community was that of the Palestinian Arab minority in the south of Israel, known as the Bedouin Arabs, who are a traditional community with a highly patriarchal and hierarchal social structure (AbuRabia, 2017, Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017, Harel-Shalev et al., 2018). Politically and socially, they are part of the larger Arab Palestinian minority in Israel, which suffers from long-term and deep discrimination in Israeli society on a variety of levels (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017; Abu-Rabia-Queder & Weiner-Levy, 2013; Adelman, Erez, & Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2003;Kook, 2017;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). Hence, the women in this community are confronted with multiple layers of marginalization. ...
... This labelling of certain practices and crimes as being cultural in nature has sparked numerous discussions about stigmatising migrant cultural practices and its outcome on forced marriage, conceptions of honour, and kinship relations (e.g. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004;Wilson 2007;Ahmetbeyzade, 2008;Abu-Lughod, 2011). ...
Recently, in the United States (US) there has been increasing interest in and advocacy for developing research and policies that identify and address what has, in the European context, been called child and forced marriage, in which migrant parents, typically from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA) impose marital choices on their Western-raised children, through coercion, psychological pressure, or the threat of violence. Despite widespread international concern, there remains little research-based empirical knowledge about the problem in the United States. Drawing on interviews with 100 City University of New York students from MENASA families, this study documents significant intergenerational conflict over honour, sexuality, and marital choice and suggests a high likelihood that coercive marital situations are present in the US. However, the different socio-political environment encountered by migrant families in the US may not effectively accommodate European style anti-forced marriage policy constructions and criminal justice responses.
... Moreover, public opinion survey data suggests the prevalence of a belief that women's work is secondary to men's and that a woman's main role is family caring and rearing (Alpha International, 2009). At the same time, female empowerment in other aspects of life is also constrained (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004). Feminist authors have also shown how the effects of military occupation have exacerbated the challenges faced by Palestinian women (e.g., Giacaman and Johnson, 2002;Taraki, 2006;Muhanna, 2016). ...
UNESCO’s new emphasis on vocational education and training as transformative, and concerns in particular with equity and sustainable human development, has been strongly influenced by a recent literature on VET and human development that has a particular focus on the most marginalised, especially young women, and is concerned with how their aspirations, agency and achievement of wellbeing can be promoted in the face of wide-ranging structural obstacles. Drawing on ongoing doctoral work by the first author, this article seeks to further develop that account through an even stronger emphasis on VET in the context of extreme poverty, inequality and marginalisation as faced in Palestine. VET in Palestine serves many of the poorest and most disenfranchised in Palestinian society in a context of profound structural obstacles to wellbeing achievement. Our data shows a very positive story of how VET has helped highly disadvantaged young Palestinians, particularly young women, to make progress on their human development.
... Some have focused on the effects and causes of domestic violence on women under the occupation (Douki, et al. 2003, Haj-Yahia 1998, 1999, 2000, Khamis 1998, Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2004, Wing 1996. This entry further complicates these studies by re-imagining gender and safety, framing safety through the experiences of Palestinian men as vulnerable subjects. ...
In Western media, the security measures taken by the Israeli Occupation forces are often couched in terms of public safety and retaliation for terror attacks. Fear and safety are pivotal concerns in the discourse of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, and these concerns are most commonly addressed through the lens of public safety for Israeli Jewish citizens.
... (van Eck, 2003, p. 9) The same holds true in those countries where if a man kills a woman (usually a family member) in order to reestablish honor violated by the woman's infidelity or nonconformity to gender roles. The punishment is much more lenient than for first-degree murder or even manslaughter (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2004;van Eck, 2003). Data on honor killing around the globe are not systematic. ...
This paper examines how attitudes toward violence against women (VAW)—in terms of justification—influence the behavioral intentions of Afghan police officers when dealing with a case of intimate partner violence (IPV). An experimental study was carried out with 108 Afghan police officers who took part in a training course at the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) bases in Herat and Kandahar. Participants read an extract of a police intervention for an IPV case. They were faced with honor-related attitudes and possible actions to be taken to help victims and arrest perpetrators. In the experimental condition, in the questionnaire provided to police officers, there was reference to the victim admitting to an affair with another man. No such reference was present in the control condition. Results showed that admitting an infidelity produced more lenient attitudes toward the violence against the woman, which in turn reduced police officers’ intention to intervene by arresting the man and providing support to the victim. Results are discussed in terms of the role and function of the so-called culture of (masculine) honor and the rule of law and its implications.
... 3,4,11 Militaristic language, mythology, and discourses that foster attitudes of superiority, dominance, and triumphalism characterize this growing militarism's intrusion into everyday life and politics. Militarism leads not only to war with drastic health consequences [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] but also to economic dependency, 19 police states, racism and political repression, 20,21 violence in families, 1,22 and a profusion of media images, venues, war toys, and games and commercial outlets that glorify and normalize violence. ...
