4^th European Feminist Research Conference

29 - 30 September 2000

University of Bologna

 

Workshop 8:

Refusing to forget:

women's political memories in a comparative perspective

 

 

Making Connections: Researching Gendered Violence

 

 

 

Professor Jalna Hanmer

University of Sunderland, UK

Why is it so hard to challenge men ?

Because they own us.

Why do they own us?

Because they control the means of production, both intellectual and material.       

(Women Talking)

 

Conciousness and questions

The field we now call Women's Studies owes a debt to women's movements throughout the world as they allowed alternative conceptions to develop and permitted researchers to approach old problems, although thought to be previously undiscovered at the time, in new ways.  Research on violence is, and has been, a major theme in women's studies for the past thirty years. This paper is an attempt to consider what contributes to and what restricts an expanded understanding of violence against women by recalling some of the moments when gender visible accounts become possible.

 

For many of us living in Europe the recent events in the former Yugoslavia were a watershed, necessitating consideration of social stability and instability, economic stability and instability, political stability and instability as factors in the increase or containment of domestic and other forms of violence against women[1]. Thirty years ago women's liberation movements and their responses to violence began in European and other nation states with relatively high levels of social stability where it is both possible for women to successfully re-orient public understanding, to make demands on the state and for the state to respond positively, if slowly.

 

War and its aftermath in the former Yugoslavia demonstrate empirically the impact of social, economic and political instability on women in many ways including an increase in violence from male partners. With social instability the rates of domestic violence prevalence and incidence over time moves from being a largely historical and unanswerable question to one of immense importance to women as experience suggests disruption to civil society increases all forms of gendered violence and this could happen in any nation. We who research on violence in Europe and have resided in relatively stable societies since the mid-1940s[2] need to turn the question around and think of stability as unusual and instability as the norm. To do so raises questions about why and how and what kinds of violence increase with social, economic and political instabilities. The what is the easiest to assess, followed by how, and most difficult why. These questions require an analysis of the role of the military and its related industries and organisations, including science, and that of the government and state, including Western imperialist ventures of various types involving military and other political interventions, and economic global interventions. Within this conceptual revision are questions about gender, of who does what to whom, how violence is organised, carried out and to what ends[3].

 

This paper began with questions:  What characterises women's recognition of violence by men to women and conversely its disappearance from consciousness? What are the characteristics of gendered social relations that make this everyday behaviour invisible - reduced, at best, to a personal problem or deflected from the individual man onto an external problem, such as employment or alcoholism? How do social movements construct knowledge based on increasing the visibility of gendered social relations? What are the contextual factors that lead to the making of connections by women between private and public violence, from domestic violence to war? If recognised, what are the factors that lead women to overcome political and other differences to form alliances[4] in order to provide services that improve the lives of women and their children and to make demands on their behalf on the state? How do women influence organisations and social institutions dominated largely by men who are responsible for the use of violence, or for its containment, or both? How do oppositional forces respond conceptually and practically?  In Europe we are in the midst of numerous examples of these largely unexplored social processes.

 

Making connections across violences

If the aim is to understand violence committed by men against women, its origins and how it is sustained socially, and ultimately what can be done about it, focussing solely on domestically located violence results in something of an impasse. The possibilities for analysis are reduced not just as a result of the focus on individuals, but also because of a severing of the relationship between private and public violences and how various ideologies and organisational forms can mobilise men for collective violences against women and civil society in general. Women who write on war as experience, as protest, as fiction, expand on more than the forms taken by crimes against women, but also on how men group together and organise in order to expand violence against women and their children.

 

This is not to imply that early women’s movement writing did not raise these issues, for example, Adrienne Rich, (1977), but that these broader analyses and questions move from the mainstream to the fringe with research on political struggles and activism that focus on locality and individual women.

 

 Domestic and Private Violence: Building alliances between women

In Europe the re-recognition of violence against women by known men in the home began as a local and then became a national issue in the 1970s[5]. Across countries timing differs, but at some historic point in time, women begin to recognise the persistent phenomenon of violence against women as a major factor in the personal and collective oppression of women. Why then, is an interesting if largely speculative question, because attempts to understand 'why then' explore the connection between changes in individual and collective consciousness and social processes in all their diversity.

