No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Constructions of Honor-Based Violence: Gender, Context and Orientalism
Abstract
In the 1990s, honor-based violence (HBV), and in particular honor killings, began receiving extensive international media attention. However, HBV includes a broad continuum of mechanisms used to control women and girls with varying levels of severity. Attention directed toward HBV has portrayed communities from South Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa in culturally rigid ways, where Orientalist discourses fail to demonstrate diversity. This essay will draw on small group interviews conducted with 27 adolescent girls and young women from diverse Asian backgrounds living in Auckland, New Zealand. Findings will illustrate the varied ways that research participants and their families negotiate gender and gender violence, with some adhering to a range of cultural norms supporting HBV and others diverging from an HBV culture.
... Instead, we showcase the complexity that characterizes migratory experiences and examine more insidious forms of violence defined as coercive control, which are common in intimate relationships regardless of ethnicity and religion. In fact, many Asian migrant youth have described their own family situations in which these honor-shame systems were not enforced (Mayeda, Vijaykumar, & Chesney-Lind, 2018), illustrating that within Asian communities, extensive diversity exists. Thus, we reject culture as the sole explanation of IPV and instead contend that dismantling patriarchy and violence against women requires deep cultural knowledge and context-specific sensitivity. ...
Honor-based violence (HBV) is a type of intimate partner and family violence that rests on patriarchal norms which fall under the parameters of coercive control. However, research has not examined the ways that HBV operates as a form of coercive control. Utilizing small group interviews conducted with 27 adolescent girls and young women, predominantly of Asian backgrounds from Auckland, New Zealand, this study will illustrate how HBV functions as a form of culturally driven coercive control, but one that cuts across multiple ecological or environmental levels, ranging from interpersonal relationships to state systems. Stark's work (2007) on coercive control has been significant for providing a conceptual framework that captures how patriarchal norms perpetuate intimate partner violence (IPV). Policy suggestions include educational programming with migrant Asian youth that explore the positive and negative dimensions of culture, and encourage youth to perpetuate those aspects of their cultures which they view as positive while critiquing cultural practices tied to HBV. For young adult marriage migrants caught in violent relationships, policy suggestions include bolstering of state resources to help legal aid practitioners, social workers and law enforcement recognize the cumulative power of coercive control in families that practice HBV and help young women exit the violent circumstances.
This qualitative study investigated understandings of spousal violence among 17 South Asian men residing in Alberta, Canada using focus groups. Thematic analysis revealed men’s ignorance about sexual coercion as a form of abuse, although they had a solid understanding of physical and financial abuse. The men identified novel forms of emotional torture, as well as two types of transnational abuses that occur in their communities which have not emerged from previous studies: framing wives for false crimes across international borders and forced participation in family chain migration. Implications for violence prevention, assessment, intervention, and transnational law enforcement are discussed.
Southern Criminology By Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Máximo Sozzo and Reece Walters, just published! (Routledge, London and New York)
Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. It is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice.
This book turns the origin stories of criminology upsidedown. It traces criminology’s orientalist fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism. It uncovers the colonial legacy of criminal justice, best exemplified by the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples. It analyses the ways in which discourses about punishment have simply assumed that forms of penality roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world. It advances the case that although the major drivers of eco-crime and global warming come from the Global North, their most harmful impacts are felt in the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes distinctive patterns of violence in the Global South.
Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. This book turns the origin stories of criminology, which simply assumed a global universality, on their head. It draws on a range of case studies to illustrate this point: tracing criminology's long fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso's theory of atavism, itself based on an orientalist interpretation of men of colour from the Global South; uncovering criminology's colonial legacy, perhaps best exemplified by the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in settler societies drawn into the criminal justice system; analysing the ways in which the sociology of punishment literature has also been based on Northern theories, which assume that forms of penalty roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world; and making the case that the harmful effects of eco-crimes and global warming are impacting more significantly on the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes patterns of violence in the Global South. Southern criminology is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice. It promotes a perspective that aims to invent methods and concepts that bridge global divides and enhance the democratisation of knowledge, more befitting of global criminology in the twenty-first century. © 2019 Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Máximo Sozzo and Reece Walters. All Rights Reserved.