This philosophical analysis critically explores an archeology of militarism as an underpinning to multiple forms of violence, especially war. Deconstructing militarism and its discourses reveal it as a pervasive geographical, cultural, political, and psychological presence. New war technologies, related health and environmental problems, injuries, social suffering, and disproportionality in military spending as a threat to health are uncovered. Continuing the dialogue in formal nursing associations, critiquing media complicity in securing consent for war, and reconstructing a nonviolent, healthier world through nonviolent resistance are advocated.
We analyze 391 news reports in Israeli newspapers between 2013 and 2015, covering murders of women and their family members by other family members and intimate partners. We compare articles where the perpetrators and victims are Jewish to those where the perpetrators and victims are Palestinian citizens of Israel (henceforth PCI). We found that articles tend to provide much more details about Jewish culprits than about PCI ones. As for ascribed motives, most murder cases by Jews were framed as an outcome of individual personality or the pathology of the culprit. Conversely, when Palestinian citizens were the killers, culture and tradition were invoked as the main motives. We suggest that the routine work of narration that the Israeli media preform when covering femicide is a case of political use of cultural stereotypes to gain moral ground in the intractable conflict between Jews and Palestinians.
El presente artículo busca problematizar la cuestión del honor para las mujeres palestinas desde una perspectiva feminista descolonial en vinculación con el significado político para la causa nacional de la tierra ocupada por parte del Estado de Israel. Su propósito es poner en tensión los sentidos del honor en torno a la noción ‘cuerpo-territorio’, de manera de abordar la relación cuerpo femenino - territorio palestino como continuo simbólico. Se contempla el período de historia que comienza con la guerra del año 1948 que antecedió a la creación del Estado de Israel en territorio palestino. En la medida en que la historia palestina ha sido sistemáticamente invisibilizada por registros oficiales, resulta importante la dimensión de la memoria colectiva, como la recuperada de los testimonios de las mujeres sobrevivientes. De esta manera, se relevan las distintas violencias históricas y cotidianas que atraviesan a las palestinas, donde el honor aparece como un asunto permanentemente vinculado, en los últimos años atendido por el movimiento feminista de la región. Hacia el final se ofrece una reflexión en torno a diálogos posibles entre feministas palestinas y latinoamericanas, teniendo en cuenta los desafíos que se presentan ante los distintos procesos de descolonización de los cuerpos-territorios.
Police officers are society’s first interveners in intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) and are essential for victim safety. Despite IPVAW laws, police attitudes influence their real actions during IPVAW intervention. However, the fuzzy conceptualization of the construct deters the pursuit of conclusive evidence. This systematic review sought to identify the components of police attitudes toward intervention in IPVAW and their determinants. A search was conducted through several databases (e.g., Web of Science). Papers were included if they (a) provided original empirical findings or were review studies, (b) were published between 1990 and 2019, (c) were written in Spanish or English, (d) alluded to police officers, and (e) focused on police attitudes toward intervention in IPVAW or their determinants. Fifty-seven papers were included. The studied components of police attitudes toward intervention in IPVAW extracted from the literature were tolerance of IPVAW, minimal police involvement, unsupportive and supportive attitudes toward the legal system and legislation against IPVAW, understanding of the complex nature of abuse, and IPVAW intervention as an important police task. Moreover, the central role of individual and situational determinants in police attitudes toward intervention in IPVAW was confirmed, whereas organizational and societal determinants were studied scarcely. This review proposes a framework upon which to build operational definition of police attitudes toward intervention in IPVAW and includes remarks on police backgrounds and the situational characteristics of IPVAW events that are essential in shaping police procedures for managing them. Empirical evidence should be transferred to police training and standard operating procedures.
Palestinians make up 64% of homicide victims in Israel, even though they constitute 20% of the population. The homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in Arab towns in Israel is 5.5 times higher than in Jewish towns. The turbulent relationship between the police and Palestinian minority is a key factor for understanding high crime rates in Arab towns. This relationship can be characterized by over-policing political activities and under-policing ordinary crime. This article analyses the policing of the Palestinian minority in Israel from a human rights perspective. It suggests that the policing of the Palestinian citizens in Israel is inconsistent with international human rights standards. Furthermore, eradicating institutional bias against the Palestinian citizens within the police force requires broader political and constitutional changes.
When Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, restrictions on Palestinian movement were gradually put in place. Today an intricate ‘architecture of occupation’ has been established – made up of numerous material barriers, the continuous expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and the establishment of an elaborate checkpoint system. For most inhabitants of the West Bank, passing through an Israeli checkpoint is a daily ritual they cannot avoid. In this article, I analyse two car checkpoints in the Bethlehem area: The Tunnels and Al Walaja, and the experiences of the Palestinian and Jewish Israeli commuters subjected to them. I argue that these checkpoints are spaces where two different, but inherently connected, mobility regimes meet: providing Jewish settlers swift and seamless passage, while controlling and hindering Palestinian commuters. I indicate how the existence of these two mobility regimes is only possible due to the low-tech design of the checkpoints, as well as the implementation of numerous biopolitical categories by the checkpoints managers. The implementation of these biopolitical categories was experienced by my interviewees as highly arbitrary as it allows the Israeli soldiers to act ‘biopolitically on the spot’, reinstating over and over again the asymmetrical relationship between the occupier and occupied. Moreover, I analyse how Palestinian commuters employ their ‘checkpoint knowledge’ in response to this arbitrariness to try to positively influence their passages: incorporating the rules and regulations as much as possible or trying to manipulate and twist the checkpoints’ practices and biopolitical categories.
