Preventing Sexual Violence

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Overcoming a Rape Culture

N. Henry, A. Powell, N. Henry, A. Powell, N. Henry, A. Powell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137356192
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

While there is much agreement about the scope of sexual violence, how to go about preventing it before it occurs is the subject of much debate. This unique interdisciplinary collection investigates the philosophy and practice of primary prevention of sexual violence within education institutions and the broader community.

1

Framing Sexual Violence Prevention

What Does It Mean to Challenge a Rape Culture?

Anastasia Powell and Nicola Henry

Introduction

The startling findings across various country and multi-country studies on sexual violence unequivocally point to what the World Health Organization (WHO, 2013, p.2) describes as a ‘pervasive [ … ] global public health problem of epidemic proportions’. In the first study of aggregated global and regional prevalence estimates for intimate partner and non-intimate partner sexual violence, the WHO (2013) found that overall 35 per cent of women worldwide reported having experienced either physical or sexual violence by a partner, or sexual violence by a friend, family member, acquaintance or stranger. Police data consistently show that while men report experiencing more physical, non-sexual violence than women, women continue to represent the majority of victims of sexual violence, while perpetrators are overwhelmingly, although not exclusively, male. Young women continue to be at highest risk of experiencing sexual violence, and most likely at the hands of a known man, such as a boyfriend, friend or acquaintance, rather than at the hands of a stranger (for prevalence studies, see, for example, ABS, 2006; 2013; Basile et al., 2007; Black et al., 2011; Fulu et al., 2013; Heenan & Murray, 2006; Mouzos & Makkai, 2004; Office for National Statistics (UK), 2013).

The statistics only tell half a story, yet they can be utilised to paint a gloomy picture of the widespread, persistent and systemic problem of sexual violence – and more generally, gender-based violence or violence against women. While scholars and practitioners routinely agree about the scope of the problem, there is much disagreement about how to prevent and ultimately eradicate all forms of sexual violence.¹ The public health model, advocated by governments, organisations and institutions globally, tends to describe sexual violence as an ‘epidemic’. Accordingly, sexual violence is treated as a disease that can be eradicated before it occurs, or before it ‘spreads’ further into the community. This approach enables the identification of adverse social, economic and psychological ‘public health’ impacts on victims, while squarely positioning violence against women as prevalent and serious – but preventable. While it is important to be optimistic about eradicating all forms of violence against women (as many public health models are – see discussion below), a disease-centred model runs the risk of individualising both the causes and impacts of violence, and as such it may fail to address the structural and cultural ‘scaffolding’ of men’s violence against women (Gavey, 2005).

Rather than focusing on individual risk factors for either sexual violence perpetration or victimisation, many feminist scholars conversely argue that the focus instead should be on the social structures that underpin the perpetration of sexual violence.² Feminist scholars, practitioners and activists pejoratively refer to a ‘rape culture’ as the social, cultural and structural discourses and practices in which sexual violence is tolerated, accepted, eroticised, minimised and trivialised (Buchwald et al., 1993; 2005; Gavey, 2005). In a rape culture, violence against women is eroticised in literary, cinematic and media representations; victims are routinely disbelieved or blamed for their own victimisation; and perpetrators are rarely held accountable or their behaviours are seen as excusable or understandable (see Burt, 1980; MacKinnon, 1987; Suarez & Gadalla, 2010). These manifestly sexist attitudes and beliefs about rape, rape victims and rapists do not exist in isolation but rather are part of a broader manifestation of gender inequality, prevalent in the language, laws and institutions that are supposed to criminalise, challenge and prevent sexual violence but instead perpetuate, support, condone or reflect these values (see Smart, 1989; Temkin, 2002). Resistance to changing or challenging this rape culture can also be found in the erroneous but deeply embedded belief that rape is an inevitable and natural fact of life (Marcus, 1992).³

Whether drawing on prevalence statistics and public health impacts, or on critiques of gender-based inequalities, what feminist and public health models of sexual violence have in common is the desire to prevent and eradicate sexual violence. Indeed, owing to the dynamic development of these diverse models, over the past decade the field of sexual violence prevention has undergone an enormous shift both pragmatically and theoretically. Emerging out of the women’s movement and grass-roots efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to secure support services for victim-survivors of rape, early efforts tended to focus on what women can do to avoid rape, such as how to avoid risk in public spaces and how to defend oneself against a potential predator (see Bart & O’Brien, 1984; Levine-MacCombie & Koss, 1986). Following the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, governments too began directing greater policy attention to the prevention of sexual violence. In the United States, for example, the 1994 Violence Against Women Act committed federal funding for prevention of sexual and intimate partner violence, among other policy measures, including victim support services. Since 2000, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has received additional federal funding to develop a programme of research into public health models to prevent sexual violence (Degue et al., 2012; CDC, 2004).⁴ In the same period, the WHO published several key research reports on sexual and intimate partner violence and advocated a public health approach to preventing violence against women ‘before it occurs’ (WHO, 2002; 2007; 2010; 2013). The last five years have seen a burgeoning of state and federal government policy and programmes directed at the primary prevention of sexual violence in countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.

