NCJ Number
178593
Editor(s)
R. Emerson Dobash,
Russell P. Dobash
Date Published
1998
Length
276 pages
Annotation
This volume presents theories, methodologies, and policy analyses relating to various forms of violence against women; it represents the joint efforts of anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, and historians and is based on international workshops sponsored by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in 1993 and 1995.
Abstract
The text examines three topics: (1) the nature, importance, and variety of cultural contexts in which violence occurs, is reproduced, and may be challenged or changed; (2) the nature and variety of sexualized violence; and (3) a range of theoretical perspectives on the perpetrators of violence. The analyses examine the themes of authority, sexual propriety, asymmetry of violence, socialization, patterns and deviations of victims and offenders, individual accounts of violence against women, and social and cultural contexts. Individual chapters examine concepts and definitions, survey research and other methods of study, and the nature and extent of violence against women. Additional papers discuss offenders and male sexual aggression, institutional and social responses to sexual assault against females, female circumcision, and violence against women in societies under stress from political conflict. Further papers focus on masculine identity and violent men, attitudes and issues related to bodily movement and contact, and lethal and nonlethal violence against wives in relation to the evolutionary psychology of male sexual proprietariness. Figures, tables, index, and approximately 450 references (Publisher summary modified)