Many changes have occurred in recent years with regard to the status of women in Israel in general and the effects of militarization on gender in particular. The present chapter attempts to update the picture as well as point to often contradictory as well as disturbing recent trends. Therefore, I shall focus on the changes that have occurred, i.e., what is new, the results of these changes, and the reactions or responses to them (primarily amongst women). I shall not deal with the Palestinian minority in Israel, for whom militarization has quite different effects, including the effects related to gender. This topic has been addressed elsewhere and warrants far greater attention than I can accord in this short chapter. Another caveat is that even within Jewish Israeli society there are vast differences of class, ethnicity, and so on, which do produce differences and refinements in the way militarization affects each of them, some of which may impact on gender. These will be referred to only slightly in the following analysis.
This paper sheds light on young Palestinian women's experiences through their engagement in the Israeli civic service. Drawing on women's voices, the paper tries to explain the reasons behind their decision to join such service, and the implications of their engagement as well.
The challenge posed by legal indeterminacy to legal legitimacy has generally been considered from points of view internal to the law and its application. But what becomes of legal legitimacy when the legal status of a given norm is itself a matter of contestation? This article, the first extended scholarly treatment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)'s new definition of antisemitism, pursues this question by examining recent applications of the IHRA definition within the UK following its adoption by the British government in 2016. Instead of focusing on this definition's substantive content, I show how the document reaches beyond its self-described status as a "non-legally binding working definition" and comes to function as what I call a quasi-law, in which capacity it exercises the de facto authority of the law, without having acquired legal legitimacy. Broadly, this work elucidates the role of speech codes in restricting freedom of expression within liberal states.
The international TVET literature stresses the role of TVET in development. UNESCO’s 2015 Recommendation envisioned TVET contribution to sustainable development as ‘empowering individuals, organizations, enterprises and communities and fostering employment, decent work and lifelong learning’. This paper illustrates the achieved functionings and agency of VET graduates in relation to their well-being in a marginalised Palestinian context. The paper concentrates on the empowerment effect on the graduate as achieved agency while highlighting the other achieved functionings, which contribute to well-being and human development.
The study examined patterns of utilization of various services among female victims of domestic violence in Israel. The study looked at how cultural background, characteristics of violence, attempts at separation from partner, and women’s emotional distress contributed to patterns of service utilization. The sample of participants included 499 women who arrived at 12 shelters in Israel. Of those participants, 142 were Jewish, 156 were Arab, 125 had been born in the former Soviet Union (FSU), and 76 had been born in Ethiopia. Latent class analysis procedure was applied to identified patterns of service utilization. The procedure identified three patterns of service utilization: substantial use, frequent use of welfare and criminal justice services, and minimal use. Among Arab women, the likelihood of making substantial use of services was greater than the likelihood of making minimal use. Moreover, among the entire sample, the higher the levels of sexual abuse, violence, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the greater the likelihood of substantial versus minimal use of services. In addition, being employed, enduring higher levels of violence, and making attempts to separate increased the likelihood of utilization of welfare and criminal justice services versus minimal use. The study highlights the factors that motivate women to make use of services and the distinct strategies they use in the help-seeking process. At the practice level, the study emphasizes the need to take into account both the woman’s cultural context and the stage of help seeking she is at. In this way, professionals can provide differential treatment accordingly.
A strategic method of governing Palestinian lives in the West Bank is to maintain a relationship between spectacular and routinized forms of violence. The dissonant interplay of these forms comprises a particular system of control and terror as Israeli authority employs both coercive and administrative methods, which rupture social life while becoming an ordinary part of it. Key to the administration of these dissonant practices is bureaucracy, which codifies a social order of racial supremacy through seemingly mundane measures. “Order” here is itself predicated on an abyssal national order, a dynamic enterprise that is remade through changing policies as well as soldiers’ variable behavior. The combined effects of military (dis)ordering practices enact a systemic attempt to wear down both one's ability and will to live.
Palestinian1 feminists’ political activities in Israel frequently draw on manifold spatialities including scale, place, networks, positionality, and mobility at once. This phenomenon has been emphasized by the flourishing scholarship that interrogates the spatial nature of contentious politics.2 As the contentious politics of “citizenship“ examined here include both real and imagined conceptualizations of citizenship’ the notion of “contentious politics“ employed in this study departs from traditional definitions3 that refer to it as “concerted, counter-hegemonic social and political action in which differently positioned participants come together to challenge dominant systems of authority in order to promote and enact alternative imaginaries.”4 In the context of Palestinian feminists’ in Israel, this action is, among other things, expressed in the form of citizenship practices that aim to contest patriarchal, racist, and colonial hegemonic systems. Depending on the positioning of the woman, these frameworks may include the nuclear and extended family, a specific community, the nation, and the state. While these authoritarian systems often reinforce each other’s discrimination and domination of Palestinian women, it will be demonstrated here that feminists frequently draw upon a specific system to resist oppressive forces produced by another.
