With examples from throughout Europe and the United States, the contributors to this volume explore how gender violence is framed through language and what this means for research and policy. Language shapes responses to abuse and approaches to perpetrators and interfaces with national debates about gender, violence, and social change.

With examples from throughout Europe and the United States, the contributors to this volume explore how gender violence is framed through language and what this means for research and policy. Language shapes responses to abuse and approaches to perpetrators and interfaces with national debates about gender, violence, and social change.

Battering States explores the most personal part of people's lives as they intersect with a uniquely complex state system. The book examines how statecraft shapes domestic violence: how a state defines itself and determines what counts as a family; how a state establishes sovereignty and defends its borders; and how a state organizes its legal system and forges its economy. The ethnography includes stories from people, places, and perspectives not commonly incorporated in domestic violence studies, and, in doing so, reveals the transformation of intimate partner violence from a predictable form of marital trouble to a publicly recognized social problem. The politics of domestic violence create novel entry points to understanding how, although women may be vulnerable to gender-based violence, they do not necessarily share the same kind of belonging to the state. This means that markers of identity and power, such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion and religiosity, and socio-economic and geographic location, matter when it comes to safety and pathways to justice. The study centers on Israel, where a number of factors bring connections between the cultural politics of the state and domestic violence into stark relief: the presence of a contentious multinational and multiethnic population; competing and overlapping sets of religious and civil laws; a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor; and the dominant presence of a security state in people's everyday lives. The exact combination of these factors is unique to Israel, but they are typical of states with a diverse population in a time of globalization. In this way, the example of Israel offers insights wherever the political and personal impinge on one another.

Facing Patriarchy challenges current thinking about men’s violence against women. Drawing upon radical and intersectional feminist theory and critical masculinity studies, the book locates men’s violence within the structures and processes of patriarchy. Addressing the limitations of current violence prevention policies, Bob Pease argues that a nuanced conceptualisation of patriarchy, that accounts for a variety of patriarchal structures, intersections with other forms of inequality, patriarchal ideologies, men’s peer group relations, men’s sexist practices and the construction of patriarchal subjectivities, is required to understand the links between gender and men’s violence against women. Pease shows that men’s violence against women needs to be understood in the context of other forms of men’s violence, including violence against boys and other men, in the involvement of men in wars and conflicts between nations and men’s ecologically destructive practices which constitute a form of slow violence. With crucial implications for priorities in violence prevention, gender equality promotion and in strategies for engaging men in this work, Facing Patriarchy offers new hope for the elimination of men’s violence. This is an essential book for scholars, practitioners, activists and policy makers involved in violence prevention in national and international contexts.

In Gender-Sensitive Norm Interpretation by Regional Human Rights Law Systems Maria Sjöholm examines the jurisprudence on gender-based harm in the European, Inter-American and African regional human rights law systems from the viewpoint of feminist legal methods and theories. By offering indicators relevant for gender-sensitive norm interpretation, Maria Sjöholm identifies inconsistencies in the current regional legal frameworks with regard to the protection of women concerning such violations as domestic violence, human trafficking, sexual violence, forced sterilization and restrictions on other reproductive rights. The book offers an in-depth account not only of the manner in which such harm has been recognized through integration in general human rights law treaties, but also the categorization of such as particular human rights norms by regional human rights courts and commissions.

Writing Terror on the Bodies of Women: Media Coverage of Violence against Women in Guatemala analyzes the scope and dynamics of violence against women in Guatemala and how it is represented in the print media. Using nearly two thousand Guatemalan newspaper reports covering murders and assaults on women, this book contextualizes violence against women within the history of violence in Guatemala; gender ideologies and patriarchal social structures; and the contemporary demands of the women’s movement for social and legislative change. It shows that while some newspapers cover violence against women with investigative reports and editorials that use feminist analysis and language, these are overshadowed by the large number of individual reports that reproduce narratives of terror and conceal the gendered nature of violence against women by suggesting that “delinquents,” “gangs,” “unknown men,” and inexplicably violent husbands are the main culprits, while simultaneously upholding dichotomous gendered narratives of “good” and “bad” wives and daughters.

The people most impacted by criminal justice policies and practices are seldom included in the decision-making processes that affect their lives. Building on the ‘nothing about us without us’ social movement, this edited volume advocates an inclusive approach to criminology that gives voice to historically marginalized, silenced, and ignored groups. Incorporating the experiences of service users, academics, and state and grassroots practitioners, this volume considers how researchers might bridge the gap between theory and lived experience. It furthers criminological scholarship by capturing the voices of marginalized groups and exploring how criminology can authentically incorporate these voices.