 

To use the example I know best, the 1970s began a process of the rediscovery of violence against women and girls by women in the women's liberation movement in the four countries known as the UK. The women's liberation movement was an outgrowth of left, anti-imperialist and student politics led primarily by men and male theoreticians. In the UK it commenced with violence against women in their homes in 1971, followed by rape crisis centres in 1976, incest survivor groups in 1980, sexual harassment at work and legal and illegal activities against pornography. While these issues could be, and were, connected in the lives of individual women they were responded to separately in terms of activities and research.

 

The focus here is on the first of these rediscoveries of social phenomena well known to previous generations and marked by spirited defences of women[6], but becoming progressively culturally suppressed knowledge during the 20c. Largely confined to social and welfare professionals by 1970 violence against women was understood to be a small problem affecting a few women whose behaviour was questionable, i.e. more than likely women brought it on themselves. The question was, what did she do to make him respond like that?. Women who rediscovered home-based violence initially believed they were the first to do so, so circumscribed was women’s knowledge of their history.

 

The women’s liberation movement began in Britain with consciousness raising groups and the opening of centres for women. Women’s Aid began at one of these centres through one woman’s account of her experience of violence at home, her safety jeopardised by the lack of alternative accommodation, followed by the decision by women at this centre to say, if it is that bad, move in here. Once one woman and her children had been taken in, there was no reason not to admit others who defined their problems in the same way. Word spread quickly through the women’s liberation movement, and a pattern of practical aid expanded throughout the four countries of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

 

Because the focus was on the need for change in the social context in which women lived, domestic violence as it is now called, was never considered an international issue in the same way as, for example, war or genocide, even when it was recognised in country after country throughout the world and spread via international meetings and activities. For example, the first international conference on violence, the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, was held in Brussels in 1976. Women were asked to organise and to bring major issues facing women in their country and women who could speak to them. The British organising group took violence against women in their homes to this conference, where the one Scottish and two English women were joined by a Dutch woman in giving testimony, thus spreading the knowledge of the problem and of women's refuges to women from many countries (Russell and Van de Ven 1976).

 

In Europe women’s movements and activism had first to establish that violence against women was not only a private sorrow, but a public issue. For example Celia Valicente (1996) describes the situation in Spain where improvements in women’s legal position were required along with developing legislation, policies, guidelines and other strategies for implementation. She explains that implementing policies, the work of ‘street level bureaucrats’, both male and female professionals and workers, is the most difficult part of the process as discretion favours obstruction. Since the early 1970s these same processes and problems have occurred and are occurring throughout Europe.

 

Conceptulaising men and alliances between women

Making gender visible in the analysis of the problem and attempts at solutions, especially when both men and women are front-line workers, if not decision-makers, is complex and remains relatively unexplored. The British example illustrates that once recognised, however partially, violence posed a problem for women of how to conceptualise men and this in turn influenced how women organised and around which issues. This example demonstrates the complexity of relating to and influencing organisations and social institutions dominated by men, including the media, the organisational decision-makers and, depending upon the public service, visible or not as front-line workers. Strategic alliances began with the media in the 1970s, followed by a continuing interactive process of changing public beliefs and governmental and state political responses to marriage and the family. It also illustrates alliance building between research and activism, suggests questions for the analysis of social welfare movements that impact with some success on the state, and the relationship between reconceptualising gendered social relations and improving conditions for women.

 

The development of women's ideas and politics on violence against women in their homes from known men in the UK drew its inspiration from the women's liberation movement's (WLM) challenges to beliefs about the family, marriage and women’s role and the ways in which these were being supported by the state and civil society. The insistence that the personal is political was a rejection of theory that marginalised women by the denial of a gendered analysis in both revolutionary and mainstream theories and led to women exploring new ways of relating to men and to each other, (for example, see Rowbotham, 2000, for an experiental account).

 

The support for refuges for women and their children (Women's Aid) began with a political alliance between women who had differing political perspectives and these informed and influenced activism on violence against women.  The demand that the ideology of the family (where the family is characterised by respect for mothers as well as fathers, for wives as well as husbands, the bedrock of society and a haven of love and kindness) be upheld by deeds not just words led to a somewhat oblique attack on male social power and domination.