This book examines and discusses the ordeals that women face as violence is perpetrated against them in politically conflicted and militarized areas. In conflict zones, every act is affected by, dependent on and mobilised by militaristic values. The militarization of both the private and public space and the use of the gendered bodies increases the vulnerability of both men and women, and further masculinises the patriarchal hegemonic powers. Through the stories and ordeals of women in politically conflicted areas and war zones, and by sharing voices of Palestinian women from the Occupied Territories, it is shown that claims such as ‘security reasoning’, fear from ‘terrorism’, nationalism, preservation of ‘cultural authenticity’ and preservation of the land can turn women's bodies and lives into boundary markers and thus sites of violence, contestation and resistance. © Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This paper offers an analysis of crime in the Palestinian society in Israel from the perspective of political relationships. It illustrates that the state of Israel is trying to define and identify crime through ideologies and narrow interests. This process is part of a mechanism of control, which intends to criminalize the daily life of the Palestinians. Discriminatory behavior against Arabs by police is more apparent and the records on crime are sometimes inaccessible, with a mania for secrecy, and view the whole Arab community as a security danger. The Israeli social control policy politicizes this community, with excess control in some areas and a lack of control in others. The paper concludes that no detailed arguments are needed in order to see the ineffectiveness of the Israeli control policy as long as the basic root of the political struggle is not answered.
Israel's system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insights into the operations of Israeli power less easily represented in more formal outlets. Because the road system is an everyday site at which its users come into contact with the work of the state, driving is an important practice through which to examine popular conceptions of politics. Still, these two communities of Palestinians face obstacles in communicating about shared understandings of space and politics. In examining everyday political knowledge of subaltern people, we must attend to varieties of subalterneity to examine how these differences can perpetuate marginalization.[mobility, infrastructure, Palestinians, subalterneity, the state, Israel, place]
This paper presents ethnographic documentations of Israeli Palestinian "women without men," who seek out married men and use the notion of polygyny to make moral sense of their non-normative heterosexual relationships. The women's presentations of self are construed against popular attitudes to polygyny as practically negligible and morally anachronistic. Following a political-economic approach to gender as constructed, historical, and embedded in multiple structures of power, the cases are interpreted as providing a lens into the structural contradictions that inform the lives of Palestinians inside Israel. It is argued that the women's uses of an explicitly traditional and patriarchal script of gender morality to legitimize lifestyles that are easily stigmatized as immoral have a quality of social poetics. These day-to-day subversions of norms expose the strategic nature of "big" power structures of state, nation, religion, and community.
This article examines the limitations of human rights activism in a colonial context by invoking the voices, experiences, and insights of Bedouin women living in Israel. Through extensive interviews, Bedouin women living in unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev reveal their struggles as unrecognized and “invisible” members of society. The article explores the ways in which the prevailing “grammar of rights”—the formal and informal mechanisms constructed and maintained by the colonial power to accord or withhold rights—delimits and confines the lives of the women, and also human rights activism. The women’s personal stories are juxtaposed against the legal justifications used to regulate and discriminate against them, as members of the indigenous Palestinian community, within the context of a “fear industry”. The article explores, from the perspective of the interviewed women, the internalization of that culture of fear, where they are constructed as the ones to be feared, and its personal, familial, and communal implications.
The interviewed women offer a critique of the existing human right framework, and question whether a human rights activism operating in a colonial context can be an emancipating force, so long as it is constrained by the regime’s rules. Furthermore, their voices assert that acknowledging historical injustice and its effect on women’s rights is central to re-thinking feminist human rights activism. The article ends by returning to the voices of women living in the unrecognized villages of the Naqab/Negev to investigate whether, and how, feminist politics and human rights activism could operationally function together within the context of Israeli state law. The article concludes that, in order to create a “grammar of rights” that is based on equality, respect, and dignity, and which challenges the balance of power in colonial contexts, it is essential to fully include the lived experiences and insights of “invisible” and unrecognized women.
This article argues that professional literature on national security in Israel, especially during the second Intifada (2000—4), reinforced the invisibility of a range of insecurities informing the lives of women and members of marginalized groups. The authors discuss the problematic of using ‘gender’ without a feminist perspective and examine the challenges of incorporating the latter into quantitative studies of security, then briefly present their research on women under a situation of political turmoil in Israel to offer intersectionality as a possible resolution. Instead of focusing on (and reifying) differences between women and men, this study located complexity in variations among women by intersecting different social locations, different types of violence and different types of knowledge. The discussion highlights the contribution of intersectionality to overcoming essentialist explanations of women’s insecurities during armed conflicts.
This study features the voices of women who sued their husbands in the Shari'a courts, revealing the empowerment that resulted from learning their legal rights. The stories of some two hundred Palestinian Muslim women who appealed to the Shari'a courts in Jerusalem and Taibe during the years 2000–2003 formed the basis of this study. The women came to the courts to claim material support (nafaqa) from their husbands and to demand child support (hadane). Four major reasons why these women sued their husbands in court emerged from their stories, revealing familial, social, economic and even political circumstances that impinged on their lives.
