Women's fear of violent crime: An exploratory test of a feminist hypothesis

Government-sponsored national victimization surveys in several countries have found consistently that women's fear of violent crime is much greater than their actual chances of being violently victimized. Not suprisingly, most attempts to account for this discrepancy begin with the assumption that women's fear is subjectively based. A few feminist theorists, however, have challenged this view. They argue that women's fear of violent crime is much more objective than the crime surveys indicate. Women's fear results in part, they suggest, from being physically abused by a husband, boyfriend, or other male intimate; an experience largely untouched in the crime surveys. Such abuse creates a generalized fear of male violence, which has shown up in the victimization surveys as fear of violent crime in public places. This study tested, and found some support for, the feminist hypothesis, using data from a telephone survey of a representative sample of 315 Toronto women.     

论女性主义心理治疗观

女性主义心理治疗产生于20世纪六七十年代的女权主义运动.它将女性主义研究与心理治疗的理论与实践有机地结合起来,以弥补传统心理治疗研究的不足与偏颇.女性主义心理治疗对传统中的实证主义假设、性别偏见以及治疗关系中的权力不对等等问题提出了挑战.它以社会性别视角透视心理治疗的理论与实践问题,关注社会情境对女性心理健康的影响,主张建立平等的治疗关系,促进社会变革与发展.女性主义心理治疗提出了一种生物的、心理的、社会的、文化的以及结构的治疗模式,这不仅有助于对个体心理功能的全面理解,而且为心理治疗的发展指明了方向.     

Feminism and the siren call of law

Feminists have so often declared and celebrated the fecundity of the relationship between feminism and legal reform that critique of legal doctrine and norms, together with proposals for their reconstruction, have become the hallmarks of the modern feminist engagement with law. Yet today the long-cherished ‘truth’ about law’s potentially beneficial impact on women’s lives has started to fade and the quest for legal change has become fraught with problems. In responding to the aporetic state in which feminist legal scholarship now finds itself, this paper offers a recounting of the relationship between feminism and the politics of legal reform. However, in so doing, it seeks neither to support nor to oppose these politics. Instead, it explores the historical contingencies that made this discourse possible. Utilizing Foucault’s concept of episteme, it demarcates the nineteenth century as the historical moment in which this discourse arose, and tracing the epistemic shifts underpinning the production of knowledge, locates its positivities at the interface of the time’s episteme and the discourse of transcendental subjectivity that it engendered.

Exploring a Research Agenda of the Feminization of the Legal Profession: Theories of Gender and Social Change

This essay suggests that recent work in feminist theory should reorient the questions that are asked about the role of gender in the legal profession. Some use gender as a category of analysis to explore differences that reinforce conventional gendered stereotypes, such as the conceptualization of work and family in lawyering as a "women's issue." Others use conventional sociology of the professions analysis, such as stratification, to measure women's "success" and "satisfaction" in the context of the traditional law firm. By focusing on some recent historical and sociological research on women in the legal and medical professions, the author illustrates how we might ask different questions, not to reify gender differences but to more fully examine the role that gender difference, as socially constructed, might play in the transformation of law practice.     

试析女性主义心理学的方法论

女性主义方法论的探讨与争论是女性主义心理学研究的焦点:女性主义心理学研究区别于非女性主义心理学研究最重要的特征在于其女性主义方法论;女性主义心理学批判心理学中量化研究与质化研究范式之争为虚假的两极之争,倡导多元方法论;女性主义认识论上的分歧导致其对于知识与性别的关系的不同主张,并最终导致了女性主义心理学在方法和方法论取向上的不同偏好。     

女权心理学及其对西方主流心理学的挑战

女权心理学是西方女权主义运动中的一股重要力量。女权心理学试图揭示西方心理学的内容和方法中的男性中心偏见 ,反对扭曲和病态化女性的经验与行为。在女性心理的研究中 ,它既反对夸大性别差异 ,也反对抹杀和取消性别差异。女权心理学质疑西方主流心理学的科学观和方法论 ,认为自然科学的经验实证范式不适合心理学 ,心理学不可能脱离社会文化的影响而进行价值中立的研究     