In the Name of Action Against "Honour-Related" Violence
"Honour-related" violence and oppression has become an important issue for various social institutions in Sweden during the last decade. The school is one of these and has been awarded a particular responsibility to detect and take action against this violence. Aside from a few studies however, knowledge remains limited regarding how professionals in various institutions take measures against this violence. In this article I examine how the school's mission to combat "honour-related" violence and oppression has evolved into a practice permeated by national notions. With the support of empirical examples, I will show how efforts to tackle "honour-related" violence are based on ideas of "Swedish" values, national borders, and gender, and how these become tools for production of exclusion and inclusion. Attention is also given to how boys and girls who are brought together with an "honour cultural" background are assigned different positions in the "Swedish" community. The study is based on interviews with student welfare staff, participant observations on training days for school staff about "honour-related" violence, and document studies.
In Finland, issues linked to honour-related violence (HRV) have gained attention relatively late compared to other Nordic countries. The aim of this paper is to study how the issue has been presented in Finnish policy documents published between 2004 and 2012. The analysis is based on a discourse-analytical approach, which enables critical consideration of prevailing understandings of HRV, of the causes assumed to lie behind it, and the different subject positions the dominant discourses offer for victims and perpetrators. A further question concerns the measures proposed in the analysed policy documents: Do these measures reflect the understanding(s) of HRV promoted in the discourses? It is argued that the presentations of HRV are involved in creating boundaries between “us”, the Finnish-majority population, and the Other, immigrant population. Furthermore, the reasons behind HRV are understood as coinciding with the prevailing schemes of “patriarchal immigrant communities”. This has led to measures combining the combat against violence with integration policies, which in issues of gender equality aspire towards immigrants' assimilation. Consequently, violence against immigrant women—especially HRV—is located outside the sphere of criminal policy.
This article focuses on rethinking the intersectional approach towards a greater framing within the new political economy and particularly concerns itself with the ways such an approach can contribute to theorising various manifestations of gendered violence. The article examines a range of different forms of violence and reflects on how an intersectional framing can inform our understanding better. Some of the intersectional dimensions to domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, honour-based crimes and trafficking are discussed.
The past decade has seen a surge in media and policy debates on honor-based violence, honor killing, and forced marriage in the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain. Drawing on political debates and policy responses to these forms of violence, we analyze how understandings of “gender equality” inform distinct approaches to immigrant integration. The Dutch case shows how the idea of gender equality can sometimes be used to include Muslim communities in the larger population, by generating policy responses that are more likely to position immigrants as full members of society. Alternatively, as the German case most clearly illustrates, the idea of gender equality can inform the stigmatization of Muslim communities and lead to exclusionary immigration policies. In Britain, gender equality discourses stand in tension with discourses on race, with some NGO's accusing government of failing women out of fear of being accused of racism.
The oppression of Afghan women by fundamentalist groups was barely addressed by the corporate media until it proved rhetorically useful for US elites to argue for military intervention as a means to liberate the women of that country. This article critically interrogates this claim, and analyzes media coverage of Afghan women before and after the US invasion on 7 October 2001. First, we present an overview of conflicts in Afghanistan, focusing on the US’s economic and strategic interests in the region, and its role in supporting and funding Islamic fundamentalism. Attention to this context, absent from media accounts, is essential to understanding the plight of Afghan women in all its complexity. Second, we examine news frameworks and the ways in which Afghan women figure in imperialist agendas in a thoroughly Orientalist manner. Finally, we turn to the outcome of the war and the situation for Afghan women today.
Significant developments have been made in research on domestic violence experienced by women as well as on the practical front of the services women seek and receive when living with partner abuse. Yet, most of the studies that explore the experiences of victims of partner abuse in the United States have focused on nonimmigrant White women. The current study aims to contribute to the literature by exploring Latina immigrant victims’ experiences with domestic violence service outreach in the Midwest. This exploratory study used one-on-one interviews and a focus group to identify the challenges faced by 10 Latina victims of partner abuse who had previously contacted an antiviolence organization in Iowa and had used its services. Findings demonstrate that immigration status and the inability to understand domestic violence within given cultural norms are major barriers keeping Latina victims from seeking help from formal advocacy agencies. Other impediments include feeling shame, isolation, along with the lack of bilingual service providers in mainstream institutions and, the lack of knowledge about resources among newcomers. We end with recommendations for research and practice.