Purpose
– This paper aims to locate, describe and analyze the mechanism and impact of women's informal role within the formally male‐only Sulha – a prevalent, inter/intra‐communal dispute resolution process practiced by Muslim, Christian and Druze Arabs in Israel and in many other regions of the Middle East and the Muslim world. Furthermore, this paper seeks to explore the way men's formal roles and women's informal roles interact within the Sulha's strict patriarchal settings.
Design/methodology/approach
– The first section of this paper uses interviews, participant observation and existing literature to locate, describe and analyze the specific ways in which women informally participate in and impact on the Sulha process. The second section uses a questionnaire, interviews, existing literature and analysis to examine the attitudes of men and women regarding women's current and future roles in Sulha.
Findings
– The paper demonstrates that the formal (male‐only) visible part of the Sulha process coexists alongside a significant, yet mostly invisible, informal contribution of women – at each stage of the process. Furthermore, the paper shows that both men and women are cognizant of the informal role women play in Sulha, and that both men and women are open to a possible future expansion of the role of women in Sulha, including into formal roles.
Originality/value
– The paper highlights the need to seek and evaluate informal, sometimes invisible, yet significant contributions of women to traditional dispute resolution processes in strict patriarchal cultures.
The article discusses the claims of success of microenterprise development programmes (MDPs) in poverty reduction and gender equality. It also deals with the broader theoretical and methodological issues related to the ways in which context and discourse interact in the assessment of anti-poverty and gender equity strategies. MDPs are considered among the most viable strategies for helping women overcome poverty and promoting gender equity. However, there has been significant debate over these claims. The relationship between business ownership, poverty reduction and gender empowerment is still to be proved. The article presents the voices of women engaged in a microenterprise (ME) from a context-informed and discourse analysis perspective, and considers the women's insights about ME as an anti-poverty and gender empowerment strategy. The findings show a complex picture. On one hand, the new occupational status promises a tangible alternative to multiple personal, social and gender constraints. Additionally, women in the study perceived the ME as a space for self-definition and as an outlet for expressing their oppressed identities. On the other hand, the findings seriously challenge the capacity of the MDP strategy to promote gender equity and combat poverty among low-income women. Implications for research and policy are discussed.
The article confronts global claims of micro-enterprise to promote poverty reduction and gender equality. The article examines
60 in-depth interviews with low-income Palestinian and Israeli Jewish women (aged 25–45years) who engaged in micro-enterprises.
The research particularly focused on women’s motivations, personal qualities required for success, systemic barriers and opportunities,
and women’s constructions of micro-enterprise as a means to overcome poverty and achieve gender equality. The article indicates
that in the frame of gender and economic exclusionary context, without comprehensive institutional support, micro-enterprise
and self employment may not promise more than a partial solution to poverty and gender discrimination. The article questions
the tendency to globalize policies without taking into account the local contexts in which these policies are implemented.
The article addresses the role of victim's voice in community policing of violence against women. Using Israel as a case study, with its minority Arab and majority Jewish communities, we show the paradoxes of adhering to community policing tenets in a highly collectivist community, and when divergence and conflict rather than congruence and consensus characterize the relations between the police, the minority community and its victims. The article juxtaposes and contrasts two databases relevant for understanding the role of victims in community policing in violence against women. Police officers' views about and perceptions of Arab female victims and their community are presented alongside the narratives of Arab female victims about their abuse, and their interaction with and perceptions of the police. The article concludes with discussing the risks and highlighting the advantages of community policing for violence against women victims in terms of victims' safety and empowerment, and the potential of community policing for improving the relation between minority communities and police.
This article moves beyond the discussion of domestic violence in the military to a broader accounting of the militarization of domestic violence in Israel. In contrast to the dominant civilian-military paradigm, which assumes a limit on an army's effect on society, in Israel, boundaries between the military and society are highly permeable, even ambiguous. The civilianization of the army and the militarization of society in Israel render incomplete the research model of domestic violence in the military. Thus, the article explores how the centrality of the military, a pervasive ideology of militarism, and the militarization of society shape perpetration, understandings, and experiences of and responses to domestic violence in Israel. Specifically, four components of the militarization of domestic violence are discussed: causality, competition, critique, and context. The article closes by reflecting on what is gained by shifting the analytical perspective from domestic violence in the military to the militarization of domestic violence.
This article theorizes the intersections between domestic violence and divorce. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Israel, including 49 interviews with battered women who found getting and/or being divorced difficult and dangerous, the author examined battered women's accounts of their experiences of the pluralistic and segregated family law system. She concludes that for battered women in Israel (Palestinians and Jews alike) the divorce process may be understood as part of or an extension of men's battering. With this analysis, the author illustrates the need to conduct locally specific, integrated domestic violence and divorce research.
