NE SV conference
November 2012
Email: l.kelly@londonmet.ac.uk
Twitter: @ProfLizKelly

 Liz Kelly PhD in 1980s
 For much of 20C VAW seen as rare, committed by deviant men, dysfunctional families
 Who decides what is abusive, what matters?
 Connecting the horrific with the everyday
 incest as an exaggeration of patriarchal family norms (Herman,
1981)
 rape as the end point of ‘socially sanctioned continuum of male sexual aggression’ (Marolla and Scully, 1979)
 how the ‘typical’ and the ‘aberrant’ shade into one another
 Is located in patriarchy/gender order – not just adding and counting violence, but in context which influences meaning and consequences

 ‘a basic common character that underlies many
different events’ – the many forms of coercion, abuse and assault that are used to control women
 ‘a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another and cannot be readily
distinguished’ – categories are not discrete: sexual harassment/ assault/rape; smuggling/trafficking
 Was not intended to be linear or imply anything about seriousness – the ‘more or less’ referred to prevalence

 Pressurised sex
 Coercive sex
 Rape
 The boundaries are not fixed and women might discuss similar events but name them differently

Trafficking/smuggling as binary and as a continuum

 Paper written with Jill Radford in 1990, drawing on data from two projects
 This phrase common in women’s accounts – they described things that had happened, involved fear, but they minimised – it could have been worse
 Unlikely to name or report these common experiences as they do not count as ‘crimes’

 I was kerb-crawled too, earlier this week. I hate this sort of thing. It happened again later in the day, when I was walking home. I was in tears by the time I got home, nothing happened, just comments, but I was intimidated.
 I have been frequently harassed by kerb-crawlers. It happened even when I was pregnant. There were several incidents about a fortnight ago, though nothing actually happened… It makes me sick and angry. I don’t go out much alone now, I resent that enormously.

 I often get angered by men’s comments and at nights.
Nothing happens, but it’s a form of terror. You can tell they know it’s terror by the way they laugh and that
 All these things are everyday harassment, the background against which our lives are lived. Not much happens but it is threatening and calculated to intimidate women – to terrorize us
 I was on the tube the other day and a man was making racist and insulting sexual remarks. He was white and said I was a snobbish black tart and he knew what was good for me, all that sort of talk, but he didn’t do anything. It makes me really sick

 Most women recall at least one incident of intimate intrusion in their lifetime and many report multiple experiences
 Most common is harassment
 Range within CSA, within IPV (lecture on measuring violence)

 Having to factor personal safety into everyday activities/limited space for action
 Bruises, broken bones, disability, HIV/AIDS, death
 Having one’s sense of self, safety and trust in other human beings undermined/destroyed
 Is dishonouring, disgracing, stigmatising across cultural contexts
 Impacts on earning power/achievement/loss of livelihood/place in society
 Few women become perpetrators many more are extraordinary activists and practitioners

 Has no frame for seriousness
 Hierarchy of harm?
 Left out sexual exploitation/sex industry
 Does not include ‘harmful [traditional] practices’ –
FGM, forced marriage, honour based violence

 Lynne Segal, Slow
Motion – blurs lines so that all heterosexuality is problematised, all men guilty, violence inherent in masculinity
 Wants differentiation of men and violences – distinguishing ‘violent rape’ and those in relationships (p248), and why some violate and others do not

 “Such violence constitutes a continuum across the lifespan of women, it cuts across both the public and the private sphere and one form of violence often reinforces another”

 Prevalence methodology requires exclusive analytic categories
 Where framed as crime this is interms of
‘incidents’
 Poor fit with IPV which is a pattern of coercive control (Stark, 2007)
 Implications for 1 in 4 figure?

 Law also requires strict demarcations
 Gradations of ‘seriousness’
 Incidents
 All sit uneasily with continuum
 Course of conduct offences exceptions
 Sweden ‘gross violation of integrity’
 Not just safety but women’s freedom

 The continuum of agency – constraints on/space for action
 Extending to include structural and symbolic violence – Srila Roy and Ava Kanyeredzi
 Women connecting their own experiences –
Fiona Elvines
 Historic continuum of oppression within a family of women – Ava Kanyeredzi

 Incremental social democratic gains stalled (Bea Campbell and
Sylvia Walby)
 Violence as a core, and relative independent, pillar of gender orders – eg Nordic countries, development income generation projects
 Need new theoretical framings
 R W Connell – gender orders, gender regimes, gender relations
 Anne Morris ‘abusive household gender regime’
 Eva Lungren – gender constitution through violence