Towards an integrated approach to violence against women: persistence, specificity and complexity

ABSTRACT

This essay deals with the topic of violence against women in a cross-national, transdisciplinary perspective. Through the investigation of a vast empirical, theoretical literature and critical thinking on the directions taken by research, the distinctive features and the complexity of violence against women are pointed out. Variable in terms of impact and form, violence against women is a feature not only present in widely-differing geo-cultural realities but also persistent and showing a polymorphic, transverse character related to male dominance which enables it (until now) to survive many social and legislative changes. As well as identifying the particular features and changing forms of this type of violence, quite unlike any other, the essay stresses the adaptive, endemic and persistent character of this phenomenon and highlights above all its intimate and political matrix.

KEYWORDS:

• Violence against women
• gender violence
• social change
• femicide
• political and intimate violence

Acknowledgements

This work is the result of a research collaboration and its contents have been discussed and shared constantly by the authors. They contributed to the final draft as follows: Maria Giovanna Musso wrote, in addition to the Introduction and the Conclusions, 3-5-6 and 7-8-9-10 paragraphs; Michele Proietti wrote the draft of 1, 2, 4. Rachel R. Reynolds contributed to the 4th paragraph, editing, bibliographic research and translation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

M. G. Musso is associate professor at University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Department of Social and Economic Sciences, where she teaches Sociology of Change, Creativity and Art and Sociological Theories. She has conducted studies on complex systems, art and science, development and globalization. Her research topics include the relationship between violence against women, identity, social imaginary and social bond; the relationship between art, science, technology and their impact on social change.

M. Proietti, Independent researcher, currently working at the Institute of Educational and Training Research (IREF), Rome. His main research interests are discriminations, migrations, social inclusion and new media. He is part of the research and communication teams of “Social Inclusion Methodology in Critical Areas via Sport” (SIMCAS) Erasmus+ project.

R. R. Reynolds is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Drexel University and she is also a graduate faculty member in the programs in Communication, Culture & Media. Reynolds does research in semiotics and discourse analysis, as well as African brain drain and human development. She is currently part of a project on 'Gender Violence, Identity and the Social Bond: a Transcultural Research Project' (Director: Maria Giovanna Musso).

Notes

1 In particular, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2014, 2019), UN Women (2019) and United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN, 2015), have had a key role in elaborating studies at transnational and inter-regional levels, according to the criteria and the prerequisites laid down in the Declaration of 1993 and later in the Istanbul Convention of 2011.

2 Understandably these are highly sensitive, painful topics, difficult to recognize at times even for those who experience them, subjected as they are to stigma and social and cultural rulings, knowledge of which depends directly on formal reporting (officially to the authorities) or on the disclosure by women (speaking to someone) (EIGE, 2017). It is also possible that someone undergoing violence does not recognize it as such or else does not fully understand the implications (Dekel & Andipatin, 2016).

3 The experience of ISTAT (the Italian Institute of Statistics) is meaningful here (Sabbadini, 2019). Thanks to a 1996 pilot survey that included a test on violence, it became clear that women had difficulty in recognizing violence as such when it occurred within the family. The enormous gap between the data reported by anti-violence centres and official findings was therefore due to the instruments used in the survey. These therefore have been perfected (after years of shared planning) to give priority to the detailed description of behaviour rather than to the assessment and opinion of the researchers (L.L. Sabbadini, personal communication, March 22, 2018; ‘Relazione finale’, 2018). The first survey entirely and explicitly on violence against women was carried out by ISTAT only in 2006 and then replicated in 2014. The level of accuracy of the findings made it possible to highlight the numerous aspects of a broad, endemic phenomenon whose features went unknown until twenty years ago. In both surveys the rate of women aged 16–70 who had undergone some form of physical or sexual violence during their lives was about 32% (ISTAT, 2007, 2015), a comparable rate to those estimated globally and evidently stable over time.

4 For example, during the collection of data for the FRA survey (2014), the women interviewers were obliged to take long breaks to alleviate the psychological and emotional impact of this type of fieldwork.

5 Over 24,000 women aged 15–49 were interview across Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand, and Tanzania.

6 The investigation foresaw a sample of 10,000 men and 3,000 women who answered a specular questionnaire, structured according to gender.

7 All voluntary homicides of women committed by co-habitants, companions, husbands etc.

8 It must be made clear that gender-related does not totally respond to ‘committed by males.’ In fact femicides committed by family members are not always committed by male family members, but also by sisters, mothers, etc., and in these cases too the gender motive is evident: the woman is killed because she is sister, daughter, and so on, that is, because of the role and expectations connected to gender within the family.

9 It should be recalled that Canada was one of the first countries to adopt a centralized, integrated information system on VAW, becoming a global reference point (UN, 2015, p. 142). Italy and England’s VAW statistical survey systems are also among the most advanced.

10 A peace that does not include an end to VAW is a peace reserved exclusively to men. As Jacqui True (2015, 2020) states, gender violence is a structural obstacle to global peace and is widely undervalued. The very idea of peace is rendered false by a vision directed only at armed conflict: in the current conception, peace means ‘absence of interstate and civil war’ (True, 2020, p. 86) or ‘absence of organized group-level violence’ (Bellamy, 2019, as cited in True, 2020).

11 A clear example is the gender pay gap - salary difference in positions of equal employment.

12 The study was based on 190 interviews of 95 couples and this is an interesting methodological solution later followed, among others, by Feder and Henning (2005) and Stern and Heise (2019).

13 More in general, one of the ‘most obvious’ data in criminology is that men commit many more violent crimes than women and those crimes are much more serious (Heidensohn & Silvestri, 2012; Walklate, 2004) and that VAW is to be attributed for the most part to the male gender. There is a sort of gender ‘specialization’ even in violent crimes: VAW is a man’s prerogative while infanticide is the only crime in which women predominate, unlike filicide, also attributed mainly to men, although with a slight difference (Scott & Fleming, 2014).

14 On the notion of intimacy and its transformations in modernity see Simmel (1998) and Giddens (1992).

15 As Catharine MacKinnon recently recalled, women ‘don’t report – because it makes their lives worse’ (MacKinnon & Mitra, 2019, p. 1031). Furthermore, according to the scholar, the #MeToo movement has succeeded in opening a debate on the power relations among men, even more than on that between women and men. The movement has managed to render the culprits’ impunity vulnerable, leading in many cases to court cases and the firing of extremely powerful men by other equally powerful men (ibid.).

16 It must not be forgotten that such relationships are embodied and interiorized in men as much as in women. Among the material perpetrators of VAW, in fact, there are not men alone – although they are the perpetrators in the great majority of cases – but more rarely other women too, who act conforming to gender roles and expectations.