This paper considers key features of police race and ethnic relations in England and Wales during the last two decades. A particular theoretical perspective, based on the view that race is a social construction, underpins the argument presented. The key concept explored is that of 'racialization'. First, the history of immigration and settlement into Britain will be charted briefly. Two key moments that have defined police race relations and drawn them to police and public attention - the 1981 riots in London and the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence - are then analyzed. Through these analyses, the ways in which the occupational culture of the police rank and file has sustained particular relationships between the police and ethnic minority groups is emphasized. Finally, whilst it is recognized that some aspects of cultural difference between minority and majority ethnic groups are of relevance to policing, it is argued that that an over-emphasis on multiculturalism can reinforce rather than ameliorate, racial prejudice and discrimination.
Our job as intellectuals, this article argues, is to struggle to understand the crisis presented by terrorism in all its forms. This can center on a theoretical account of militarization and its relationship to broader social changes, from the emergence of nationstates to the course of racialization and other inequalities to the convergence of interests in military spending. The article gives a terse historical account of the 20th-century history of the militarization process and of the distinct modes of warfare that have developed over that time. To account for the growth of militarization over the last half of the century requires a focus on the growth of U.S. hegemony and the naming of the empire that dominated the global scene as the most recent crisis opened on September 11, 2001. This account suggests how we can connect these global and national histories with specific ethnographically understood places and people, giving some examples from ethnographic and historical research in a military city, Fayetteville, North Carolina. Finally, this review of militarization suggests that the attacks on the United States, and the war that followed, represent a continuation and acceleration of ongoing developments, rather than sharp openings in history. These new developments include reasons for hope that the legitimacy of violence and empire may also be under challenge. [Keywords: militarization, modes of warfare, United States, ethnography of empire]
Justice processing for crimes against women is reviewed. The data reveal conviction rates for partner violence and rape by known acquaintances are miniscule; mandatory arrest, protection orders, and diversion programs inadequately deter rebattering; few losses are compensated; and the adversarial justice process is retraumatizing, exacerbating survivor's self-blame. To better address crimes against women, several nations and tribal communities use communitarian approaches, forms restorative justice. The offense is framed to include the perpetrator; victim, and community The process forgoes incarceration to have family, peers, and advocates design perpetrator rehabilitation, victim restoration, and social reintegration of both victim and perpetrator: Evaluations suggest communitarian justice may increase victim satisfaction, raise the social costs of offending, multiply social control and support resources, and open a new avenue to targeted prevention.
While traditional policing celebrated male officers as masculine crime fighters who were tough, aloof, and physically intimidating, policewomen were characterized as too soft and emotional for patrol assignments and were relegated to roles focusing on children, other women, or clerical tasks. With the advent of community policing, women's perceived skills are finally finding a legitimate place in police work, and law enforcement structures now encourage such previously undervalued feminine traits as trust, cooperation, compassion, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution. In this illuminating study of gender and community policing, Susan L. Miller draws on a combination of survey data, forthright interviews with a diverse mix of police officers, and extensive fieldwork conducted in a midwestern city where community policing has been practiced for over a decade. She describes the differences and similarities in policing styles of male and female officers, considers the relationships that develop between neighborhood police on foot and patrol officers in squad cars, and explores the interactions between neighborhood officers and community members. Miller confronts such questions as how police reconcile incompatible images of masculinity and femininity; how actions of neighborhood police officers compare with those of traditional rapid response patrol officers; how community police cope with resistance from the rank and file; and how gender and gender-role expectations shape police activities and the evaluation of new skills. Gender and Community Policing provides both a feminist framework for community policing and a fresh examination of how race, gender, andsexual orientation affect police image, identity, and methods.
September 11, it is said, has changed everything. However true or not this may be-and I tend to think that it is not very true at all-one thing it certainly should have changed is the loose manner in which the adjective "violent" has been appended to recent antiglobalization protests. Especially for a conference such as this one-conceived in the wake of the Quebec City events of last year and designed to shed light on the nature of the challenge posed to capitalist democracies by the new antiglobalization movement-the horrific and deadly terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D.C., and the scale of state violence unleashed-literally from on high-by the way on terrorism, certainly put this loose usage in stark perspective. This should give us pause about the way the word "violent" has been invoked in the media, and the way in which massive police and even military forces of containment have been mobilized every time there has been a large-scale protest at gatherings of corporate and political elites to further the globalization agenda. When the whole world is witness to passenger airplanes being deployed to destroy office towers in New York, and to military airplanes being deployed to rain bombs on villages in Afghanistan, the police designation and seizure as a violent weapon of a toy catapult designed to throw teddy bears over a security fence becomes even more surreal than the names of groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism or the Lanarkists that conceived this type of protest. Even those who engage in practices oriented to breaking through police lines and fences to make their objections heard and their presence felt in public spaces adjacent to where the rich and powerful are gathered, or who throw a rock at a McDonald's window along the route of a protest march, or who manage to get so far as to toss a paint bomb at a politician or CEO, are clearly engaged in a form of politics that is fundamentally of a different order in terms of intent, in terms of the material employed, and in terms of effects, than the practice of armed conflict by or against, a state. Indeed, the very charge of disturbing the peace leveled against people sitting down together to block intersections is brought into question by September 11.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
This article addresses why rape in ethnic conflict and war is common. Emphasis is placed on the context of abuse, which some argue remains undeveloped in general explanations of violence against women. The author focuses on the role that ethnic nationalism plays in repatriarchalizing society and gender relations. With the rise of nationalism and militarization, there are institutionalized attempts to revive patriarchal social forms and relations that place women at an increased risk of violence. The article focuses on the former Yugoslavia to show that with nationalism and militarization, the nexus of gender and ethnicity becomes significant and deadly.
