South African women's still-increasing presence in local, provincial, and national institutions has inspired sweeping legislation aimed at advancing women's rights and opportunity. Yet the country remains plagued by sexual assault, rape, and intimate partner violence. Hannah E. Britton examines the reasons gendered violence persists in relationship to social inequalities even after women assume political power. Venturing into South African communities, Britton invites service providers, religious and traditional leaders, police officers, and medical professionals to address gender-based violence in their own words. Britton finds the recent turn toward carceral solutions—with a focus on arrests and prosecutions—fails to address the complexities of the problem and looks at how changing specific community dynamics can defuse interpersonal violence. She also examines how place and space affect the implementation of policy and suggests practical ways policymakers can support street level workers. Clear-eyed and revealing, Ending Gender-Based Violence offers needed tools for breaking cycles of brutality and inequality around the world.

8. Challenging the state.

Women have made significant inroads into political life in recent years, but in many parts of the world, their increased engagement has spurred attacks, intimidation, and harassment. This book provides the first comprehensive account of this phenomenon, exploring how women came to give these experiences a name: violence against women in politics. Tracing its global emergence as a concept, Mona Lena Krook draws on insights from multiple disciplines--political science, sociology, history, gender studies, economics, linguistics, psychology, and forensic science--to develop a more robust version of this concept to support ongoing activism and inform future scholarly work. Krook argues that violence against women in politics is not simply a gendered extension of existing definitions of political violence privileging physical aggressions against rivals. Rather, it is a distinct phenomenon involving a broad range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors, taking physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic forms. Incorporating a wide range of country examples, she illustrates what this violence looks like in practice, catalogues emerging solutions around the world, and considers how to document this phenomenon more effectively. Highlighting its implications for democracy, human rights, and gender equality, the book asserts that addressing this issue requires ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure women's equal rights to participate--freely and safely--in political life around the globe.

What does it mean for men to join with women as allies in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence? Based on life history interviews with men and women anti-violence activists aged 22 to 70, Some Men explores the strains and tensions of men's work as feminist allies. When feminist women began to mobilize against rape and domestic violence, setting up shelters and rape crisis centers, a few men asked what they could do to help. They were directed "upstream," and told to "talk to the men" with the goal of preventing future acts of violence. This is a book about men who took this charge seriously, committing themselves to working with boys and men to stop violence, and to change the definition of what it means to be a man. The book examines the experiences of three generational cohorts: a movement cohort of men who engaged with anti-violence work in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of the feminist anti-violence mobilizations; a bridge cohort who engaged with anti-violence work from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, as feminism receded as a mass movement and activists built sustainable organizations; a professional cohort who engaged from the mid-1990s to the present, as anti-violence work has become embedded in community and campus organizations, non-profits, and the state. Across these different time periods, stories from life history interviews illuminate men's varying paths--including men of different ethnic and class backgrounds--into anti-violence work. Some Men explores the promise of men's violence prevention work with boys and men in schools, college sports, fraternities, and the U.S. military. It illuminates the strains and tensions of such work--including the reproduction of male privilege in feminist spheres--and explores how men and women navigate these tensions. To learn more please visit somemen.org

This work covers the complex issues involved in intervention with children of battered women and provides an overview of current practice including strategies and program models.

This is an edited volume of 12 articles previously published in Social Problems that may be considered among the most influential in the development of the sociological study of violence against women.

“An elegant, impassioned demand that America see gender-based violence as a cultural and structural problem that hurts everyone, not just victims and survivors… It's at times downright virtuosic in the threads it weaves together.”—NPR Winner of the 2022 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books From the woman who gave the landmark testimony against Clarence Thomas as a sexual menace, a new manifesto about the origins and course of gender violence in our society; a combination of memoir, personal accounts, law, and social analysis, and a powerful call to arms from one of our most prominent and poised survivors. In 1991, Anita Hill began something that's still unfinished work. The issues of gender violence, touching on sex, race, age, and power, are as urgent today as they were when she first testified. Believing is a story of America's three decades long reckoning with gender violence, one that offers insights into its roots, and paths to creating dialogue and substantive change. It is a call to action that offers guidance based on what this brave, committed fighter has learned from a lifetime of advocacy and her search for solutions to a problem that is still tearing America apart. We once thought gender-based violence--from casual harassment to rape and murder--was an individual problem that affected a few; we now know it's cultural and endemic, and happens to our acquaintances, colleagues, friends and family members, and it can be physical, emotional and verbal. Women of color experience sexual harassment at higher rates than White women. Street harassment is ubiquitous and can escalate to violence. Transgender and nonbinary people are particularly vulnerable. Anita Hill draws on her years as a teacher, legal scholar, and advocate, and on the experiences of the thousands of individuals who have told her their stories, to trace the pipeline of behavior that follows individuals from place to place: from home to school to work and back home. In measured, clear, blunt terms, she demonstrates the impact it has on every aspect of our lives, including our physical and mental wellbeing, housing stability, political participation, economy and community safety, and how our descriptive language undermines progress toward solutions. And she is uncompromising in her demands that our laws and our leaders must address the issue concretely and immediately.