 

The Women's Aid movement in the four countries of the UK theorised the problem as being located in the social position of women in society. While seen as politically radical by the state[7] and society in general, this formulation neatly sidestepped the use of the term men, while making a demand for change that would positively impact on the lives of all women. This formulation resulted from an alliance between women who perceived men in different ways; at its most extreme either as comrades or as the enemy. There were few head-on collisions between women who held these different positions within Women's Aid for what were initially termed battered women and their children (see Hanmer 1976 and Weir 1976), these tended to be reserved for the wider political clashes within the women's liberation movement.

 

When collisions did occur, the alliance known as the women's liberation movement was threatened and ultimately broken[8]. This permanent rupture occurred at the 1978 national women's liberation movement conference in Birmingham. The dispute arose as a result of a resolution on violence against women. It had two parts, the first declared violence against women to be unacceptable, a proposition agreeable to all the women present and this view became the 7^th and final demand of the women's liberation movement. The second placed the blame and responsibility for violence on men, a proposition not acceptable to sufficient women to pass. As national conferences required participation in the planning and organising by all women’s groups in the locality in which they took place, this disagreement on men between groups meant national movement meetings ended. The final exchange took place in WIRES, the national newsletter, when one woman representing the problem is men position suggested it was time to meet again to receive the reply, only if you discuss our agenda. Labelling this dispute as socialist versus radical feminist does less than justice to a complex issue.

 

Alliances: Circumnavigating around the problem of  men

Women’s Aid, always supported by the women’s liberation movement, but also treated as distinct from it, continued unscathed. The argument over men had been resolved in 1975 and formalised after the second national women’s aid conference held a few months earlier in 1974. The decision was that the National Women’s Aid Federation (NWAF) would be open to membership solely from Women’s Aid groups that were women-only. Certain positions, about how to organise, the role of support workers, how to assist women, were agreed and a women-only environment was, and is, seen as basic to assisting women to achieve control over their lives.

 

This 1974 second national conference of Women's Aid groups was known to those who participated as 'the split'. Groups whose members were not in the women's liberation movement and did not have a women-only policy, a small minority, choose to not participate in NWAF. As well as a women-only policy, the groups were organised as non-hierarchically as possible. This was a period of conscious collaboration between heterosexual women and lesbians and between women of various political tendencies, an alliance that continues today.

 

The underlying issues of 'the split' were a carefully guarded secret by those who knew what they were, and not everyone at the meeting did, for fear public knowledge might damage the refuge movement and void government support for the recognition of women's liberation movement Women's Aid groups as the legitimate network for this work. The need to establish legitimacy with the state was a political requirement as competing conceptualisations of violence against women in the home from known men were at stake[9]. One of those issues, and the one that could be publicly acknowledged, was the exclusion of men as workers and support group (later management committee) members from Women’s Aid groups in the Federation. This was not an abstract decision, but based on the experience that men caused disruption through competitive relationships between women and abusive relationships with women in Women’s Aid refuges. Issues that had to be kept out of public view involved sexuality and left politics. Some of the most active members of Women's Aid support groups were lesbians and some women were involved in political events in which the police and security forces took an interest.

 

Cirsumnavigation continued: Making demands on the State

The necessary changes in the social position of women demanded by women providing services to women leaving home because of violence from the men with whom they lived or had lived, meant society and the agencies of the state were required to respond differently to the violent treatment of women. Within the alliance between women who held different positions on men there was the further agreement that demands should be made on the state and specifically on what the state should do; that is, provide income maintenance, housing and law enforcement. The focus was steadfastly on improving conditions for women, rather than changing or punishing men although their incarceration could be seen as a means of securing an individual woman's safety.

 

At the same time violence was understood as an independent dimension of male dominance and control in that any woman could be victimised by any man irrespective of social class and other differences, and that all women are oppressed by male violence. Research focused not on variations in the type and extent of violence and abuse to different groups of women, but on how the state responded to women, including women from different ethnic and class backgrounds[10]. There were several reasons for this. The alliance could agree on treating the state as the culprit, while pandering to a commonly held belief that domestic violence was class or ethnic or some other variable dependent was seen as a way for the state to undermine support for women. The ‘problem’ would then become one for this group or that group and not a social problem affecting all women in Britain. Those who researched on domestic violence in the 1970s and later on developed and/or collaborated with Women’s Aid’s assessment of the issues. Summarising a review of research in Europe on violence against women more generally and in the language of the year 2000, Carol Hagemann-White concludes, 'Violence deals with a dimension of patriarchal social relations that is independent of other structures of social, economic and political inequality, even as it interacts with them' (in press).  The 1970s alliance would agree with the first part of this sentence, while the second would have raised contentious issues.

