“Violence is everywhere!” An analysis of children's narratives on violence

Exposure to violence is a threat to the health and well-being of society, especially for children. Previous research on youth exposure to violence has focused primarily on the implications for victims or the treatment of the offenders. While some research has concentrated on the lived experience of the children subjected to violence, it has generally been defined within a specific domain such as domestic violence or bullying. Using student essays available from the “Do the Write Thing” (DtWT) Challenge, this research explored significant issues of violence as experienced by middle school children in southeast Texas. This research used a thematic approach for a qualitative analysis of 132 essays submitted during the 2015 school year. Essays were coded and categorized to identify major themes of how children describe their experience of violence and assign meaning to violence in their lives. Several themes within three domains (cognitive, social and moral) arose including the pervasiveness of violence, feelings of helplessness, and violence as “wrong.” Results indicate that students wrote most about personal experiences and how violence permeates their daily lives. Implications for practice and services to children are discussed.     

‘Feel what I feel’: making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters

Abstract

Inspired by feminist new materialist and posthuman activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what happens when data entangles with arts-based methodologies in a school-based participatory activist project with six teen girls (age 15) on gender-based and sexual violence. Mapping the journey of how data become da(r)ta and how da(r)ta become d/artaphacts, the paper follows how the Runway of Disrespect, the Shame Chain, the Ruler-Skirt and the Tagged Heart ripple through peer cultures, school assemblies and national policy landscapes. Each journey provides a small glimpse into how bodies, space, objects, affects and discourse ‘intra-act’ in dynamic assemblages to produce d/artaphacts crafted from and carrying experience. The paper concludes to consider the ethical-political affordances of how participatory arts-based methodologies and the im/personal vitality of objects might support young people to safely and creatively communicate and potentially transform oppressive sexual cultures and practices.     

“Excuse Me,But Are You Raping Me Now?” Discourse and Experience in (the Grey Areas of) Sexual Violence

In feminist research on sexual violence and victimization, the relationship between discourse and experience has often been at the forefront of intense debates. Poststructuralist scholars have emphasized that the discourses used to name sexual violence may in fact perpetuate the very problem they set out to describe, by freezing women into powerless positions of rapability. Others have likened this sort of argument to anti-feminist trivialization of the pervasively gendered experiential reality to which such discourses refer, highlighting that women’s victimization is not a discursive problem. In this article, I seek to carve out a path that cuts through such polarization by exploring the multifaceted dialectical relationship between, on one hand, gendered discourses on sex and sexual violence and, on the other, people’s reported experiences of these phenomena and, in particular, of the “grey area” between sex and sexual violence. I do this by analysing autobiographical stories from the influential Swedish campaign #prataomdet (#talkaboutit), which emphasized the need for a new language that can do justice to people’s experiences of sexual violence and the grey area between sex and sexual violence.     

(Re)centering street harassment – an appraisal of safe cities global initiative in Delhi,India

Abstract

In 2012, New Delhi (India) was catapulted into the global limelight for the brutal gang rape of a 23-year old woman travelling in a bus. This wasn’t the first time that sexual violence had been perpetrated on the streets of Delhi and nor would it be the last. Yet this universal fact of everyday violence in public spaces particularly streets, though acknowledged by activists and feminists, has been examined minimally in academic scholarship. Further, even though the United Nations has been instrumental in foregrounding gender-based violence as a critical human rights issue, it has only recently turned its attention to street harassment through its ‘Safe Cities Global Initiative’. Therefore, in this paper, we trace how a routine but understudied form of violence becomes central to United Nations’ agenda to eliminate violence against women. By specifically, analysing the Delhi Safe Cities programme as a case study, our second contribution lies in examining the adequacy of the contemporary Safe Cities framework as a model for addressing sexual violence in public space. We conclude the paper by offering critical conceptual and methodological recommendations to further strengthen the framework.     

Cross-gender Violence Perpetration and Victimization Among Early Adolescents and Associations with Attitudes Toward Dating Conflict

This study examined gender differences in cross-gender violence perpetration and victimization (ranging from mild, e.g., push, to severe, e.g., assault with a knife or gun) and attitudes toward dating conflict, among an urban sample of 601 early adolescents (78% African-American). Comparisons across gender groups for cross-gender (e.g., female-to-male) violence perpetration and victimization indicated higher levels of perpetration for girls and higher levels of victimization for boys. Girls also reported higher levels of verbal and physical violence toward partners with regard to attitudes toward dating conflict. A path model was specified and indicated that cross-gender violence perpetration, harsh parenting, peer deviance, low family income, and neighborhood hazards accounted for significant variation in attitudes toward dating conflict. Findings were discussed regarding the need to identify developmental precursors of dating violence in early adolescence and to focus prevention efforts on components (e.g., social skills, coping strategies) necessary to prevent the onset and escalation of adolescent dating violence.