Value conflicts involving gender equality are interwoven into current multicultural tensions in many European societies. They are at the core of these tensions in Sweden, in which gender equality and principles of individual human rights constitute the state profile and political identity. In this article, we focus on three cases of honor killings that became flash points for public debates on `culture and cultures' among political parties, immigrant groups and feminists in Sweden. The media fervor surrounding honour-related violence has provided xenophobic groups with political opportunities, but at the same time, the public debate has given visibility and opened up public space for immigrant women's groups. We conclude that the notion of the `good society' has kept at bay the recognition of overtly xenophobic parties, but it has also inhibited open dialogue across and within majority and minority cultures, which would allow for reflections upon the diversity within cultures, marked by religion, gender, class differences and generational conflicts.
In this article, the authors assess the still limited literature on domestic violence among immigrant women in major receiving countries so as to begin delineating a framework to explain how immigrant-specific factors exacerbate the already vulnerable position—as dictated by class, gender, and race—of immigrant women in domestic violence situations. First, a review of this scholarship shows that the incidence of domestic violence is not higher than it is in the native population but rather that the experiences of immigrant women in domestic violence situations are often exacerbated by their specific position as immigrants, such as limited host-language skills, isolation from and contact with family and community, lack of access to dignified jobs, uncertain legal statuses, and experiences with authorities in their origin countries. The authors then examine the various responses at the national and local community levels to this issue in receiving countries.
Through a comparative analysis of crimes of 'honour' in India and Pakistan and an examination of appellate judgments from the two countries, we reflect upon how a rights-based discourse of modern nation-states forms a complex terrain where citizenship of the state and membership of communities are negotiated and contested through the unfolding of complex legal rituals in both sites. We identify two axes to explore the complex nature of the interaction between modernity and tradition. The first is that of governance of polities (state statutory governance bodies) and the second is the governance of communities (caste panchayats and jirgahs). We conclude that the diverse legacies of common law in India and Pakistan frame an anxious relationship with the categories of tradition and modernity, which inhabit spaces in between the governance of polities and the governance of communities, and constantly reconstitute the relationship between the local, national and the global.
This study identifies social, political, and cultural barriers to help seeking from health care organizations faced by abused Latina and Asian immigrant women. Qualitative data were collected through four semistructured ethnic-specific focus group interviews with 28 abused Latina and Asian immigrant women. Participants who had suffered intimate partner abuse were recruited through urban community-based organizations in San Francisco, California. Sociopolitical barriers to help seeking and patient-provider communication included social isolation, language barriers, and, for some, discrimination and fears of deportation. Sociocultural barriers included dedication to the children and family unity, shame related to the abuse, and the cultural stigma of divorce. Abused Latina and Asian immigrant women face significant social, cultural, and political barriers to patient-provider communication and help seeking. Medical and social service providers and policy makers may improve the quality of care for these women by understanding and addressing these barriers.
This article explores the factors that have an impact on domestic violence in African refugee communities, with specific reference to the Liberian community in South Australia. Seventeen focus group discussions were undertaken with women participants of the Liberian Women's Gathering. The nested ecological model (Dutton, 2001; Heise, 1998) is used to conceptualize the factors having an impact on domestic violence. The findings suggest that disruption to traditional gender roles has an impact on domestic violence at the cultural, socioeconomic, familial, and individual levels and that women's experience of domestic violence must be understood in relation to the acute and prolonged stressors of war, loss, and displacement.
This article examines issues of naming and defining violence against women in the context of Chinese societies. The first part discusses the differences between feminist and crime approaches to defining violence against women. The second part presents the findings of a focus group study which aimed to examine how Chinese people define and make sense of the term violence against women. Our study shows that the power of the term lies in turning people's attention from violence in general to violence directed against women. However, the use of the term violence tends to limit Chinese people's conception to the use of brute force (bao-li). It is suggested that an interchangeable use of the terms violence against women, women abuse and/or violation of women would facilitate women sharing their views and experiences. Findings also point to the development of a set of non-physical, subjective criteria in defining violence against women in Chinese societies.