Pathways of Victimization and Resistance: Toward a Feminist Theory of Battered Women’s Help‐Seeking

Although intimate partner abuse has been extensively researched over the last thirty years, battered women’s help‐seeking remains perplexingly undertheorized, particularly within criminology. This analysis aims to offer a corrective by applying the feminist pathways theoretical model—which examines women’s and girls’ offending behaviors in the context of their past victimization experiences—to battered women’s help‐seeking. Data from in‐depth life history interviews with 22 battered women in two states indicate that the women’s childhood victimization experiences informed their adult help‐seeking decisions in meaningful ways. The primary theoretical contribution of this analysis is the identification of specific mechanisms—five help‐seeking inhibitors and three help‐seeking promoters—through which childhood victimization influenced participants’ help‐seeking. Results of this analysis demonstrate the benefit of a feminist pathways theoretical model of battered women’s help‐seeking in order to better understand how pathways of victimization and resistance develop over the course of women’s lives.     

Campus Crime Beat: The Challenges of Doing Feminist Criminology in the Academy

One of the persistent problems with academic life is that one is encouraged to tell the truth, whether in research, the classroom, or the department meeting. For feminists, graduate school in particular stresses the importance of meticulously documenting girls' and women's lives, which have been rendered invisible by virtually all fields. Although these days the idea of truth is contentious, in the real world in which feminist academics and feminist criminologists in particular work, real problems that women confront (like sexual harassment, discrimination, and workplace violence) continue. Documenting these problems on their own campuses is a particular burden that feminist criminologists as well as others have taken on. It produces genuine challenges in a career that relies heavily on collegiality and civility. This article reflects on the costs of telling it like it is while also considering the long-term benefits, such as they are, of bringing the feminist perspective fully into the field of criminology.     

Trespass,impasse, collaboration: Doing research on women's rights in India

A developing tenet of feminism is the need to work collaboratively in order to avoid assumptions of universality and embrace differences between women. In this paper, Cossman and Kapur reflect upon their attempts to put this principle into practice in research on women's rights in India. They highlight ethical dilemmas raised by their project which forced them to problematize and challenge many of their initial assumptions about doing feminist research, particularly those of identity politics which give primacy to women's experiences as a claim to truth. The authors affirm the importance of identity and experience, but at the same time acknowledge the limitations of this affirmation for the development of effective methodological and political strategies. Osgoode Hall Law School What I feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you. I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex and class and sexual identity all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has never been done before.     

试析女性主义心理学的三种研究取向

西方主流心理学植根于经验实证主义传统,认为科学是客观的和价值中立的。这种观点与女性主义理论格格不入。女性主义心理学试图调和女性主义理论与传统心理科学观之间的冲突,在其研究历程中形成了三种研究取向：一是实证主义取向的女性主义心理学,强调遵循实证主义研究传统,重新改造主流的心理科学,以服务于女性主义目标;二是现象学取向的女性主义心理学,强调从女性立场出发,创建一个全新的,“以女性为中心”的心理科学来代替传统的心理科学;三是后现代取向的女性主义心理学,强调采用解构的方法,重新解读主流心理学中的关于女性的所谓“科学的”知识,揭示心理学中的男性中心主义偏见。     

Women's law: methods,problems, values

Conclusion The five areas of women's law that I have chosen to focus — money law, housewives' law, paid-work law, criminal law and birth law — represent different coordinating perspectives on women's legal position. These perspectives could certainly have been supplemented by others, for example, discrimination law. The feminist perspective can also be used in several traditional areas of legal science e.g., social insurance law, tax law, family law etc. I, however, have chosen a problematic other than the traditional one: first, to underline the importance of theory through the development ofconcepts anddiscussions of values in women's studies in general; and second, to indicate the especial fields in focus within the Institute of Women's Law at the University of Oslo. Through the perspective discussed in this article we think that we are on our way to describe, explain and understand women's legal status. The fundamental aim is to improve women's position both in law and society.     

