Transcript a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another

Re-visiting the Continuum of
Sexual Violence
NE SV conference
November 2012
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @ProfLizKelly
Where the continuum concept
came from
 Liz
Kelly PhD in 1980s
 For much of 20C VAW seen as rare, committed by
deviant men, dysfunctional families
 Who decides
what is abusive, what matters?
 Connecting the horrific with the everyday
 incest
as an exaggeration of patriarchal family norms (Herman,
1981)
 rape as the end point of ‘socially sanctioned continuum of male
sexual aggression’ (Marolla and Scully, 1979)
 how the ‘typical’ and the ‘aberrant’ shade into one another
 Is located in
patriarchy/gender order – not just adding
and counting violence, but in context which influences
meaning and consequences
The 1987 concept
‘a basic common character that underlies many
different events’ – the many forms of coercion,
abuse and assault that are used to control women
 ‘a continuous series of elements or events that pass
into one another and cannot be readily
distinguished’ – categories are not discrete: sexual
harassment/ assault/rape; smuggling/trafficking
 Was not intended to be linear or imply anything
about seriousness – the ‘more or less’ referred to
prevalence

The continuum of nonconsensual sex
 Pressurised
sex
 Coercive sex
 Rape
 The
boundaries are not fixed and women
might discuss similar events but name them
differently
Trafficking/smuggling as binary
and as a continuum
‘Nothing Really
Happened’
 Paper
written with Jill Radford in 1990,
drawing on data from two projects
 This phrase common in women’s accounts –
they described things that had happened,
involved fear, but they minimised – it could
have been worse
 Unlikely to name or report these common
experiences as they do not count as ‘crimes’
Examples

I was kerb-crawled too, earlier this week. I hate this sort of
thing. It happened again later in the day, when I was walking
home. I was in tears by the time I got home, nothing
happened, just comments, but I was intimidated.

I have been frequently harassed by kerb-crawlers. It
happened even when I was pregnant. There were several
incidents about a fortnight ago, though nothing actually
happened… It makes me sick and angry. I don’t go out much
alone now, I resent that enormously.
A different understanding of
terrorism

I often get angered by men’s comments and at nights.
Nothing happens, but it’s a form of terror. You can tell they
know it’s terror by the way they laugh and that

All these things are everyday harassment, the background
against which our lives are lived. Not much happens but it is
threatening and calculated to intimidate women – to terrorize
us

I was on the tube the other day and a man was making racist
and insulting sexual remarks. He was white and said I was a
snobbish black tart and he knew what was good for me, all
that sort of talk, but he didn’t do anything. It makes me really
sick
Continuum of experience
in individual women’s lives
 Most women recall at
least one incident of intimate
intrusion in their lifetime and many report multiple
experiences
 Most
common is harassment
 Range within CSA, within IPV (lecture on measuring
violence)
Continuum of Impacts,
meanings and consequences
 Having
to factor personal safety into everyday
activities/limited space for action
 Bruises, broken bones, disability, HIV/AIDS, death
 Having one’s sense of self, safety and trust in other
human beings undermined/destroyed
 Is dishonouring, disgracing, stigmatising across cultural
contexts
 Impacts on earning power/achievement/loss of
livelihood/place in society
 Few women become perpetrators many more are
extraordinary activists and practitioners
Critiques of continuum
 Has
no frame for seriousness
 Hierarchy of
 Left
harm?
out sexual exploitation/sex industry
 Does
not include ‘harmful [traditional] practices’ –
FGM, forced marriage, honour based violence
Critique conted

Lynne Segal, Slow
Motion – blurs lines so
that all heterosexuality
is problematised, all
men guilty, violence
inherent in masculinity
 Wants
differentiation of
men and violences –
distinguishing ‘violent
rape’ and those in
relationships (p248),
and why some violate
and others do not
 “Such
violence constitutes a continuum across
the lifespan of women, it cuts across both the
public and the private sphere and one form of
violence often reinforces another”
What counts and what
are we measuring?
 Prevalence methodology
requires exclusive
analytic categories
 Where framed as crime this is interms of
‘incidents’
 Poor fit with IPV which is a pattern of
coercive control (Stark, 2007)
 Implications for 1 in 4 figure?
Law, crime and harm
 Law
also requires strict demarcations
 Gradations of ‘seriousness’
 Incidents
 All sit uneasily with continuum
 Course of conduct offences exceptions
 Sweden ‘gross violation of integrity’
 Not just safety but women’s freedom
Other potentials
 The
continuum of agency – constraints
on/space for action
 Extending to include structural and symbolic
violence – Srila Roy and Ava Kanyeredzi
 Women connecting their own experiences –
Fiona Elvines
 Historic continuum of oppression within a
family of women – Ava Kanyeredzi
Connecting to gender equality
and women’s freedom



Incremental social democratic gains stalled (Bea Campbell and
Sylvia Walby)
Violence as a core, and relative independent, pillar of gender
orders – eg Nordic countries, development income generation
projects
Need new theoretical framings
 R W Connell – gender orders, gender regimes, gender
relations
 Anne Morris ‘abusive household gender regime’
 Eva Lungren – gender constitution through violence