This paper argues for a broader consideration of the issue of abortion—one that stresses the centrality of the denial of reproductive rights in the patriarchal policing of women’s bodies and their sexuality. Globally, the estimates of abortion-related deaths in 2014 ranged from 22,500 to 44,000, and countless women are injured or left infertile by seeking illegal abortions. We briefly review international trends regarding abortion politics and then analyze closely women’s access to abortion in two countries: the United States and Bangladesh. Representing two very different contexts of the developed and the developing world, respectively, we contend that abortion services are being constrained by misogynistic politics that deny women control over their bodies. Finally, the paper reviews recent international efforts to establish abortion rights as part of a broader landscape of human rights. Notably, while there are some efforts in the global north to recriminalize both contraception and abortion, these practices have been characterized by a recent United Nation’s report as the deliberate denial of medically available and necessary services and hence a form of “torture.”
Like many other western nations, New Zealand has experienced significant migration since the mid-1980s. According to the most recent census, roughly one out of every four persons living in New Zealand is foreign born. The significant number of migrants to New Zealand of Asian and Middle Eastern ancestries has led to the development of rich and diverse ethnic enclaves. However, young people from these communities experience significant pressures to assimilate into western culture, which sometimes clash with parental desires to perpetuate cultural traditions. Drawing on 10 small group interviews conducted with 11 adolescent and 16 young adult female interviewees of Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds in Auckland, New Zealand, this study examines how participants traverse culturally prescribed gender roles as they relate to intimate partner violence (IPV). Emergent themes from the study address participants' conceptualization of IPV, processes of learning IPV, and pressures to follow rigid gender-roles tied to IPV that are culturally embedded. The article closes with discussion on interpretation of research findings without perpetuating an Orientalist framework.
The purpose of this investigation was to identify risk and protective factors associated with intimate partner violence (IPV) in a high-income country (New Zealand) and to identify those factors that distinguish between current versus previous exposure to IPV. Data were drawn from the New Zealand replication of the World Health Organization's Multi-Country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence. Logistic regression was conducted to identify those variables associated with experience of IPV. Problem drinking, a partner who has concurrent sexual relationships, and a partner who is violent outside the home were associated with increased likelihood of current as opposed to previous experience of IPV. Increased household income and both the respondent and her partner being employed were associated with reduced likelihood that women would experience current as opposed to prior IPV. The findings point toward the need for comprehensive approaches to reduce all forms of violence and to contribute to the primary prevention of IPV. Strategies that address early exposure to violence, problematic alcohol consumption, gender transformative approaches to working with boys and men, and economic empowerment for women may all hold promise.
'Tony Bryant and Kathy Charmaz are the perfect editors for this excellent and forward looking Handbook which is surely destined to be a classic'
- David Silverman, Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths College
For anyone interested in grounded theory this is a must have book. No longer will students have to search the library or internet to find authoritative voices on a variety of topics. It's all right there at their fingertips
- Juliet Corbin, San José State University
Grounded Theory is by far the most widely used research method across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas, including social sciences, nursing and healthcare, medical sociology, information systems, psychology, and anthropology. This handbook gives a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of Grounded Theory, taking into account the many attempts to revise and refine Glaser and Strauss' original formulation and the debates that have followed.
Antony Bryant & Kathy Charmaz bring together leading researchers and practitioners of the method from the US, the UK, Australia and Europe to represent all the major standpoints within Grounded Theory, demonstrating the richness of the approach. The contributions cover a wide range of perspectives on the method, covering its features and ramifications, its intricacies in use, its demands on the skills and capabilities of the researcher and its position in the domain of research methods.
The SAGE Handbook of Grounded Theory is an indispensable reference source for academics and researchers across many disciplines who want to develop their understanding of the Grounded Theory method.
