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This thesis is based on a field study conducted in Uganda in the fall of 2015. The study is analyzing at the process behind the Domestic Violence Act, a law that came in to place in 2010, and try to scrutinize it by using the inclusive democracy theory of Iris Marion Young. In the study numerous interviews with several women’s organizations, as well as representatives for the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development and local police officers are presented.   The study aims at getting a better understanding of what is necessary to create successful laws to prevent violence against women. The main objective is to answer the question how inclusion, or the lack of it, can influence the success of legal norms and laws regarding violence against women. The result of this study shows that inclusion could play a role in a law’s success. However inclusion is not enough, other factors such as allocating enough money in the budget together with educating both the public and the officials that are enforcing the law, are also of great importance for a law’s success. Yet, this study also shows that a greater inclusion could affect these factors in a positive way, however inclusion alone is most likely not sufficient for creating a successful law

This project examines rape culture in American literature and society, exploring factors of rape culture through the narratives of literary protagonists and current women alike. Each chapter is grounded in a work of literature, which serves as a lens through which to analyze a factor of rape culture, and is then broadened in scope to incorporate recent court cases that have had significant sociocultural impacts. The introduction includes a critical review of rape in feminist theory, from Susan Brownmiller to Ann J. Cahill. The first chapter treats the rape of Dolores Haze and victim blaming in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita, and the 2010 Cleveland, Texas gang rapes of an eleven-year-old girl, who was cast as a “Lolita” by her community and the media. The second chapter discusses the rape of women with disabilities in Elmer Harris’s 1940 Johnny Belinda, and two 2012 cases in California and Connecticut involving the rapes of women with disabilities and the issue of consent, both of which influenced legislation. The third chapter focuses on the use of mass rape as a weapon of war in Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Ruined, and the narratives and testimonies of rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where nearly 2 million women have been raped since 1998. As the literature illustrates, when rape functions as an instrument of power and control certain similarities arise, such as victim blaming, consent, and the use of rape to demoralize and subjugate women, all of which are primary features of rape culture.

This dissertation examines representations of feminicide victims in documentary film, novels, non-fiction, art, and graffiti and argues that these images express anxiety about they way women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juárez, often giving precedence to the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. In order to reclaim memory of the victims some cultural producers focus on the testimonial form in which victims’ families and other activists share their stories or construct informal memorials in the city; these remembrances later appear in works of non-fiction, film, and art, as markers of the process of creating and preserving memory. My dissertation analyzes such works as the documentary Señorita extraviada (2001) by Lourdes Portillo, the non-fiction work Huesos en el desierto (2002) by Sergio González Rodríguez, and the novel 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño, among other cultural expressions, to show how feminicide victims and their families have been marked by and have challenged a pervasive public discourse about female sexuality.

Författarna har studerat hur kvinnor utsatta för våld i en nära relation upplever bemötandet i vården, genom granskning av elva kvalitativa studier. Resultatet visar att känslan av skuld och skam är stor hos kvinnor som utsätts för våld i en nära relation. Kvinnorna vill berätta om sin situation, men endast om de upplever att sjuksköterskan vill lyssna, har tid och kan han-tera informationen. Flertalet kvinnor önskade att sjuksköterskan skulle fråga dem om våldet, de längtade efter att någon skulle ta kontroll över situationen. Oftast känner sig kvinnorna dömda, förlöjligade och respektlöst bemötta av hälso- och sjukvården efter de berättat om våldet som försiggår i relationen. Kvinnor som levt under hot och våld från sin man har ofta en bräcklig och skev självbild. Vilket ökar deras osäkerhet och förstärker eventuella negativa upplevelser i vården. I och med det kan ett dåligt bemötande från vårdpersonalen i värsta fall öka kvinnornas känsla av hjälplöshet och bekräfta skammen de bär på. Studien påvisar att hälso- och sjukvården är en mycket viktig instans för kvinnor utsatta för våld av sin partner, trots detta finns sällan kunskap hos personalen. Författarna har funnit brister i bemötandet och omhändertagandet av kvinnorna och även i kontakten med andra viktiga instanser. Vårdpersonalen behöver kunskap, handlingsplaner och riktlinjer för att kunna lotsa kvinnorna vidare i deras väg mot ett liv utan hot och våld. När väl kvinnan samlat mod till sig för att erkänna sin situation i vården och inte blir tagen på allvar kan det i vissa fall få förödande konsekvenser. Medan en genuint intresserad sjuksköterska som har kunskap och är villig att lägga sin tid på kvinnan och relationen till henne, kan vara livsavgörande. Sjuksköterskan kan hjälpa henne en bit på vägen till ett liv utan smärta, rädsla och ensamhet. / Background: Violence against women is a major global public health issue, which has an impact on women’s lives and mental health. Aim: To explore healthcare experiences of women exposed to intimate partner violence. Method: Literature based study with eleven qualitative studies. Results: The women who sought help felt ashamed for the violence and most of them didn’t get the help they needed. They felt that the caregivers didn’t believe in their stories or their experiences. The health care professionals made them feel like objects and not human beings. Few women had a good experience of the care they were given, in those cases the caregivers had asked the women about the violence and gave them time to talk and made them feel safe and comfortable. Conclusion: Nearly all of the women had feelings of shame and guilt. They wanted the caregiver to ask them about the violence, because they found it hard to reveal it themselves. Caregivers need more knowledges about intimate partner violence and its impact on the women to offer right kind of help.They also need guidelines to know how to meet and help these women.

