Handbook on Sexual Violence (107 page)

To summarise, the breadth and depth of analysis offered by the contributors to this book conveys a number of messages: the influence of second-wave feminism as articulated by the intervention of Kelly; the persistent conceptual power of the deserving victim, victim-blaming, and associated processes of silencing; the recourse to violence primarily by men; and, despite a wealth of policy activity, the evidence that little progress seems to have been made in seriously changing behaviour. The question remains: why? In what follows we sketch out one way of making sense of the ambivalences that evidently remain towards sexual violence.

Gender mainstreaming and gender violence

One way of making sense of the issues presented in this book is to situate them within the broader context of gender mainstreaming. Given the importance of the role of international organisations like the United Nations and the European Community in endeavours to tackle gender inequalities (and that includes sexual violence) in their member organisations, this makes sense since it is through the conduit of gender mainstreaming that sexual violence has become a part of the agenda for these organisations. Indeed Walby (2009) argues that sexual violence is the fourth domain in which gender inequalities become institutionalised. Nancy Fraser (2009) posits that as a result of these activities, gender equality is now part of the social mainstream agenda but has yet to be realised in practice. Whilst Fraser (2009) is addressing a wide range of equality issues (unequal pay and so on), the gap between theory and practice that she comments on is very resonant of the observations made in the chapters of this book and the implementation process discussed above. However, in the light of the gap between theory and practice, her question is:

‘is it possible that the cultural changes jump started by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society?’ (
ibid
.: 99). As unpalatable as this question might appear to be, especially for those committed to the feminist movement, in asking it, we are forced to consider its implications as one way of making sense of the ambivalent relationship between what it is that is known about sexual violence and what it is that is done about such violence documented in this book.

In the context of debates around gender mainstreaming Walby (2005) reminds us that the terms themselves, gender equality and gender mainstreaming, represent a dualism. This dualism has embedded within it a number of policy possibilities in terms of process and outcome that reflect different models of equality: sameness, difference or transformation. These models of equality are familiar territory to feminist debate, but in the context of contemporary policy responses to sexual violence, it is possible to identify some of the tensions that gender mainstreaming and these different models of equality pose. At a fairly superficial level, but nonetheless significant, many public (and other) bodies have substituted the word gender for sex in such practices as how they survey their employees (asking such questions as what gender are you, followed by the options male or female!) as though this change in and of itself solves the gender inequality problem. At a deeper level, however, a change in terminology like this reflects an inability to grasp what the term gender actually means and thereby fails to recognise the possibilities of difference and transformation. Put simply it buys into ‘one size fits all’ policy responses. This is perhaps most usefully illustrated by the way in which risk and risk assessment practices (commented on in this volume by Kemshall and Westmarland) have spiralled up the policy agenda, not just for responding to offenders but also responding to ‘at risk’ victims.

Of course, as Robinson and Rowlands (2009: 191) suggest, risk assessment tools have their uses. They structure police response, aid resource allocation, and through information sharing raise awareness of safety issues for all concerned. However, the constraints imposed on these uses by the concept of risk itself need to be considered. As Robinson and Rowlands (2009) comment, risk assessment tools for ‘at risk’ victims implicitly reflect a normative heterosexism. This assumption includes and excludes all at the same time: a failure to recognise difference. In particular being identified ‘at risk’ has replaced an appreciation of cause and/or need understood in
context
. In other words not only does risk assessment erase individual experience situated within a particular socio-structural environment, it presumes all ‘at risk’ victims are the same. Thus the desire to prevent and extinguish interpersonal violence, especially partner violence, has proceeded to transpose
relationships
, which include, or once included, and may indeed continue to include, feelings like love and desire, into
risk factors
that can be measured and managed. (See also the discussion of risk assessment in Jennifer Brown’s chapter in this book.) Such a transposition reflects the deeply embedded embrace of risk as a forensic concept (Douglas 1990) in which risk itself is understood as uniform and unifying (O’Malley 2006). Nowhere is this more the case than within the criminal justice process in which risk creep, and its material translation into risk assessment tools, serves to protect those charged with protecting us: the

criminal justice professionals (see also Kemshall and Maguire 2001: 256).

Such risk creep also creates a degree of complacency as has been shown in recent cases investigated by the IPCC. In a recent case in Essex, IPCC Commissioner Len Jackson said:

Our investigation found serious failings on the part of officers both individually and collectively in their response to allegations made by a highly vulnerable woman. Her serious allegations deserved a far more sympathetic, professional and determined response by Essex Police. A man has been imprisoned for a sexual assault, but it was only following the entreaties of the victim’s family that a full criminal investigation was undertaken.

We have substantiated a number of complaints made by the family including that the lack of positive action by officers was adversely influenced by the woman’s mental health history. Police wrongly focused on the existence of a mental health condition, yet for instance failed to make arrangements for possible DNA evidence to be secured at the scene, despite the woman offering such evidence to the officers. I remain saddened for the victim and her family who have conducted themselves with great dignity throughout these protracted proceedings.

The lack of help and support for this particular victim on two separate, traumatic occasions back in 2007
did not stem from poor policies
– those policies, since updated, were in place. It stemmed from very poor policing and totally inadequate supervision. (emphasis added)

These words powerfully illustrate not only the problem of the implementation gap discussed above but also the problems that lie within presumptions of who and who is not ‘at risk’ and why. As an example it also adds some weight to the observations made by Walklate (2008: 48), who asked: ‘who is imagined in the recourse to law as a response to violence against women?’ She goes on to argue that,

On the surface, it may appear that the needs of women as voiced by feminist campaigns have been so imagined. But have they? A deeper analysis might suggest that these imaginings have rather been the needs of the criminal justice process itself alongside those that inhabit this space.

