This edited collection brings together leading and emerging scholars in the important field of sexual violence scholarship. The last ten years have witnessed an international reckoning on sexual violence, typified in the mainstream imagination by the #MeToo movement, acknowledgement of the violence of university campus life, and the overdue recognition of the enduring harms of child sexual abuse. While the state has been forced to respond through law and other political processes, at times revealing its agility and at other times its archaic investment in the past, much of the real work responding to sexual violence and abuse has taken place within communities, and in the personal responses of the individuals writing the scripts of their experiences. This volume explores the nuances of these individual experiences and considers how they are shaped and reflected by intersecting axes of power including gender, race, class, age and able-bodied status. It reflects on law and law reform in the area and suggests new modes and frames through which to explain and understand sexual violence and institutional responses to it. Debates within this contested personal and political arena do not map onto longstanding binaries of liberal and radical feminism, nor conservative and progressive politics. This interdisciplinary volume traces that murky terrain and features some of the leading international scholars writing on sexual violence in English today. This book will appeal to scholars and students across the broad disciplines of law and legal studies; criminology; gender studies; political science and sociology.

This book argues for the critical potential of locating the girl as the subject-position and voice of legal critique. Law’s imaginary is notoriously limited in its ways of thinking through and adjudicating gender violence. This book argues that ‘the girl’ is a key figure through which to understand, theorise, and challenge law’s relation to this violence. Law, Culture and the Figure of the Girl explains the meaning and significance of the figure of the girl to legal, political, and critical projects centred on trauma and responsibility. The book offers new readings of exemplary cultural texts that thematically deal with law’s adjudication of violence against girls, emphasising the ways these texts challenge dominant ways of thinking and doing law, jurisdiction, violence, race, and gender. The book also explores radical cultural figurations of the girl in fiction, films, and TV series and demonstrates the critical potential of these works in understanding and providing counter-narratives to dominant legal and cultural imaginaries. These works provide ways not only to critique existing law but to theorise emergent forms of law-making. This book will be of interest to scholars in the areas of cultural legal studies, law and literature, feminist legal studies, and cultural studies. It will also be suitable as a prescribed text for upper undergraduate classes and graduate studies in the disciplines of law, legal studies, cultural studies, and criminology.

This book brings abolitionist ideas into higher education contexts as a way to address the problem of sexual violence on college campuses. Despite college and university administrators spending millions of dollars each year to address sexual violence among students, rates of sexual violence have not budged. This cutting-edge book examines the histories of policies enacted to address sexual violence on campuses, drawing parallels between campus movements and mainstream feminist movements, describes contexts contributing to ongoing harm and violence among students with minoritized identities, and explores healing through community accountability processes. Thinking Like an Abolitionist to End Sexual Violence in Higher Education provides promising strategies for leaders in higher education to consider, including embracing mistakes, moving through fear, facilitating individual and collective healing, and employing transformative approaches to accountability. With suggestions for engaging in reflection and specific calls to action, practitioners, researchers, activists, educators, and policymakers alike will find this resource to be a transformative keystone text.

This book analyses a selection of leading works in the criminal law to ask questions about how the modern discipline of criminal law has developed, how it has been deployed in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and how criminal law scholarship has engaged with traditionally marginalised perspectives such as feminism, queer theory, and anti-carceral and abolitionist movements. The works analysed range from Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code (1837) to more recent textbooks and monographs on criminal law, and their jurisdictional reach extends to India, Canada, Australia, Malawi, the UK and the USA. The contributing authors include scholars, activists and legal practitioners, each of whom explores the intellectual development and geographical reach of Anglocriminal law via the work they analyse. Across the collection, the editors and contributors address the question of what it means to be a leading work in criminal law. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and researchers working in the area of criminal law.

The use of a rape victim’s sexual history as evidence attracted intense public attention after the acquittal of footballer Ched Evans in 2017. Set within the context of a criminal justice system widely perceived to be failing rape victims, the use of sexual history evidence remains a flashpoint of contention around rape law reform. This accessible book mounts an important interrogation into the use of a victim’s sexual history as evidence in rape trials. Adopting a critical multidisciplinary perspective underpinned by feminist theory, the authors explore the role and significance of sexual history evidence in criminal justice responses to rape.

What does gender equality mean for peace, justice, and security? At the turn of the 21st century, feminist advocates persuaded the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution that drew attention to this question at the highest levels of international policy deliberations. Today the Women, Peace and Security agenda is a complex field, relevant to every conceivable dimension of war and peace. This groundbreaking book engages vexed and vexing questions about the future of the agenda, from the legacies of coloniality to the prospects of international law, and from the implications of the global arms trade to the impact of climate change. It balances analysis of emerging trends with specially commissioned reflections from those at the forefront of policy and practice.

Rape: Challenging Contemporary Thinking – 10 Years On takes stock of current thinking and research about rape and the way it is handled in practice within the criminal justice system, as well as challenging some of the widely held but inaccurate beliefs about rape. The second edition of Rape: Challenging Contemporary Thinking – 10 Years On is not a traditional new edition, although it does provide updated versions of substantive issues covered in the first edition. Bringing the book to the cutting edge, it incorporates both old and new contexts where sexual exploitation takes place, identifying some knowledge gaps especially when considering the voices of complainants/victims/survivors who are invisible or muted, numerous new areas of research including the implications arising from #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, the limitations of our present criminal justice systems, and radical alternatives to closing the justice gap. The new book reflects the global reach of research and thinking about rape, including more international coverage, with material from India, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as well as the UK. In order to learn from our shared history in this field, two authors reflect on their careers and other authors were encouraged to move away from conventional academic formats to convey their stories. Bringing together leading researchers in the field of psychology, sociology, and law, considering new research, and presenting new data from a strong theoretical and contextual base, the chapters are provocative and engage in innovative thinking, whilst remaining grounded in the available evidence. This book is essential reading for students of criminology, forensic psychology, sociology, criminal justice, law, media studies, and women’s/gender studies. It also aims to inform professionals engaged in the investigation, prosecution of rape, support, and preventative services.