 

One agreed approach in socially stable societies is to analyse how social institutions and the state interact to protect male dominance. For example, Ailbhe Smyth uses the experience in Ireland to explore the connection between feminist actions and state and institutional resistances in achieving visibility of violence to women from men (1996). While this is as difficult a process in Ireland as elsewhere in Europe, when the power of the state begins to dissipate then the power of paramilitaries in the oppression of women also become significant, for example, in Northern Ireland. This makes it even more difficult to achieve visibility for men’s violence to women as public discussion is further restricted.

 

Experience in different European countries demonstrates that with political, economic and social stability women can make both an impact on the cultural understandings of violence and on the provider of services and/or funding; that is, the state. This also affects how those who protest conceptualise the state. In the 1970s in the UK, for example, while a constant refrain was to not reify the state, this was not always easy to do as decision-makers seemed 'way up there' while movement women, activists and researchers, were 'way down here'. The space between us is not so great now[11]. There is a growing agreement on the importance of curtailing violence against women and how improvements may be made, if not on aims or the reasons for doing so; that is, for the British Government family reform in order to bolster and sustain the heterosexual, nuclear family, and for women assisting other women, independence and safety for women and their children.

 

Three phases in confronting men

In the UK there were three phases in the response to violence against women from known men in the home. Intra-family violence as taboo, or moving domestically located violence from the socially invisible to the visible, is a first step that can link activism and research theory and practice. Phase 1 is to make domestic violence visible as a social problem. To move it from a private sorrow to a public issue in the sense of state recognition was achieved in the UK between 1971 and 1975, the year the Parliamentary Select Committee published its report on Violence in Marriage. This was followed by an increase in research and in services for women and children in the voluntary sector. This watershed date is not to suggest a uniform acceptance of domestic and other forms of violence against women from known men as a social, rather than individual, problem. The task of recognition and reformulation remains to be accomplished with both some individuals and in some communities in the UK. Research and improvements in service provision continue to play an important role in this re-orientation. While states may be unified, the communities within them are not.

 

Phase 2 is a national project where the state progressively takes on more responsibility for controlling the violence of men in the home and ensuring safety for women and children. This, too, is ongoing and the practices in state agencies vary in their effectiveness and in the consistency of service delivery to women and children in need. There has been a very slow response to demands from women from 1971 onwards for improvements in state services and these will be ongoing for many years to come provided women continue to demand change. In the UK the focus is slowly turning to men rejected or in danger of rejection by women because of their behaviour. As divorce rates and cohabitation increase, the question is becoming, what did he do to make her behave like that?

 

Phase 3, I would like to think, is gaining momentum. To use the over-worked phrase of the UK Government, there is a need for 'joined up thinking' to be applied to violences of different types including international perspectives and analyses of domestic violence. We need to theoretically link, for example, racism, sexist violence and the feminisation of genocide with domestically located violence. We need to move away from an adding on approach to violences to an integrated analysis and perspective. Accomplishing this task can contribute to activism in many ways.

 

To do so however, is to more fully confront the issue of men, the ways in which they are organised, and of gendered social relations. It means examining those violences against women that men are prepared to challenge and ask 'why'. Is it that the violence they challenge is not so much because it is against women, but because the thirty years of agitation and alternative service provision challenges social norms and practices that in the past furthered their dominance, individually and collectively, but is now less effective? It can be argued that domestic violence no longer contributes to collective power and control over women in the same easy way as in the past. For example, in the UK women are voting with their feet, demonstrated through significant increases in cohabitation rather than marriage, divorce petitions, and a growing intolerance to domestic violence, particularly amongst younger women. Sociological research over time demonstrates that men live longer and the quality of their lives is improved with marriage, but not the lives of women. The increased action by government and its agencies to assist those who experience domestic violence and to respond to men who abuse is explicitly located in support for the heterosexual, two parent with children, family. These processes are occurring in other European nations.