In the collectivist Arab society, intimate partner violence (IPV) is considered to be a personal and a family problem. Arab women who seek refuge in shelters for battered women are perceived as violating a cultural norm. This study focused on how Arab women cope with living independently in the community after spending time in a shelter. In this qualitative study, 12 women between the ages of 25 and 42 were interviewed, after having spent six to 30 months in the shelter. Since then, they had been living in the community. Analysis of the interviews revealed that the women described their independent lives as positioned between two poles: On one pole, they experienced stress and rejection from the family and society, which caused them pain, anger, and loneliness. On the other pole, the women experienced strength that enabled them to find meaning in their right to choose. The discussion of the study findings focuses on the dialectical relationships between the social stigma of rejection and the women’s self-transformation toward an empowered identity in the context of a collectivist-patriarchal community.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The "honor crime" poses perhaps more starkly than any other contemporary cultural-legal category the dilemmas of feminist scholarship and rights activism in a transnational world. Marked as a culturally specific form of violence and given a special and stigmatizing association with Muslims, especially after the 1990s, the honor crime does significant political work in the world today. Through an examination of popular literature, human rights reports, and anthropological and sociological studies, this article uncovers the forces that produce and maintain this category of spectacular cultural violence; the elements of popular fantasy that animate it; the forms of modern state and transnational power the category occludes; and the ahistorical and divisive civilizational thinking it encourages. Drawing both on ethnography from one Egyptian Bedouin community in which honor is a key moral value and on the critical analysis of diverse representations of the honor crime in Germany, Sweden, Palestine, Turkey, Jordan, and elsewhere, the author explores how the seductive power of the honor crime, mixing sexual titillation and moral horror, and its truly polymorphous interpretive capacity have enabled it to emerge as a robust category implicated in projects that include the policing and exclusions of immigrants; nation-states' disciplinary penetration of rural and urban subaltern communities; dominance by specific national, ethnic, or class groups; manipulation of liberal values in the service of assertions of Western superiority; and justifications of international intervention and transnational governance in the name of women's rights, including by feminists. © 2011 by Brown University and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.
This study empirically examines why exposure to family violence and adolescent dating violence are associated. Data are from self-administered questionnaires completed in schools by 1,965 eighth- and ninth-grade students. Exposure to family violence was positively associated with dating violence. For both genders, this relationship was mediated by the social-learning-theory-derived variables of acceptance of dating violence and aggressive conflict-response style. For males, the relationship also was mediated by the social-learning-theory-derived variable of positive outcome expectations and the control-theory-derived variable of belief in the conventional rules of society.
This paper discusses ‘honour’-based violence (HBV) and ‘honour’ killings in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (in the north of Iraq) and the UK. HBV consists of violence committed, most commonly, against (young) women by male relatives and is usually carried out in order to preserve or restore the ‘honour’ of families, communities, or individuals. The paper discusses HBV in the context of the first-ever transnational study of such violence in Iraqi Kurdish communities. The study is a major part of the contribution of Iraqi Kurdistan to the current global effort to begin to combat this type of violence against women. Using an understanding of HBV as gender-based violence, the paper reports on the findings, actions, and recommendations which emerged from the study for both Iraqi Kurdistan and the UK. These recommendations are grounded in a gendered perspective and are currently leading to social action and change for women in Iraqi Kurdistan, together with some further impacts in the UK.
This article explores the impact of domestic violence on Asian immigrant and refugee women in New Zealand. Domestic violence needs to be recognised as abusive and as a crime. Asian men use violence as a way of securing and maintaining the relations of male dominance and female subordination, which is central to the patriarchal social order. It is essential that various theoretical works on domestic violence in New Zealand recognise and understand the variation in cultural and familial constraints experienced by different groups of ethnic-minority Asian immigrant and refugee women. Despite the fact that a wide range of interventionist services exist and there is a very progressive legislation against domestic violence in New Zealand due to various cultural and structural constraints, Asian women find it difficult to access them. This article examines these issues and in conclusion suggests that the Asian community take responsibility to address this issue as well as the perpetrators.
This article contributes to the literature on wife abuse by using the patriarchal bargaining framework, which highlights the issue of agency as women strive to achieve their goals within the constraints of family and culture. Study participants were recent South Asian immigrants to the United States. Narrative analysis revealed that patriarchal constraints in natal families, culture, and expectations of benefits gained through marriage influenced many of the women to migrate for marriage. When husbands enforced extreme patriarchy with abuse, women's personal efforts to contain abuse were largely ineffective. However, advocacy agency interventions did help some women break out of extreme patriarchy.