Changes in public attitudes to violence have given rise to debates about the proper relationship between gender, violence and the role of the State. This study of Palestinians living in Israel examines the appropriateness of formal legal interventions in spousal assault cases for a community with different cultural values, including a mistrust of state intervention and the legal order. Structured interviews with welfare professionals in 55 cases of spousal assault reveal that, contrary to the aims of legislation designed to assist and support women, the law has had the paradoxical effect of further victimizing those very women seeking to rely on it. The Palestinian experience suggests that legal interventions need to be understood as complementing rather than substituting for more culturally sensitive community responses to spousal assault. The paper advocates raising the awareness of agents of social control about factors which hinder or promote the use of legal remedies.
The main ethnic minorities in Britain arise from postcolonial migrations from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent. South Asians adopted survival strategies based on the family, religion, and ethnic community, whereas Afro-Caribbeans initially adopted more outgoing and integrative strategies. Both groups have been subject to similar levels of racial discrimination in the fields of employment and housing. The rate of imprisonment of black people is currently seven times that of whites or South Asians. The theory that this disparity is mostly caused by cumulative bias at the various stages of law enforcement and criminal process is implausible in the light of the fragmentary evidence available. There is evidence that law enforcement targets black people, that certain stages of criminal process are biased against them, and that apparently neutral criteria used by the criminal justice system work to their disadvantage; but these effects are small compared with the disparity in rates of imprisonment. Despite conflicting evidence from a major self-report study, it is likely that the actual offending rate is substantially higher among black people than among other groups.
Congress has expressed concern that the Homeland Security agency might lack the power necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks. This paper argues that it less likely to be a lack of police power and more likely the misapplication of those powers that undermines the war on terror. Until one learns to police in ways that build trust within those communities least likely to willingly assist the police, no amount of additional funding or legal authority will increase the capacity of the police forces to gather the information needed. For neighborhood policing this means partnering with those most victimized by crime. For the war on terror, this means partnering with Arab-American communities. This examination of partnerships provides a basis for understanding how likely it is that current neighborhood policing practices will support a successful war on terror.
Examined how invisible methods of social control contribute to the tolerance of battering amongst women. The study is based on the responses of 173 Palestinian women selected randomly from the East Jerusalem area, and who were interviewed to assess their perception and response to wife battering. Quantitative and qualitative data collected on the respondents suggest that while women do not accept violence practised on them, they tolerate it. Contextual analysis of the data showed that women tolerate violence because no other viable alternative is available to them. An in-depth analysis of the hidden variables contributing to this tolerance is given from a feminist perspective. Suggestions are given regarding the questions researchers should ask when dealing with wife battering. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Major controversies regarding the value of legal and policy reforms have accompanied research on wife battering and social reactions to it. The present study examines the utility of law enforcement and emphasizes the relationship between gender, culture, and politics. It points to the difficulties arising from the shift from private, traditional methods of dealing with violence against women to a more public approach characterized by intervention of the state and the criminal justice system. In this connection, it was hypothesized that enforcement of the Israeli Law Against Family Violence among the oppressed and discriminated Palestinian minority generates new conflicts within the group, exacerbating control and abuse and re-victimizing women. Social control agents (formal and informal) who were interviewed about their perceptions and attitudes regarding the applicability of such a law pointed to obstacles created by sociocultural variables, the political legacy and procedural barriers. An attempt is made to show that application of the law without prior preparation and understanding of its sociocultural and political ramifications may produce adverse effects at the victim's expense. That is, unless power struggles, cultural pressures, and political priorities are taken into consideration, criminal strategies that seek to eliminate abuse may prove to be dangerous.
Incl. bibliographical references, index
"This book is about America s most unknown soldiers-enlisted women in the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines." Focusing on the decade from 1972 to 1982, Judith Stiehm uses personal narratives, interviews, policy statements, and other material to explore the experience of American women in the military their reasons for enlisting, their roles, their self-image, and the way they are viewed by civilians. Although there are now more than 200,000 women in uniform, Stiehm asks why the policies concerning enlisted women "so often appear to fly in the face of both logic and evidence." Her analysis of the effects of change in military policy on women of different ranks and ages reveals how certain functional myths (e.g., "war is manly") are challenged by the presence of women. The result has been an uneasy accommodation. Arms and the Enlisted Woman includes a vivid first-person account by a female veteran of one woman s experience in the Air Force. Honorably discharged as a Staff Sergeant after six years of working as an airplane mechanic, this woman describes the struggle to be taken seriously and treated equally, and to excel in a non-traditional field. She also relates the joys of seeing a job well done and being part of a cohesive team. Her mixed reaction to her military career epitomizes the difficulty with which enlisted women have been assimilated. Stiehm also analyzes the rapidly shifting military policies concerning women as well as the reasons for certain erroneous but persistent beliefs about them, and remarks, "One thing seems to be certain. To the professional military the enlisted woman is a raw nerve."