 

Sexual violence is not responded to in the same way. This is complex as sexual violence has many dimensions, both conceptual and experientially.

 

Gendering sexuality and public violence: Conceptualising Men

This paper can only touch on a few issues concerned with conceptualising gendered violence and the gendering of political action. To turn to an analysis of fiction, Evelyne Accad writing on the war in Lebanon examines male motivations and the consequences for women[12]. She centrally locates violence and war in gendered social relations, in ‘badly lived sexuality conceived within a tribal system based on honor, virginity, possession, jealousy and the exclusive propriety of women’ (p. 167). Relatively under-developed social science accounts along with women’s lack of agreement on the importance of (hetero)sexuality and male domination of women as a basis for understanding male violence led her to examine novels on the Lebanon war for their treatment of gender. The chosen six novels, three by women and three by men, all foreground men’s relations to women as cause and consequence of the war where young men are motivated by heroism, revenge and violence as catharsis, high on drugs destroying a city, Beirut, a feminine symbol, and the women within it. The desired transformation of society is to be achieved through destruction.  Diversity in all its forms is to be eliminated in order to obtain male honour.

 

While the scope of the analysis is far larger, incorporating Arab history, patriarchy, nationalism, culture, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, globalisation, revolution, the state, the process she describes of how women respond to a political analysis of (hetero)sexuality mirrors the differences expressed in the UK on violence against women in their homes from the men with whom they live; that is, the primacy given to loyalty to men or the ideology of mixed gender political groups or parties, ‘hiding the sexual source of their conflicts’ (p. 23).

 

She argues that in the Middle East the meaning and importance given to a military weapon and to the sexual weapon are equal and these are used to conquer, control, and possess.  This links domestic and territorial violence as rape has always been used in war and at home to control and possess, to establish ownership. This theme is pursued in women’s responses to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, for example, Lepa Mladjenovic and Divna Matijasevic (1996) explore politics and power, private and public violence by men and feminist resistance and activism. Moving from the effects on women to those on men, Lt Col. Dave Grossman (1995) writing on preparing men to kill, killing, and its psychological costs explains that the point of rape as a military order and by groups of men is to bond those who rape with their leadership; empowerment and bonding go hand in hand. By ensuring that their men commit atrocities, they become inextricably linked to the fate of their leader; only total victory or total defeat are possible outcomes. He explains that throughout history women are probably the largest single group of victims of this empowerment process.

 

Accad concludes that Lebanon is not unique, but ‘carries the code of honor, and masculine-macho values as well as the concomitant condition of women’s oppression to their farthest limits’ (p.38). Unfortunately, since the publication of this book, an even more extreme example is available to us, the Taliban controlled territory in Afghanistan. Today in the Taliban ‘transformed and purified society’, women who have survived the war, now face starvation simply because they have no man to provide for them. Unable to work outside the home, and even unable to accept food charity[13], the Taliban are pronouncing a death sentence on women whose only cultural crime is that their husbands, sons and other male relatives, killed in the war, are no longer there to help them. Today the Taliban are continuing to purify society by eliminating women not under the direct control of men in the family.

 

War is an extreme pattern of male dominated social structure where civil and externally promoted war violence against women share commonalties. In the former Yugoslavia war crimes against women are both ethnic cleansing and crimes against gender. Rada Boric and Mica Mladineo Desnica (1996) raise the same issue as Accad, the aim of women is to recognise and oppose male dominant structures that do not respect diversity or as they express it, ‘care for Others’. The ‘Others’ they refer to include women as a group or social category. This is an argument for why individual men and women do not bind together to support each other when societies become unstable and why men increase their domestic attacks on women.