Over the last decade, political initiatives against so-called honour-related violence have been undertaken in several Western countries, as well as in the UN. Swedish policy initiatives are relatively ambitious, and have primarily targeted young women as victims, one aim being to make it possible for them to speak up. In this article the overarching concern is to explore how victim stories are used in Swedish policy initiatives. Drawing upon discourse theory and post-colonial feminism, the aim is to challenge the ideal of speech as emancipation and to elaborate the connections between speech, silence and power. The article shows that, despite efforts by policy-makers to include these young women, and not to reproduce stereotypes, the possibility of speaking is formulated within a certain nationalist discursive terrain. The victims are primarily called upon to speak as non-Swedish representatives. Paradoxically, the inclusion of young women into policy discourse has led to a particular exclusion and thereby produced new silences.
Many studies have attributed the disproportionately high rate of domestic violence in Asian communities to Asian patriarchal "cultural norms" and the psychological and behavioral traits that these norms produce in individuals. This article seeks to expand the scope of domestic violence analysis beyond these individual and cultural frameworks, arguing that Asian domestic violence is also a product of larger scale, social systems of inequality. By examining the funding criteria of the Family Violence Prevention Services Administration (FVPSA) and the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) standard used by Robin Hood, my research shows how state and private organizations systematically devalue and underfund minority-targeted programs.
While there is a considerable body of literature dealing with various forms of violence against women, comparatively little research has explored the phenomenon of ‘honour’-based violence (HBV) within the Kurdish diaspora. This paper seeks to challenge both dominant understandings of HBV and the institutional structures that underpin its context-specific practice as a method for controlling and subjugating women. In doing so, the paper draws on original research involving thirty-four in-depth interviews with stakeholders working to address HBV in Kurdish communities in Britain: the interviewees included police officers, prosecutors, staff from government bodies and staff from women's non-governmental organisations. After exploring the role of ‘shame’ and ‘honour’ in Kurdish communities, and how value-systems predicated on gendered understandings of these concepts give rise to HBV, the paper offers a number of recommendations for improving policy and practice, especially in relation to police responses.
Thirty-one Chinese adults (16 men and 15 women) were randomly selected using a 1995 telephone directory for the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County. A telephone questionnaire on perceptions of domestic violence was administered. Respondents defined domestic violence as physical or sexual acts of aggression between spouses as opposed to psychological aggression. Chinese men and women did not agree with the use of violence in the home or that hitting is an effective problem-solving strategy. However, they tended to justify it in cases of self-defense and defense of a child. Domestic violence was attributed to individual and environmental factors. Minimal gender differences were found; however, age and length of residence in the United States were significantly related to various perceptions of domestic violence. The cultural context of domestic violence and implications for social work interventions and research are discussed.
The paper focuses on aspects of gender relations and sexuality in two villages in western Crete (Greece). It concentrates on local ideas about the sexuality of men and women and on the way in which a shift, in values and practices has occurred since the early 1970s, with economic change. The paper suggests that the economic development in the two villages, and the opportunities this has opened up for the women and men who live there, has meant a shift of values and practices regarding sex away from the traditional ‘honour—shame’ ethic.
‘Honour killings’ are extreme acts of domestic violence culminating in the murder of a woman by her family or community. However only in relation to religious and ethnic communities is the concept of ‘honour’ invoked as motivation for domestic violence. In this article we argue that ethnicised women1 are caught up in a collision of discourses. Women who are victims of honour killings are invisible within the cultural relativism of the British multicultural discourse and the private/public divide which characterises the domestic violence discourse. But since September 11, while ethnicised women have become highly visible, they are now contained and constructed in the public consciousness within a discourse of fear and risk posed by the presence of the Muslim alien ‘other’. By developing an effective human rights approach to honour killings it could be possible to move away from the ‘gender trap’ of cultural relativism within the liberal democratic discourse on multiculturalism.