Sumario: Policing as risk communications -- Policing, risk and law -- Community policing and risk communications -- Risk discourse -- Risk institutions -- Risk and social change -- Tracing territories -- Mobilizing territories -- Territorial communities -- Securities -- Careers -- Identities -- Knowledge risk management -- Communication rules -- Communication formats -- Communication technologies Bibliografía: P. 453-470
Thesis (M.P.H.)--San Diego State University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-49).
Justice processing for crimes against women is reviewed. The data reveal conviction rates for partner violence and rape by known acquaintances are miniscule; mandatory arrest, protection orders, and diversion programs inadequately deter rebattering; few losses are compensated; and the adversarial justice process is retraumatizing, exacerbating survivor's self-blame. To better address crimes against women, several nations and tribal communities use communitarian approaches, forms of restorative justice. The offense is framed to include the perpetrator, victim, and community. The process forgoes incarceration to have family, peers, and advocates design perpetrator rehabilitation, victim restoration, and social reintegration of both victim and perpetrator. Evaluations suggest communitarian justice may increase victim satisfaction, raise the social costs of offending, multiply social control and support resources, and open a new avenue to targeted prevention.
Culture and ImperialismTolerating Battering: Invisible Way of Social Control
- E W Said
Said, E.W. (1994) Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (1997a) 'Tolerating Battering: Invisible Way of Social Control', International Review of Victimology 5: 1–21.
Fixing Broken Windows
- G Kelling
- C Coles
Kelling, G. and C. Coles (1996) Fixing Broken Windows, New York: The Free Press.
Women and Sexuality in Muslim societies, Istanbul: Women for Women's Human Rights (WWHR)
- P Ilkkaracan
Ilkkaracan, P. (2000) Women and Sexuality in Muslim societies, Istanbul: Women for Women's Human Rights (WWHR).
Law for One and One for All? An Intersectional Legal Subject The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society
- K Laster
- P Raman
Laster, K. and P. Raman (1997) 'Law for One and One for All? An Intersectional Legal Subject', in N. Naffine and R. Owens (eds), Sexing the Subject of Law, Sydney: Law Book Co. Lomsky-Feder, E., and E. Ben-Ari (eds) (1999) The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society, Albany: State University of New York Press.
The Legal Status of Arabs in Israel
- D Kreztmer
Kreztmer, D. (1990) The Legal Status of Arabs in Israel, Boulder, CO: Westview.
Looking White People in the Eyes
- S Razack
Razack, S. (1998) Looking White People in the Eyes, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Justice for All? Jews and Arabs in the Israel Criminal Justice System
- A Rattner
- G Fishman
Rattner, A. and G. Fishman (1998) Justice for All? Jews and Arabs in the Israel Criminal Justice System, London: Praeger.
Women and the Gulf War: Critique of Feminist Responses
- S Mojab
Mojab, S. (1997) 'Women and the Gulf War: Critique of Feminist Responses', in D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White (eds), Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures, and Revolutions, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 12:00 21 December 2014 Police Reactions to Violence against Palestinian Women in Israel 193
Mukadimat Li-Dirasat Al-Mujtam'a Al-Arabi (Introduction to Studies of Arab Society)Ethnic Origins
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Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sharabi, H. (1975) Mukadimat Li-Dirasat Al-Mujtam'a Al-Arabi (Introduction to Studies of Arab Society), Beirut: Dar Altali'a Liltiba'a Wa Al-Nashr. [Arabic] Smith D.J. (1997) 'Ethnic Origins, Crime and Criminal Justice in England and Wales', Crime and Justice, 21: 101–82.
Stanko (eds) (1989) Women, Policing and Male Violence
- J Hanmer
- J Radford
Hanmer, J., J. Radford and E. A. Stanko (eds) (1989) Women, Policing and Male Violence, London: Routledge.
Writing Against Culture Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present
- L Abu-Lughod
Abu-Lughod, L. (1990) 'Writing Against Culture', in R. G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Revising Culture Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. SaidThe Arab Family and the Challenge of Social Transform-ation Making Crime Pay: Law and
- N Aruri
- M A Shuraydi
- H Barakat
Aruri, N. and M. A. Shuraydi (eds) (2001) Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said, New York: Olive Branch Press. Barakat, H. (1985) 'The Arab Family and the Challenge of Social Transform-ation', in E. W. Fernea (ed.), Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, London: Sage. Beckett, K. (1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Irreconcilable Differences: Battered Women, Police, and the Law Legal Responses to Wife Assault: Current Trends and EvaluationFeminist Methodologies in criminology
- K J Ferraro
- L Pope
Ferraro, K.J. and. Pope, L. (1993) 'Irreconcilable Differences: Battered Women, Police, and the Law', in Z. Hilton (ed.), Legal Responses to Wife Assault: Current Trends and Evaluation, London: Sage. Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 12:00 21 December 2014 192 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Gelsthorpe, L. (1990) 'Feminist Methodologies in criminology,' in L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris (eds), Feminist Perspectives in Criminology, Philadelphia: Open University Press.