 

Women’s experience indicates the militarised war reduces not just women’s security and living standards, but contributes to their under-valuation by the state and its agencies. Evidence of the escalation of domestic violence with war is not statistically available, but women-centred agencies, for example in Croatia, report it is increasing in intensity and extent (Boric and Desnica 1996). Women’s roles in peace processes, in social and material reconstruction, support for the displaced and refugees are not recognised, nor do women have a voice in decision-making or the peace negotiations.  When the smallest breakthrough is achieved, for example, the election to the peace negotiations of the Northern Ireland Women’s Party after quick organising and a six week campaign, the men whose right, they believe, it is to wage war, to settle or not disputes, and to determine the fate of women and children, were outraged. In Northern Ireland men had to put up with the presence of women at the peace negotiations, but this is not a full-scale war and therefore the power of men is not absolute.

 

'Badly lived hetero-sexuality' and alliances

Understanding violence against women as 'badly lived (hetero)sexuality' is not easy for women and can be even more strenuously denied by men.[14]  For example, the impact of economic instability in the larger Europe introduces other forms of violence against women, in particular sexual violence through prostitution and trafficking of women. This too, is linked with militarism more generally, as a service industry for peacekeeping troops, not just for paramilitaries and military invaders. This form of male violence and domination is particularly difficult for women to analyse and agree upon given the connection between sexual libertarianism and revolutionary activity or women's liberation. We are caught in competing explanations and political beliefs, from a 'job like any other' to a distinction between prostitution as 'forced or freely chosen' to a total rejection of the social validity of male heterosexual demands as punters and pimps, in and out of uniform. Our experience in England is that organisational moves against local punters and pimps results in organised opposition and by groups of women and men including organisations funded by the state[15]. Across Europe there are various initiatives to curb the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation. Sweden has gone further than other countries in attempting to curb prostitution by a law that penalises men.  And everywhere in Europe there is substantial opposition to curbing men's sexual access to women's bodies.

 

But this is not to say that men and women have the same views on trafficking or prostitution or support prostitution for the same reasons, although some men and women may. Women are more likely to understand that the estimated 500,000 Eastern European women transported by traffickers annually into the European Union are driven by economic need to take chances that may result in their prostitution in a European Union country than the men who police these activities. For women, they remain women or underage girls; for men they are likely to be simply prostitutes whatever their mode of entry into prostitution, to be repatriated as soon as possible and without attempting prosecution (BBC 2000). Implicit support for traffickers and local prostitution businesses is occurring in European Union countries even though the European Union has called on its members to focus on the criminal gangs that organise trafficking and to respond to women as potential witnesses in need of protection. 

 

To look at locally based crime, there has been some progress in the recognition and condemnation of sexual crime, especially against children in the family, but even here public anger from both men and women is reserved primarily for stranger attack. For example, the recent attacks on men defined as paedophiles begun by a newspaper in the UK after the murder of a young girl is community based and appears to be led by women against neighbours and strangers who have been rehoused in their communities, sometimes after prison. The aim is to protect their children from specifically identified men, demonised by the term paedophile. Sexual crime in the family against women when identified as rape, however, remains somewhat hidden under the term domestic violence and, given the conviction rates, receives little sympathy from juries on which both men and women serve.

 

Divisions between women, by continent, by colour and racism, slow the development of alliances, but one of the recent successes of European and international women's alliances is moving rape in wartime from non-prosecution (a non-crime) to prosecution (a crime). This is a major victory for women who led the campaigns and created alliances with professional and political women to achieve this end. This is not to deny that men too, were involved, but that their presence was not necessary for this to lead to political alliances between women worldwide.

 

Connections -the military and 'badly lived (hetero)sexuality'

Accounts of military violence against women in peacetime derive primarily from countries with US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region where there is a very high incidence of prostitution, trafficking and violence against women. Catherine Euler and Daniel Welzer-Lang (2000) in researching violence against women in living near a base in Northern England and the Foreign Legion base near Toulouse, describe some of the relationships near the bases to be at least superficially similar to those outside any military base in the world. Their research report focuses on military wives and cohabitees who spoke not only domestic violence, but also their marginalized position in relation to the military and the communities in which they live. Because men are posted elsewhere and can always return to barracks, women are more marginalized and disempowered than women with civilian male partners. There is sexual exploitation in England, defined as underage sex and unmarried women with children by soldiers, but almost all local residents interviewed blamed the women and girls for loose morals rather than the military system or the men involved in it.