Drawing significantly on the public health approach, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives across education, criminology, gender studies, law, psychology, social work and sociology, ‘primary prevention’ refers to strategies that seek to prevent sexual violence before it occurs. Prevention efforts are commonly directed towards addressing the key underlying causes of sexual violence, including cultural attitudes, values, beliefs and norms about masculinity, sexuality, gender and violence. These efforts include interventions that focus on building the knowledge and/or skills of individuals in order to change their behaviour, such as social marketing campaigns, community theatre and/or public art projects, as well as education programmes in high schools and university campuses. Yet primary prevention also incorporates strategies that are directed towards changing organisational, community, institutional and societal cultures and structures to address underlying causes of violence, such as gender inequality, sexism, discrimination and socio-economic deprivation.

The rapid rise of primary prevention approaches to sexual violence represents a substantial shift from strategies directed at women to strategies directed at changing the socio-cultural and socio-structural causes of sexual violence. The implications of this shift for how we address sexual violence through policy, law, education and our broader community are yet to be fully realised. Indeed, to date, the field of sexual violence prevention remains significantly under-theorised. This book is the first to draw together a unique collection of internationally renowned scholars writing about the issue of primary prevention of sexual violence. The chapters in the collection are informed by analytical frameworks and strategies across key fields, including criminology, education, health promotion, law, psychology, social work, socio-legal studies, sociology and women’s studies. The book provides a much-needed theoretical and empirical investigation of primary prevention, which is lacking in the existing sexual violence literature.

This chapter provides a brief background and conceptual framework for exploring the promises and the perils of the emerging field of primary prevention of sexual violence. The chapter will introduce several key themes to be further developed across the book, including the role that structural violence and inequality play in fostering a ‘culture’ of sexual violence; the relationship between the macro- and micro-levels for understanding both sexual violence perpetration and prevention; the role of bystanders and community initiatives; the normalisation of sexual violence in certain cross-cultural contexts; and the benefits of multi-disciplinary approaches to addressing and preventing sexual violence to effect substantive cultural change. The first part of the chapter critically examines three conceptual frameworks for the primary prevention of sexual violence, before then addressing some of the key tensions and challenges inherent in current theoretical and practical approaches to primary prevention. The final section provides an overview of each contributing chapter to this collection.

How to prevent sexual violence? Conceptual frameworks and accompanying strategies

The conceptual frameworks with which we seek to understand sexual violence have important implications for what we do in practice. Indeed, different prevention frameworks draw on different understandings of the problem of sexual violence and are open to divergent limitations or critiques. For example, some feminist engagements with sexual violence prevention have been critiqued for focusing too strongly on gender, while marginalising other factors such as ethnicity, sexuality and socio-economic status, or for focusing on what women can do to ‘protect themselves’ from men’s violence. Classic crime prevention frameworks have likewise long been criticised for focusing on protecting the ‘targets’ of crime (often conceived of in terms of property rather than people) and less commonly focusing on attempts to change the behaviour of offenders themselves. Public health models, meanwhile, tend to be more inclusive in their focus on a broad range of causal factors, but in doing so they risk marginalising strategies that address systemic gender inequalities or the human rights basis for action to prevent violence (Daykin & Naidoo, 1995).

The following sections will briefly outline each of these three key frameworks and their contribution to sexual violence prevention. Ultimately, we suggest that primary prevention of sexual violence means challenging the socio-cultural and socio-structural basis of rape, and it is this broad approach to primary prevention that underpins each of the chapters in this book.

Sexual violence as a socio-cultural and socio-structural problem

Feminist theory and action over the last 40 years have persistently challenged the silence surrounding sexual violence, and the idea that it is a matter exclusively for the private realm. A range of strategies have been deployed to bring sexual violence firmly into public discourse and debate, and ultimately to eradicate this form of violence. Law and policy reform, crisis support services, community programmes, school curricula, awareness-raising resources (such as posters, pamphlets, stickers, billboards and films), mainstream media interviews and articles, public shaming of alleged and convicted rapists, street marches such as ‘Reclaim the Night’ and ‘Slut Walk’, and online campaigns through blogs, petitions and social media have all contributed to an alternative discourse on sexual violence and a challenge to a ‘culture’ of rape. While feminist approaches to prevention are many and varied (as are feminist thinking and activism), feminist-informed frameworks remain central to sexual violence prevention. At their core, these frameworks share the central tenet that gender inequality and gender relations underpin sexual violence (Evans et al., 2009).

