Handbook on Sexual Violence (36 page)

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References

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Richards, L., Letchford, S. and Stratton, S. (2008)
Policing Domestic Violence
, part of Blackstones practical policing series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stanko, E. (2000) ‘The Day to Count: a snapshot of the impact of domestic violence in the UK on 28 September 2000’,
Criminal Justice
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Stuart, E. and Campbell, J. (1989) ‘Assessment of patterns of dangerousness with battered women’,
Issues in Mental Health Nursing
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Walby, S. (2004)
The Cost of Domestic Violence
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Walby, S. (2009) T
he Cost of Domestic Violence: Update 2009
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Part Two
‌

Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Violence

Introduction
‌

Sandra Walklate and Jennifer Brown

As Joan McGregor has illustrated in Chapter
3, the law has provided a crucial and contested framework that has historically informed how sexual violence has been understood and responded to: hence the significance of feminist informed campaigns of different theoretical persuasions that have focused on the importance of the law as a vehicle for change. However, as Smart (1989) cogently argued, changes in the law have not necessarily yielded the kinds of reforms that feminists were looking for. The contemporary persistence of attrition in cases of rape, even in countries where the law has been changed to make the act less penis- and heterosexual-centred and more accommodating of different weapons, orifices and sexualities, stands as testimony to the resistance of the law in theory to impact upon the law in practice. (See in particular Daly and Bouhours 2009; Lovett and Kelly 2009.) Part of the explanation for that continued resistance lies with the central preoccupation of the law with incidents, and the provision of evidence associated with particular incidents, as opposed to the processes that comprise real life. This preoccupation with incidents not only drives how the law itself makes sense of the cases brought before it, but also informs much criminal justice practice. In cases of sexual violence this classically presents itself as ‘her word against his’ and the need for corroborative evidence to support ‘her words’. Given the seriousness of the likely punishment outcomes for a defendant found guilty of rape, such a concern with evidence ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is perhaps understandable but not necessarily in and of itself defensible. In this part of this book we gain an insight into how disciplines outside of the law frame sexual violence, and the implications that these different ways of thinking might have for criminal justice practice.

The emphasis here then is on how different theoretical perspectives define and understand sexual violence. We are primarily concerned with what can be gained from appreciating the commonalities and differences between different disciplinary takes on sexual violence and what can be learned about the nature and extent of sexual violence if we adopt an interdisciplinary position on this topic. Thus by implication this
section of the book challenges disciplinary boundaries and pushes at the limits that they have historically imposed upon work in this area. Here we have four different disciplinary contributions. Helen Jones considers the kinds of sociological questions that the problem of

sexual violence poses. Jennifer Brown offers an overview of psychological perspectives. Arlene Vetere takes us through an appreciation of how a clinician might approach sexual violence and Jo Phoenix looks to consider the nature of our understandings of sexual violence that occurs when the sexual is conjoined with the economic as in prostitution. Ruth Mann considers the efficacy of these different perspectives for criminal justice practice. Each of these different perspectives poses different questions for Kelly’s concept of continuum and, as we shall see, each adds further subtle and nuanced dimensions to our understanding of it.

In Chapter
8, Helen Jones asks a very clear and straightforward question: what can sociological analysis tell us about sexual violence? She offers us a way of thinking about an answer to this question through addressing what kinds of light the classic sociological perspectives might throw on it. In doing this she provides us with three different ways of answering: by considering what function sexual violence performs for society; who benefits from it, and what understandings are attached to it. At the heart of Jones’s analysis of each of these answers is the problem of measurement and what is included and excluded when researchers proceed to measure the nature and extent of sexual violence. (This also resonates with some of the issues raised by Jan Jordan in Chapter
12.) For Jones, the historical exclusion of sexual violence in the context of war is particularly problematic in this respect (adding a significant dimension to Kelly’s work), but perhaps more significantly for a sociological analysis is that, in her view, violence evades definition at all if it is not recognised as rooted in the structural foundations of societal behaviour. Hence the need to reflect on the myths that surround rape that also support those structural foundations, at the centre of which, she suggests, is the notion of the ideal family. This family is classically formed around a heterosexual (married) partnership and is especially focused on child rearing. It is an image that erases anything problematic associated with such family life and is a concept on which much sociological and policy responses to rape have been built.