 

The similarities with the UK situation and the better known situation near US bases in Asia are: reports of rape coupled with low conviction rates, short-term relationships involving some resource exchange, high population of single mothers outside the base, hopes for marriage or travel or better housing, high incidence of underage sex, imbalance in local sex ration coupled with higher soldier wages compared to those of local men, relative poverty of the women compared to the soldiers; no skilled work possibilities for the women. The differences were: less frequent, much less extreme violence, no official red light district, no local trafficking for purposes of prostitution, more overt racial/ethnic othering of those outside the bases in Asia, more extensive, more complex policing arrangements to control violence in the UK (Euler and Welzer-Lang, 2000, p. 80).

 

In contrast, the Foreign Legionnaires bring women into France from countries that are poor and where the women themselves occupy a precarious position. Each French foreign base is an anchor point for a migratory chain of women. Their immigration to the Foreign Legion bases abroad is often illegal and once there they work in the sex trade. Being chosen by a Legionnaire to be taken to metropolitan France occurs for a few and once at the Castelanaudary base, a woman and any children who have accompanied her are in a state of extreme emotional and financial dependence on the Legionnaire. Violence is commonplace and access to services for women in the town is minimal. The relationship between the Foreign Legion and the population of Castelanaudary, which profits from the presence of the Legion and the women that accompany it, is described as symbiotic. Women are silenced. This project however, was undertaken with local authority co-operation and new services are being planned.

 

These two European countries are relatively stable societies and, as with domestic violence generally, when there is concerted action it is possible to achieve improvements in responses to women. This research concludes that the military in stable European countries do not want attention drawn to violence against women; in Castelanaudary French women are relatively well protected and in the UK base commanders are prepared to cooperate to control domestic violence.

 

There are other ways the militarisation of societies presents a further challenge to the security of women in Europe. The world is becoming a smaller place in that it is now more difficult to restrict harm in one region from spilling over into another. For example, Daniel Volman (1995) summarises the militarisation of Africa that began with the cold war arming of various factions and states by Western countries, while reduced, continues today and is augmented by multinational corporations involved in light weapons trade, illegal arms dealers and so on.  Militarisation and the resulting wars and civil unrest has created pervasive insecurity, ignited an escalating level of violence, much of which is specifically directed against women. Women and children too, are largely those affected by famine and mass starvation, refugee and displaced persons status as a result of war. Volman also makes a connection between economic and political instabilities through military organisation and activities. He describes warfare as a dominant mode of production and a significant sector of the economy as warfare is being used to obtain and sustain control over food and related supplies now that the economies of some African countries are destroyed. He also explains that the continued militarisation of Africa is not just an African concern as the ‘consequences of the growth and spread of conflict and crime in Africa ....produced a growing demand for humanitarian assistance from the international community, ignited massive refugee migrations, facilitated the flow of drugs and other illegal products around the globe, prompted acts of terrorism, complicated efforts to monitor and control the spread of disease, and accelerated environmental degradation.’ (p.161). He concludes that violence in Africa will escalate and spread if the West is unwilling to confront its continuing militarisation of Africa (and elsewhere) and the social instabilities it has done so much to create.

 

Researching gendered violence

While academic language when considering violence and protest has moved away from using the categories women and men to more abstract formulations, such as patriarchy and gender, this does not resolve the imbalance in the giving and receiving of violence or in its organisation or clarify the analysis[16]. Of course, not all men are violent and not all women are non-violent or support other women; researching violence is not about biology, but social relations within a social context (Hanmer and Hearn 1999).  If it were about biology, women would never band together at particular historical moments to oppose violence against women and men would never resist being violent to women. That violence and its organisation are gendered is an empirical reality and therefore the terms, men and women, remain useful. While differences based on gender are not always obvious in research, we should continue to look for these as men and women can engage in the same struggles, the same activities, have the same aims with very different motivations and outcomes.

 

Transformation of society is also a goal of women, but their aims can be very different from those of organised groups of warring men. The elimination of violence against women is a demand for the end of male domination. A call for the acceptance of national identities based on cultural, religious, ethnic and other diversities is a demand for the end of male domination. The formulation women’s rights are human rights is a demand for the end of male domination. The aim of these demands is to empower women to gain or regain control over their lives. Analysing moments of conflict over men and of how women restrict and expand their analyses and actions, are relevant and little discussed in researching and developing theory on violence.