Ethical implications in teaching and learning about intimate partner violence and femicide prevention

ABSTRACT

This article explores a number of ethical implications that could arise in classroom situations when tackling the topic of intimate partner violence and femicide prevention with adolescent students. Due to their disturbing nature these topics might cause distress to students. The elimination of these topics from school curricula aimed at avoiding potential emotional risks also raises a number of ethical issues. These concern the reproduction of silences that shroud the topics of intimate partner violence and femicide in some cultures. The song “Love The Way You Lie” by Eminem and Rihanna is presented as a teaching tool that could be used to navigate the exposure of material that could be ethically sensitive. The song revolves around the theme of intimate partner abuse and could be considered an example of how violence is made acceptable and normalised through cultures that permit and perpetuate it. Insights from a diffractive methodology are employed to suggest that the use of the song for educational purposes is regarded as potentially helpful for students to think diffractively about the lived realities surrounding interpersonal violence and femicide. The article discusses a number of implications this has for educational curricula.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• intimate partner violence
• femicide
• education
• adolescent romantic relationships
• diffractive methodology
• Barad
• posthumanism

Notes

1. The article does not present a content analysis of the song or its video. For an analysis of the lyrics of LTWYL, see Enck and McDaniel (2012), and for other analyses of misogynistic rap songs see Weitzer and Kubrin (2009). For an analysis of rap music videos, see Conrad et al. (2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joanne Cassar

Joanne Cassar, EdD, is a senior lecturer at the Department of Youth and Community Studies at the University of Malta. Her research interests comprise sexuality education and gender. Her academic publications examine young people's sexualities as social, discursive and material constructs, which reflect the myriad ways sexual behaviours are perceived and acted out. Dr. Cassar has carried out various research projects about young people on a local level as well as in collaboration with other European and international research partners.