(Walklate 2008: 49)

In similar vein, by not only embracing risk assessment tools, but also demonstrating their deployment, it is possible for the criminal justice system and professionals to exhibit ‘accountability’ despite the shortcomings of that process. In this desire to demonstrate responsiveness and accountability, there is little space to accommodate the ‘irrational life’ of the individual; the kind of life that fails to fit with the expectations of the professional. The use of risk in this way integrates gender as a concern but fails to transform understandings of gender and thus simultaneously serves to deny difference and complex inequalities. It also reflects a tendency not to listen to women themselves and

to appreciate the lived reality of their everyday lives (see also Miller and Meloy 2006).

To return to the question posed by Mooney for a moment that was quoted earlier; as she suggests, the values whereby men’s violence to women is sustained in the face of public imperatives otherwise ‘exist throughout the width and breadth of popular culture’ (Mooney 2007: 169). For example, consider the vicarious pleasure gained by some young males in witnessing violence on a ‘good night out’ (Winlow and Hall 2006). Thus violence becomes ‘folded into everyday life’, an ‘intertwining of the descent into the ordinary’ in which ‘ordinary people become scarred’ (Das 2007); like when a woman living with violence judges that the risk of poverty and homelessness are worse than the violence she knows she will be subjected to (see also Genn 1988; Kirkwood 1993). This is her version of risk assessment and is not necessarily reflective of the violence of risk assessment tools or risk factors. This is the ordinary violence of everyday life. In fading out the voices of those who ‘know otherwise’, as Jordan in this volume suggests, this ordinariness of violence is rendered absent. So, to answer Mooney (2007), this is one way in which violence can be both public anathema and a private commonplace all at the same time. Thus unless we understand the ‘lived reality’ of, on the one hand, practitioners who are driven to take questions of gender and/or sexual violence seriously and, on the other hand, people’s routine experiences of violence in their sociocultural context, we may forever be taking two steps forward and one step back and face the problems of the implementation gap. This last observation, however, leads us to consider processes that are arguably much deeper than the embrace of gender mainstreaming and an appreciation of its internal inconsistencies permits. This question raises the spectre of neo- liberalism and the relationship of second-wave feminism with it implied by Fraser’s (2009) question.

Feminism and the concession to neo-liberalism?

Fraser’s (2009) question of the relationship between second-wave feminism and neo-liberalism is as uncomfortable as it is telling: is it possible that second- wave feminism has inadvertently contributed to the legitimation of neo- liberalism? As she observes, second-wave feminism coincided with the emergence of neo-liberalism and thrived under the conditions of privatisation, deregulation and imperatives for personal responsibility, and it is these conditions which, she suggests, facilitated the ‘resignification’ of feminist ideals. So, as neo-liberalism took a hold, the feminist challenge to the economy, in which women suffered from (mis)distribution, (mis)recognition and (mis)representation, became resignified as claims for justice centred on identity and difference. Neo-liberalism in its very essence can handle claims of difference and identity as simultaneously it struggles with claims rooted in class. In other words, under the conditions of neo-liberalism, feminist claims for recognition became separated from the feminist critique of capitalism. For example, the feminist challenge to the androcentric nature of the labour market, typified in the valorisation of waged work, has become revalorised as

women entered the ‘flexible’ labour market and there emerged a ‘new romance of female advancement and gender justice’ (Fraser 2009: 110). Thus women at both the top and the bottom of the labour market are differently tied to the process of capitalist accumulation. The feminist desire to democratise state institutions to promote gender justice through citizen participation has become resignified as citizen empowerment in ‘the big society’ (in contemporary UK politics) in which the state is considered to be increasingly redundant. Finally, whilst second-wave feminism had an ambivalent relationship with debates around the nation state, this has been resignified in what Fraser (2009) refers to as the ngo-ification of feminist politics well represented at the UN and elsewhere where indeed the pressure towards gender mainstreaming, as observed earlier, has been evident. As a result, and it is worth quoting Fraser (2009: 113) at length on this:

... this capitalism [neo-liberalism] would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution, as it builds a new regime of accumulation on the corner stone of women’s wage labour and seeks to disembed markets from social regulation in order to operate all the more freely on a global scale.

Thus second-wave feminism has become an unhappy bedfellow of neo- liberalism similar to the way in which both those of the far right and feminists would like to ban pornography; an alliance produced from very different motivations. In the context of criminal justice policy, Fraser’s observations add significantly to Garland’s (2001) analysis of a ‘culture of control’. The adaptation to failure of the criminal justice system to solve the problem of crime, alongside the emergence of performance indicators under the guise of new managerialism, informs the specific institutional setting in which many of the policy initiatives introduced in the UK need to be understood: a particular manifestation of neo-liberalism.

Fraser (2009) takes this opportunity to suggest that now is the time to reconnect feminism with systemic rather than individual subordination. However, her socio-historical analysis raises some interesting questions for the dilemmas that this edited collection foregrounds. Has the ‘progress’ that has been made in the recognition of sexual violence merely been a product of a particular historical epoch? Are the tensions that are observed around that ‘progress’ a reflection of the resignification of feminist concerns to match with the demands of neo-liberalism? Or, might some of the changes that have occurred during this epoch be deeper and longer-lasting? Has there been any real transformation? We have yet perhaps to find out.

Conclusion: the future – a crisis or a double movement?

As suggested above, for Fraser the 2008–10 crisis of neo-liberalism affords feminism the opportunity to reconnect with the question of women’s systemic subordination. However, the likely success of such a strategy may well depend upon whether or not there has been any real institutional transformation as a