The present study examines help-seeking behavior among abused Vietnamese American women to understand factors associated with their decisions to seek help. Using a qualitative method and data obtained from in-depth interviews with 34 abused Vietnamese American women selected from four different Vietnamese communities in the United States (Orange County, CA; Houston, TX; Boston, MA; and Lansing, MI) and 11 Vietnamese Americans who had contacts with Vietnamese American victims of domestic violence through their jobs, the study found that abused Vietnamese American women have sought help from their personal networks, the criminal justice system, and various victim service agencies. Data analyses suggest that the decisions of Vietnamese American women to reach out are complex and diverse and are shaped by various structural, cultural, and organizational factors. Acculturation on the part of abused women as well as victim services can facilitate the women’s efforts to seek help outside their personal networks.
The authors argue that cultural and personal systems of honor that depend on the behavior of others are an integral part of the killing of women by their families or intimates. Comparing patterns of conduct in both traditional cultures and English-speaking countries, this study focuses on the basic elements of such honor rationales—control, feelings of shame, and levels of community involvement—to establish that such rationales are a worldwide phenomenon. An appreciation of such honor systems adds an additional theoretical dimension both for understanding the incidence of male intimate violence in English-speaking countries and for cross-cultural comparisons. Furthermore, it contributes to the current need for a theoretical framework that accounts for cultural and contextual patterns of male intimate violence.
The article presents the voices and concerns of activist women in the Indian diaspora in Canada who, faced with much evidence of domestic and sexual violence against women, have begun to analyse domestic violence and their own roles in combating it. The article explores different ways in which women activists have struggled in an alien land to raise the issue of Indian women being subjected to forms of violence that seem magnified by the vulnerable position of immigrant women who lack a secure residence status. While there have been notable achievements, huge challenges remain, both within the South Asian community structures as within wider Canadian society and mainstream feminist discourses.
This study documents the lifetime and 12-month prevalence and overlap of psychological/emotional, physical, and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) reported by a representative sample of New Zealand women. Use of controlling behaviors by women's current or most recent intimate partner was also explored. The results indicated that 55% of ever-partnered women had experienced any IPV in their lifetime: 33% had experienced more than one type of IPV (usually psychological/emotional violence and physical and/or sexual violence), and 22% had experienced one type of IPV. Use of controlling behaviors by the woman's current or most recent partner was associated with partner's use of physical or sexual violence. Implications are discussed at the population level, for service providers, and for future studies.
One aspect of violence against women and children is what is referred to as honour related violence. Honour related violence (HRV) is a form of violence which is now on the agenda in several countries as a violation of human rights. From 2002 the Swedish government started paying serious attention to this issue. The aim of this paper is to present the Swedish government programme dealing with HRV with special focus on sheltered housing as the prevalent measure to safeguard victims of HRV. Our results indicate that sheltered housing without doubt plays an important role for victims in the sense of providing short term safety. Notwithstanding the adequacy of sheltered housing as a means to provide support and safety, the outcome of the support is ambivalent in the long run. Our qualitative interviews of girls with previous experiences of staying at sheltered housing demonstrate the risk of the practice, turning one kind of control and isolation into another kind. The ambivalence of sheltered housing is further analysed in terms of conflicting logics of social work practices reflecting the Swedish conflicting discourses on HRV.