Terrorist violence and the enrollment of psychology in predicting Muslim extremism: critical terrorism studies meets critical algorithm studies

Discourse on terrorist violence has long facilitated an especially liberal form of securitisation. Originally evoked in reference to anarchists and communists, a rational consideration of terrorist violence, inaugurated by the concept, asks for deferred judgement about the nature of, or reasons behind, violence related to terror on the premise that state and international legal norms governing the legitimate use of violence fail to circumscribe the proper capacities of the state to regulate and explain terrorism. Where sovereign powers along with their military and civilian instruments of coercion are deemed unable to regulate violence effectively, analysts of terrorist violence and their readership are invited to consider and cultivate new sensibilities. Beginning in the 1980s, studies by psychologists found renewed urgency among a growing cadre of interdisciplinary terror experts who found religion, Islam especially, a key variable of analysis. I situate their contributions in a longer history of secular and racialising discourse about terrorist violence. Central to this history are practices of reading, translating, interpreting and archiving texts. Evidence for the argument is based on the analysis of an algorithm that allegedly predicts the likelihood of terrorist strikes by counting words spoken by al-Qa?ida leaders and correlating their frequency with over 30 psychological categories.     

Women’s experiences of peacebuilding in violence-affected communities in Kenya

Despite the attention to gender and conflict in empirical positivist peace research, and the interest in local agency in recent peacebuilding literature, women’s understandings and lived experiences of peacebuilding are not necessarily well accounted for. This article, drawing on interviews, focus groups and observation research with 57 female victims/survivors of post-election violence in Kenya, provides an ethnographic study of women’s largely informal peacebuilding activities, ranging from mediation and dialogue to economic empowerment. It analyses women’s constructions and ways of making sense of being peacebuilders, demonstrating that, while participants employed dominant gender frames, they exerted considerable transformative agency in their communities. It argues that their ‘gendered responsibility for peace’ at community level is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. The research aims to increase understanding of the gendered nature of peacebuilding and the ways in which women exercise peacebuilding agency through a focus on their own voices and lived experiences.     

‘Are We Still Running?’: Violent Migration to Violent Refuge

For most foreign nationals of African origin who lived in South Africa during 2008 and 2015, this period will be remembered with horror and fear. These were the years when South Africa’s growing culture of xenophobia matured into mass deadly violence. This violence has been widely reported in the press and is the subject of much scholarly engagement. The pre-migration life stories of many who take refuge in South Africa are laden with violence but such narratives are less well known and reported. The forces at home that propel migration are frequently excessively violent and traumatic. Once in South Africa, many migrants experience further violence and vulnerability in their places of refuge, as in 2008 and 2015. The violence fuelling migration and characterising refuge are thus tragic combinations of multiple forms of physical, symbolic and structural violence. In identifying repeated cycles of trauma, dehumanisation and vulnerability, this article discusses the pleas of migrants for better understanding, formal recognition and support from South African citizens and the government. Finally, the role of peace education, including healing interventions, for creating greater justice and harmony between foreign nationals and their host communities is discussed.     

A Model for Female-Perpetrated Domestic Violence

Child abuse often coexists with intimate partner violence. However, limited studies incorporate both phenomena in a single study. Moreover, the examination of female-on-male violence is an important development. Hence, an intrinsic case study of domestic violence is presented to provide insights regarding the nature and impact of female-perpetrated violence. The research approach was qualitative and demonstrated that a model for abusive behavior seems to be similar for both sexes. The data revealed theoretical trends such as the reality of an intergenerational transmission of violence into adulthood, as well as abusive partners presenting with borderline traits.     

Vigilante justice and informal policing in post-Euromaidan Ukraine

During and after the Euromaidan, the Ukrainian society experienced an emergence of non-state groups that combined elements of civic activism and paramilitarism. They operated independently from the state and often used extra-legal violence to restore law and order, deliver justice, and protect Ukraine from external and internal threats. Their conduct closely resembles vigilantism. This article draws on the body of criminological and sociological research on vigilantism in order to understand the diverse landscape of vigilante groups in post-Euromaidan Ukraine. It explores the complex relationship between the most representative vigilante groups, the Ukrainian government, and the political and business elites; analyzes the legal boundaries of vigilantism in Ukraine; and discusses the outcomes of vigilante justice for democratic consolidation, rule of law, and human rights. This article offers a new paradigm for theorizing popular mobilization in Ukraine and sheds light on important dimensions of the formation of an informal system of policing and justice.