Abstract
Gender-based violence is a worldwide scourge that respects no barriers of class, ethnicity, race, or religion. Discussions of gender-based violence usually focus on immediate concerns of social and interpersonal violence, especially physical and sexual assault by an intimate partner. In addition to domestic violence, this chapter analyzes the many other economic, political, and cultural forms of violence that effectively restrict women’s liberty and affect their lives and health. Economic violence is the mechanism that triggers gender inequity; political violence places limitations on the meaning of women’s citizenship; and cultural violence supports customs that deny women’s bodily integrity in the name of tradition. The chapter explores societies’ use of violence to control women’s productive and reproductive labor, beginning with a discussion of sexuality.
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- 1.
The terminology—white power, white nationalism, white supremacy, white separatism, white extremism, and identitarianism—is a confusing constellation that denotes a range of racist positions. One idea common to all white power groups is opposition to immigration. Based on a fear of the “great replacement”—the belief that nonwhite immigrants have higher birth rates and by their sheer numbers will supplant whites in European-identified nations—antipathy to immigrants seems to go hand-in-hand with denial of women’s sexual and reproductive health rights, discussed in Chap. 6.
- 2.
For more information on femicide in Latin America (see http://www.fundar.org.mx/mexico/pdf/SpotlightonPublications-FemicideinLatinAmerica.pdf, accessed 2 April 2019).
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Chesler (2009) disagrees, arguing that is erroneous to say honor killings are merely domestic abuse and have nothing to do with Islam.
- 4.
Men’s ability to justify their criminal behavior and escape punishment is encoded in law, not just custom. But adopting laws against honor killings does not stop the practice (https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/opinions/pakistan-honor-killings-afzal-kohistani-zakaria/index.html, accessed 31 March 2019).
- 5.
Bellil died 4 September 2004 at age 31 of stomach cancer.
- 6.
In UN terms, non-partnered women with children in developed and developing regions and older women in one-person households in developed regions have higher poverty rates than men with the same characteristics (https://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/downloads/WorldsWomen2015_chapter8_t.pdf, accessed 3 April 2019).
- 7.
Ethiopia remains one of the African countries with the highest rates of FGC; for a story about a local women’s group, Light Ethiopia, tackling the problem (see https://www.academia.edu/22481418/Ethiopian_still_far_from_eradicating_FGM._Here_my_conversation_with_Ethiopian_activist_Tesfaye_Melaku_Aberra_founder_of_Light_Ethiopia_Organization_who_fights_FGM_in_Ethiopia_and_promotes_girls_and_womens_rights, accessed 5 April 2019).
- 8.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda held in the Jean Paul Akayesu judgment that sexual violence was an integral part of the process of destruction, specifically targeting Tutsi women and specifically contributing to their destruction and to the destruction of the Tutsi group as a whole (http://unictr.irmct.org/en/cases/ictr-96-4, accessed 8 April 2019).
- 9.
The UN distinguishes between refugees, who cross international borders to escape conflict, internally displaced people who move from their homes in the conflict area to some other part of the country in search of safety, and asylum seekers who flee their own country and seek sanctuary.
- 10.
The 2016 EU-Turkey Statement committed Turkey to stepping up measures against people smuggling; in return the EU financed Turkey’s hosting of refugees; this effective arrangement cut migration from Turkey by 97 percent in one year (https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/background-information/eu_turkey_statement_17032017_en.pdf, accessed 8 April 2019).
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Turshen, M. (2020). The Sexual Politics of Violence Against Women. In: Women’s Health Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9467-6_5
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