The Continuing Problem of the Universal to Questions of Justice: A Feminist Reading of Lars von Trier’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Dogville</Emphasis>

What are the terms of evaluation that seem relevant in deciding whether a film is feminist or anti-feminist? Which critical practices should be engaged in such an evaluation? In recent and contemporary critical feminist practices, feminist arguments are no longer based on a stable subject category of “woman” and there is no longer any particular methodology upon which feminist theorists rely. The category of “woman” has been revealed to be not an ahistorical, stable category but an effect of material and representational practices. Further, feminist methodologies have been concerned to contextualize the framing of the questions they ask, as well as their place in the methodologies they employ. In addition to the refusal of an essentialized female subject, feminists have called into question the idea that it is possible to produce a “feminist method” based on the standpoint of a female subjectivity, even where this subjectivity is admitted as a construct, arguing that this extrapolation to the general from a particular point of view produces political, and frequently racist, effects. In this essay, I consider Lars von Trier’s controversial film Dogville (2003) as a case study to explore the relation of practices of representation to questions of feminist justice. I argue that the film does a lot of good critical work in showing the ways in which certain practices of representation can be mobilized to produce a collectivity (or “sovereignty”) that is seen to emanate from “the people” and to thereby instantiate authority, while simultaneously disguising the material and political effects of its subjugation of “others.” However, in doing this work the film produces its own problematic construction of universality and particularity. Further, the film instrumentalises representations of sexual violence and subjection in order to prove its point, and as productive as these tactics are to illuminating questions of social justice, I argue that this representational practice produces effects that need to be read as anti-feminist.     

Battered women: Implications for social control

This paper examines battered women as a systemic problem of social control, involving three structural phases: structure, deconstruction and reconstruction. At the first phase, woman battering occurs in a context of dependency, including economic, social, political, and emotional subordination that maintains the traditional, male-centered family structure. During phase two, or deconstruction, broad societal changes, including the feminist movement, contributes to altered gender definitions and the emergence of a battered women's movement and practice. During this phase feminists served as the chief reform catalyst, introducing protective legislation, educating the public and organizing women's shelters. Phase three, reconstruction, entails the state's direct involvement in the violent relationship in a series of coercive netwidening actions, including arrest of the offender, forcible separation of the couple, and formal sentencing. On the one hand, state intervention substantially reduces the incidence of violence against women in the home. On the other hand, the power of arrest and detention extends state power into new spheres, as the state exploits social problems and weakened social structures in line with its expanding control agenda. Overbureaucratization during this phase also affects feminist practice, as shelters increasingly take on a social provision, sometimes anti-feminist, orientation that further constrains who can be served. The paper raises questions about the extent to which the reconstruction phase, operating in the interests of dominant groups, contributes to the revictimization of battered women.     

Reassessing the Feminist Theoretical Project in Law

This article seeks to address the current state of theoretical debate within feminist legal studies in the United Kingdom and beyond. It is part map, part critique of dominant theoretical trends – an attempt to identify and explore a range of questions about feminist scholarly engagement in law, including the relationship between academic feminism and political activism, the distinction (if any) between 'feminist' analyses and broader engagements with law and gender, and the normative underpinnings of feminist legal scholarship. The author makes no pretence to neutrality on these issues, questioning the perceived 'drift' between political and academic feminism, and arguing strongly for the recognition and realization of feminism's normative and transformative aspirations. Similarly, she challenges the emergence of an 'anti-essentialist' norm in feminist discourse, and reaffirms the value of 'women-centred' feminist approaches. Finally, this article is also a personal venture, a 'stock-taking' exercise which seeks to interrogate the author's own understanding of what feminist legal work entails.     

Pornography and men's practices

Abstract

Summary: This article addresses the inter-relationship between pornography and sexual violence. Its particular focus is a political analysis of pornography within a context of gender politics, using concepts from feminist standpoint theory and recent theorising about men. It examines extant research concerning the effects of pornography, and critiques the predominantly positivist assumptions of such research. The article concludes with some ideas for enabling men to challenge pornography and its uses.     