Women’s lived experiences of abuse and depression are examined within the context of gendered and racialized pathways to incarceration among 403 women randomly selected from a diagnostic unit in a state prison. This study utilizes feminist action research and community psychological methods to understand what factors predict incarcerated women’s placement on the mental health caseload and provides quantitative support for the pathways theoretical framework. Findings indicate that, among the sample, the prevalence of abuse experiences prior to incarceration exceeded 90%, prevalence of mental health problems exceeded 70%, and less than 35% were receiving mental health care. Being Caucasian, experiencing depression and suicidal ideation, and serving time for certain types of (non-violent, non-property, and non-drug related) crime (e.g., cruelty to children, prostitution, public order, “technicals,” and others) predicted the placement of women on the mental health caseload. Implications for trauma-informed, anti-racist, gender-responsive policies and interventions are discussed.

English abstract Domestic violence in society This thesis is divided into two parts to reflect the definition of domestic violence as a very broad social (gender) and legal term. The opening chapter provides an introduction to the theory of domestic violence along with en explanation of its elementary features and concepts. The chapter describes domestic violence as a societal problem which - in the light of statistically proven (and surprisingly frequent) occurrence and presumptive high latency - cannot be put aside as a marginal pathological phenomenon. Such (erroneous) conclusion, however, is tempting since there are many myths around intimate violence, as is a general misapprehension that both victims of domestic violence as well as persons abusing their close relatives can be unmistakably identified. The author of this work aspires to refute such conclusions by pointing to criminological as well as victimological specifics of a person that is the victim or perpetrator of domestic violence. The second chapter explores the factors of feminization of domestic violence, including the aspects of gender, gender socialization and its dynamics, discrimination and violence against women. Worldwide, domestic violence is still considered a subcategory of violence against women, despite the facts that anyone can...

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Law, 2014 / This study is interested in questions of law and social change, with a particular focus on how litigation can be used strategically to change the law to benefit women. Given law’s patriarchal nature, feminist litigators have often asked questions about whether, and how the law can be used to reflect women’s experience and to improve women’s lives. In this sense, the feminist project in law considers how feminist theory and methodology can be used in constructing legal arguments that seek the improvement of women’s rights and gender equality. The focal point of this study is amicus curiae participation and how this participation is employed by means of feminist litigation strategy so that it enhances rights-claiming and advances gender equality for women within the court system. I examine the way in which amicus curiae participation promotes litigation from a feminist and gendered viewpoint and validates the employment of feminist method to create effective arguments. The main body of the dissertation is dedicated to a case analysis of the Constitutional Court’s core gender jurisprudence and the amici curiae that have participated in these matters. The case discussions are divided into three categories: violence against women, women as part of cultural communities, and specific areas of vulnerability including prostitution and domestic partnerships (between heterosexual couples). The purpose of this analysis is to establish whether the amici curiae that have participated in these matters were able to influence judicial decisions, and how the amici used litigation to communicate a feminist and gendered viewpoint. The study concludes that, whether the relevant amici curiae participation had a direct or indirect impact on judicial decisions or not, its importance lies in engaging the law from a feminist and gendered viewpoint to create awareness of gender inequality, how this inequality is entrenched in the legal system and how it might be remedied.

This sociological thesis has focus om men´s violence against women, both general and domestic. My aim is to examine how the Swedish court system portrays women as victims and men as offenders in cases with men´s violence against women. I also have a special focus on the perspective of the construction of gender. I executed the thesis by using two qualitive methods; thematic content analysis and observations. The empirical material consisted mainly of court case documents but also of the field notes I took during the observations of two court hearings. My theoretical framework consists of the gender system by Yvonne Hirdman (2003) which mainly describes the different societal positions of power men and women possess and what consequences it has. I’ve also used a victim discourse which examines how victims are expected to act, and react, in connection to be a victim of crime. The thesis showed that the court system in my material maintains stereotypical gender norms regarding the theory of the gender system. It showed considerations based on men´s superior positions and women´s subordinate positions according to the same system. It also showed that the female victims are expected to react according to what the court system see suitable; which in my analyzed cases meant a display of the correct feelings. If the correct feelings were not present, it could affect the outcome of the trial.