In a somewhat different vein, though interestingly posing a similar question to Jones, Jennifer Brown, in Chapter
7, starts by asking us to think about what Kelly’s concept of continuum presumes to be ‘normal’ in the context of sexual violence. Brown takes Kelly’s conceptual approach forward by arguing that whilst it is not tenable to say that all sexual violence is committed by those deemed ‘mad’ or abnormal, by the same token it is not viable to adopt the position that such violence is all routinised and normal. Taking five categories of sexual violence (that resonate with the acts of sexual violence subjected to detailed scrutiny within this book), Brown explores the common features between them (unacknowledged victimisation that echoes the work of Jan Jordan, under-reporting that is also commented on by Helen Jones, and perceptions of false allegations) but proceeds then to analyse these acts in terms of what it is that is known about their perpetrators. In a fascinating analysis of existing knowledge of offenders, Brown offers us a complex but none the less meaningful framework for making sense of the ways in which different types of sexual violence are overlaid with different kinds of offenders and the ways in which these may or may not shade into one another. So, for

example, stalking behaviour may relate to murder and rape in a different way to the way in which stalking behaviour relates to domestic violence. Moreover, whilst Brown’s analysis is heavily reliant on what is known psychologically about known offenders, she nevertheless makes a convincing case for a more inclusive definition of sexual violence concerning who can do what to whom. Arlene Vetere, in Chapter
9, is also concerned with known offenders but from a clinical perspective. Interestingly, at the centre of her approach are three concepts: risk, responsibility and collaboration. All of which are worked through as a process with the parties concerned. The focus on process is key to the establishment of a sound working relationship with the people they are concerned with. The aim of this working relationship is to produce a reflective space in which the individuals themselves can come to terms with their responsibility for their violent behaviour. In an interesting example, one man who had hit his daughter in contravention of their ‘no violence contract’ commented, ‘but I didn’t hit you like a man’. This distancing from responsibility for violence is also observed by Kewley in Chapter
17 and is also raised by Ruth Mann in Chapter
11. The ability to recognise, embrace and to challenge such distancing practices in such a way that perpetrators recognise their responsibility for their behaviour is considered central to the success of clinical interventionist work. None of this implies making excuses for violence but does involve recognising the processes that result in violence, trying to understand them and what triggers a violent response; whether that be excessive use of alcohol or what Vetere refers to as the ‘paradox of power’. This paradox is a way of trying to capture how the use of violence may be born out of fear but results in the victim nevertheless feeling the offender’s power. Whilst more relationship-focused than other perspectives so far discussed, this clinical approach nevertheless recognises the gendered nature of sexual violence alongside the perspectives discussed by Jones and Brown. The gendered nature of sexual violence is also the starting point for Jo Phoenix’s analysis of the relationship between sexual violence and economics. In Chapter
10 Phoenix encourages us to think very hard about the ways in which prostitution, as an institution, blurs the boundaries between behaviour regarded as intimate and private and an activity (like paying for a service) usually regarded as public, like economics and associated regulatory activities. In the context of the violence that occurs as part of prostitution as an institution, Phoenix argues that Kelly’s concept of a continuum conflates as much as it reveals. This she suggests results from the fact that Kelly’s work, whilst hugely impactive in shifting thinking on violence that centred women’s experiences, was ahistorical and asocial. Phoenix raises these issues as significant since the tendency with work on prostitution is to prioritise the selling of sex as problematic. This does two things: first it denies the reality of prostitution as an institution that perhaps more accurately needs to be referred to as ‘prostitutions’; and, second, it silences questions around the impact of both regulatory activities and economic drivers on those women who choose to sell sex. As a result ‘sex worker’ becomes the ‘master’ status that denies other aspects of both women’s lives and the institution in which they work. The denial of the structurally specific context in which women make these kinds of choices is problematic since it is this structural specificity that is key to

understanding the relationship between sexual violence and economics. It is the lack of structural specificity that Phoenix finds problematic with the concept of a continuum. Such a call for ‘analytical specificity’ enables us to situate the violence that occurs under these circumstances in the context of wider cultural processes (for example, changes in attitudes about what might be considered ‘degrading’ in terms of sexuality, suggesting some resonance with the position adopted by Jones) and within the specific context of women’s lives: women who (rather like the subjects of Matza’s 1964 classic study of young delinquents) may drift in and out of prostitution as their economic needs dictate. Phoenix’s analysis in no way suggests that extreme violence does not occur (like that for example documented by Anette Ballinger in Chapter
14) but she is suggesting that it is important not to conflate prostitutions into prostitution, or prostitute into prostitutes. The latter, of course, in particular results in male prostitution being hidden both for men and for women.