Bruised Inside Out: The Adverse and Abusive Life Histories of Incarcerated Women as Pathways to PTSD and Illicit Drug Use

The majority of incarcerated women who suffer from diverse traumatic life histories including abusive home lives and intimate partner violence (IPV), develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and struggle with heavy illicit drug use. While many have offered examinations of these relationships, the current study is among the first to utilize an integrated feminist pathways and general strain theory (GST) approach to explain them. Using data from a stratified random sample of all incarcerated women in Oklahoma (N = 334), we explore the links between, adverse childhood experiences, including physical, sexual, emotional, and childhood neglect, IPV, PTSD, and heavy illicit drug use. Our findings indicate that the effects of IPV on heavy illicit drug use are mediated by PTSD symptoms suggesting that PTSD plays a significant role in the pathway to illicit drug use among Oklahoma women prisoners. Implications for the importance of utilizing an integrated feminist pathways and GST approach in future research are offered.     

不必重构我国刑法上的强奸罪——从比较法律文化的角度考察

域外强奸犯罪的立法变革源于其人权的张扬、女性运动的发展和对同性恋的宽容等社会现实引起的性文化观念的革新。在祖国大陆地区由于传统文化观念依然占据主流地位,女性的主体意识,特别是性主体意识和相应的文化观念尚未普遍形成,女性在社会经济文化生活中的地位制约着男女平等观念的确立;因此,在现有的制度和文化背景下,不宜立即变革强奸罪立法,而应当积极采取以司法个案判决的形式推进体现正义和平等的性文化观念,最终实现强奸罪的立法变革,这应当是目前我国大陆地区比较稳妥的做法。     

Broken Hearts and Battered Lives: Adverse and Abusive Life Histories and Externalized Responses to Anger as Pathways to Illicit Drug Use Among Incarcerated Women

Most incarcerated women suffer from adverse and abusive life histories, including adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as sexual, physical, emotional abuse, and neglect, and intimate partner violence (IPV). In addition, many have difficulties regulating their anger expression and most participate in illicit drug use. Although many have offered explanations for these relationships, the current study is among the first to utilize an integrated feminist pathways and general strain theory (GST) approach to explain them. Using data from a stratified random sample of all incarcerated women in Oklahoma (N?=?441), we explore the linkages between ACEs, IPV, the externalized expression of anger, and heavy illicit drug use. Our findings indicate that childhood physical and sexual abuse are significantly associated with externalized responses to anger. However, the effects of childhood adversities, particularly sexual abuse, on heavy illicit drug use are mediated by externalized responses to anger suggesting that anger plays a significant role in women’s pathways to illicit drug use. In contrast, and somewhat surprisingly, being a victim of IPV was negatively related to externalized responses to anger and not significantly related to illicit drug use. Implications for the importance of utilizing an integrated feminist pathways and GST approach in future research are offered.     

Revictimizing the victims? Interviewing women about interpersonal violence

Research on women's experiences of interpersonal violence has grown dramatically and, as a result, the ethical issues surrounding this research are a concern. Although regulatory procedures ensure that research participants are protected from undue risk, little is known about the impact of victimization research on participants. In this study, the authors examine the differences in the abilities of a "vulnerable" population (142 incarcerated women) to complete interviews about the extent and nature of their violent experiences. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors assess whether the prevalence and incidence of women's victimization experiences, other stressful life events, and personal backgrounds are related to response rates to specific questions and completion rates. The authors find that the cumulative effect of violence over the life course has a significant relationship to women's disclosure of sensitive issues and that providing multiple avenues for disclosure of prior victimization is critical for facilitating a positive outcome for research participants.     

The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and Terrorism

This article critiques and expands upon the jurisprudence of law’s violence from feminist and lesbian/gay/queer perspectives. The incorporation of gender and sexuality into the jurisprudence of law’s violence, via the social experiences of women and gay men, highlights the masculine and heteronormative character of law’s violence, while bringing into view particular forms of law’s violence, and forms of extra-legal but thoroughly legitimate heterosexual male violence, that have remained invisible in previous accounts. A feminist analysis of violence also suggests that law’s regime of violence is neither totalising nor inevitable, and that possibilities for resistance, if not avoidance, do exist.