The East Side Village Health Worker Partnership is a community based participatory research (CBPR) partnership that uses a lay health adviser model to address social determinants of health on Detroit's East Side. This chapter draws on the experience of Village Health Workers to examine a series of questions related to the experience of women who become involved with a CBPR partnership in their communities. Specifically, the authors ask, What brings women to participate in a CBPR effort such as the East Side Village Health Worker Partnership? What challenges do they encounter in the course of their participation? And how has the partnership attempted to recognize and grapple with those challenges, for example, to address inequalities of power and resources? The aim of this discussion is to enhance the understanding of challenges women encounter as well as to offer some suggestions for addressing those challenges in CBPR partnerships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Despite its great achievements, the domestic violence revolution is stalled, Evan Stark argues, a provocative conclusion he documents by showing that interventions have failed to improve women's long-term safety in relationships or to hold perpetrators accountable. Stark traces this failure to a startling paradox, that the singular focus on violence against women masks an even more devastating reality. In millions of abusive relationships, men use a largely unidentified form of subjugation that more closely resembles kidnapping or indentured servitude than assault. He calls this pattern "coercive control." Drawing on sources that range from FBI statistics and film to dozens of actual cases from his thirty years of experience as an award-winning researcher, advocate, and forensic expert, Stark shows in terrifying detail how men can use coercive control to extend their dominance over time and through social space in ways that subvert women's autonomy, isolate them, and infiltrate the most intimate corners of their lives. Against this backdrop, Stark analyzes the cases of three women tried for crimes committed in the context of abuse, showing that their reactions are only intelligible when they are reframed as victims of coercive control rather than as "battered wives." The story of physical and sexual violence against women has been told often. But this is the first book to show that most abused women who seek help do so because their rights and liberties have been jeopardized not because they have been injured. The coercive control model Stark develops resolves three of the most perplexing challenges posed by abuse: why these relationships endure, why abused women develop a profile of problems seen among no other group of assault victims, and why the legal system has failed to win them justice. Elevating coercive control from a second-class misdemeanor to a human rights violation, Stark explains why law, policy, and advocacy must shift their focus to emphasize how coercive control jeopardizes women's freedom in everyday life. Fiercely argued and eminently readable, Stark's work is certain to breathe new life into the domestic violence revolution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Schlytter A, Linell H. Girls with honour-related problems in a comparative perspective Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 152–161 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare.
The aim of this study was to learn to perceive the indicators of honour-related problems in a girl's everyday life. Our investigation included all girls aged 13–18 years who were about to be taken into care in 2006. The comparative analysis was based on 37 County Court cases in Stockholm County. The girls' exposure to harm in 13 of the 37 cases could be coupled to the demands and values of the honour culture. All the girls in the ‘honour’ group had been victims of mental abuse; they were more isolated than the girls in the ‘other reason’ group and none of the girls in the ‘honour’ group chose to meet their parents in court. We found that the honour culture life situation is new to the social services, which for these girls can mean that they do not have access to the same legal protection as other girls.
This article examines the debate on whether to analyse ‘honour crimes’ as gender-based violence, or as cultural tradition,
and the effects of either stance on protection from and prevention of these crimes. In particular, the article argues that
the categorisation of honour-related violence as primarily cultural ignores its position within the wider spectrum of gender
violence, and may result in a number of unfortunate side-effects, including lesser protection of the rights of women within
minority communities, and the stigmatisation of those communities. At the same time it is problematic to completely dismiss
any cultural aspects of violence against women, and a nuanced approach is required which carefully balances the benefits and
detriments of taking cultural factors into account. The article examines the issues within the context of the legal response
to cases involving honour-related violence, arguing that although the judiciary has in a number of cases inclined towards
viewing ‘honour’ as primarily cultural rather than patriarchal, in some cases they have begun to take a more gender-based
or ‘mature multiculturalism’ approach.
This article is based on the life histories of two immigrant women of Turkish origin living in Sweden. Fictive names are used in the article. The women are given in marriage at a very young age to attach them to men who will take over the function of their control from their fathers. By analyzing the life histories with the help of Delaney and Bourdieu's theoretical approaches, I try to explain the implicit idea in the honour/shame complex whereby protection of women is maintained through control on their sexuality. The control is accelerated to the extent that women live in “immigrant enclaves”. The function of women as carriers and bearers of group identity gains importance in case of the “immigrant situation” where ethnic identity becomes an issue to consider. Women are abused when they violate the boundaries of the definition of acceptable femininity by their ethnic community.
A systematic review of the research literature on honor killings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) indicates a paucity of studies relative to the presumed magnitude of the problem. Forty articles were reviewed and critically appraised, of which only 9 contained primary data and 11 presented original secondary analyses. Despite a recent increase in published studies, persistent methodological limitations restrict the generalizability of findings. Most studies focus on legal aspects, determinants, and characteristics of victims and perpetrators. Victims are mostly young females murdered by their male kin. Unambiguous evidence of a decline in tolerance of honor killings remains elusive.