Este trabalho foi desenvolvido como subprojeto integrante da pesquisa A Interface Entre a Ocorrência e o Atendimento de Violência de Gênero Entre Mulheres Usuárias dos Serviços de Saúde da Rede Pública de Ribeirão Preto. A violência contra a mulher é uma das expressões mais perversas da subordinação feminina e gera graves conseqüências para as pessoas que vivenciam o seu ciclo. Mulheres nessa situação buscam frequentemente os serviços de saúde, que possuem um alto poder de detecção da violência. Porém, há uma série de dificuldades por parte dos profissionais, médicos e enfermeiros, em identificar e prestar assistência adequada a essas mulheres. O objetivo deste estudo foi analisar comparativamente as percepções de médicos e enfermeiros que atuam na rede de saúde de Ribeirão Preto acerca da violência contra a mulher buscando formas de aprimorar a assistência prestada. Para isso, realizamos uma pesquisa qualitativa, utilizando um banco de dados de 14 entrevistas com médicos e 10 com enfermeiros, realizadas por meio de um roteiro semi-estruturado. Por meio de análise de conteúdo temático foram identificadas as seguintes categorias: 1) Percepções sobre gênero; 2) Percepções sobre a violência contra a mulher; 3) Sobre atuação profissional; e 4) Sobre a rede de proteção. Tais categorias foram divididas em diversas subcategorias que foram analisadas a partir do referencial de gênero. Os resultados mostraram que há muitas semelhanças nas percepções relativas às questões de gênero, que são ainda bastante tradicionais. Os profissionais entendem que a violência contra a mulher ocorre devido às desigualdades perpetuadas pelo sistema social e que acabam por justificar a violência. Eles reconhecem os tipos de violência existentes e estão aptos a identificar e acolher as mulheres nos serviços de saúde, reconhecendo tais ações como suas responsabilidades. Porém, muitas vezes não o fazem por barreiras como a própria estrutura dos serviços, a falta de capacitação e aspectos emocionais, que dificultam o acolhimento e a orientação adequados. Também identificamos que a rede de apoio existente ainda é desconhecida por muitos dos profissionais e, diversas vezes, está estruturada de forma inadequada para atender às demandas existentes. Assim, é fundamental o desenvolvimento de capacitações para os profissionais da área de saúde com o objetivo de prepara-los para uma melhor assistência às mulheres em situação de violência e para o conhecimento da rede de proteção existente. Além disso, é urgente que a estrutura dos serviços seja repensada em diversos aspectos para que os princípios do SUS e as ações de humanização possam, de fato, ser colocadas em prática. / This study was conducted as part of the larger research project \"The interface between the occurrence and treatment of gender violence among women who are users of public health care in Ribeirão Preto. Violence against women is one of the most perverse forms of female subordination and leads to serious consequences to those affected by it. Women in such conditions frequently seek health care services, which are highly capable of detecting violence. However, there are a number of obstacles faced by professionals, doctors and nurses, in order to identify and provide proper assistance to these women. The objective of this study was to comparatively analyze how doctors and nurses who work in the public health care system in Ribeirão Preto perceive violence against women with a view to improving the quality of services. To attain this goal, this qualitative study made use of a database of 14 interviews with doctors and 10 with nurses following a semistructured script. Following thematic content analysis, the following categories have been established: 1) Perceptions about gender; 2) Perceptions about violence against women; 3) About the jobs; and 4) About the protection network. These categories were further divided into subcategories that were analyzed by taking gender as a reference. The findings show that there are many similarities across perceptions concerning gender issues, which are still quite traditional. Professionals believe that violence against women occurs as a result of inequalities that have been perpetuated by the social system and that ultimately justify such violence. They recognize the existing types of violence and are ready and able to identify women and offer them assistance within the health care system, which they regard to be part of their responsibilities. However, they frequently cannot do that due to barriers such as how the services are structured, lack of training, and emotional aspects, which make both reception and counseling difficult. It has also been found that the existing support network is still unknown to many professionals and, very often, that it is inadequately organized to meet current demands. Thus, it is essential to develop the skills of health care professionals in order to prepare them both to provide better assistance to women who have been affected violence and to know about the existing protection network. In addition, there is the urgent need to rethink the organization of services at various levels so that the principles of SUS - the universal health care system - and humanization actions can actually be put into practice.