As Carmody (2009, p.3) writes, early feminist approaches to rape prevention problematically tended to ‘deny the diversity of women’s experience of sexual violence, and left unchallenged an assumption that sexual violence was inevitable. In other words, early approaches universalised women as “victims” and men as “perpetrators”.’ Susan Brownmiller’s highly influential 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, for example, positioned rape both as an expression of men’s political dominance over women and as a biological inevitability:

Man’s structural capacity to rape and women’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself [ … ] We cannot work around the fact that in terms of human anatomy the possibility of forcible intercourse incontrovertibly exists. This single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it.

(Brownmiller, 1975, pp.13–14)

This ‘inevitability of rape’ was (and still is in many examples) expressed in public campaigns and programmes that focus on what women can do to prevent being attacked: improving knowledge of what constitutes sexual assault; providing legal education around rights and recognising and avoiding risk; and in some instances, proposing strategies for women to resist and/or survive rape (see, for example, Delacoste, 1981; Rozee, 2011).

Influenced by the post-modern turn within gender studies more broadly, by the 1990s, feminist ideas about gender and violence shifted substantially to recognising the socially and culturally variable practices of femininities and masculinities (see Carmody, 2009). This brought greater attention to both the diversity of women’s experiences of sexual violence and the intersectionality of marginalisation based on race, class, sexuality and disability. It also enabled a challenge to societal constructions of normative gender roles and the notion that rape is an inevitable, or natural, manifestation of gender difference. In other words, challenging the fundamental roots of a ‘rape culture’ has become a key approach within feminist rape prevention.

While the everyday expressions of rape culture in mainstream media, advertising and popular culture (including more recently in online communities and via social media) cannot be ignored, one identified problem for feminist prevention strategies is that the construction of women’s vulnerability to victimisation can have the effect of positioning women as ‘inherently rapeable’. Feminist scholar Sharon Marcus (1992, p.170), for example, has challenged the view of rape as an inevitable ‘fact’, structured in the physiological differences between men and women, and instead calls for a challenge to the ‘narratives, complexes and institutions’ that make rape a dominant ‘cultural script’. Norms inscribing passive, non-combative models of femininity against a physically aggressive masculinity set women up to live with both the fear and practice of rape. Controversially, among the strategies of rape prevention that Marcus (1992, p.170) suggests is for women to ‘resist self-defeating notions of polite feminine speech as well as develop physical self-defense tactics’.

To be clear, Marcus’s approach is not to imply that individual women are responsible for ‘rape avoidance’, as is common in some risk frameworks of rape prevention, but rather she acknowledges that disrupting our collective, cultural narratives of women’s ‘natural’ passivity and vulnerability to rape is just as important as disrupting those of men’s ‘natural’ sexual aggression (Marcus, 1992; see also Henderson, 2007). When one considers broader contexts of gender inequality, in which a presumed physical and psychological passivity underlies women’s under-participation in sport comparable to men (in turn negatively affecting their health and well-being), and women’s lower assertiveness in the workplace (which is linked to women’s lower rates of promotion and positions of leadership), the deconstruction of normative assumptions about passive femininity should not be dismissed too readily, since discourses are powerful and can have the effect of reinscribing these patterns of dominance and subjugation which perpetuates the oppression rather than fundamentally challenges it (Brown, 1995). However, as Mardorossian (2002, p.755) argues, ‘making women’s behavior and identity the site of rape prevention only mirrors the dominant culture’s proclivity to see rape as women’s problem, both in the sense of a problem women should solve and one that they caused’.

In response to the limitations of prevention programmes and initiatives that focus on dismantling women’s vulnerability to sexual violence, more recently, feminist approaches have turned towards engaging men and promoting alternative cultures and practices of masculinity as key to the prevention of sexual violence. The important role that masculinity and male peer cultures play in violence against women is further expanded in Schwartz and DeKeseredy’s highly cited theory of ‘male peer support’ – a feminist-informed application of ‘routine activity theory’ (RAT) to the specific issue of men’s sexual violence against women. Based on r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Framing Sexual Violence Prevention: What Does It Mean to Challenge a Rape Culture?
• 2. Theorising Men’s Violence Prevention Policies: Limitations and Possibilities of Interventions in a Patriarchal State
• 3. The Everydayness of Rape: How Understanding Sexual Assault Perpetration Can Inform Prevention Efforts
• 4. Limits of the Criminal Law for Preventing Sexual Violence
• 5. The Dark Side of the Virtual World: Towards a Digital Sexual Ethics
• 6. The Prevention of Sexual Violence in Schools: Developing Some Theoretical Starting Points
• 7. Just How Do We Create Change?: Sites of Contradiction and the ‘Black Box’ of Change in Primary Prevention
• 8. Sexual Violence Prevention Educator Training: Opportunities and Challenges
• 9. Taking Stock of Bystander Programmes: Changing Attitudes and Behaviours Towards Sexual Violence
• 10. Shifting Upstream: Bystander Action Against Sexism and Discrimination Against Women
• Index