Final Verified Test Bank Chapter 8 Violence

Chapter 8 Violence 

Chapter Introduction

Violence against women is widespread. There are links between violence and masculinity.

The Gendered Continuum of Violence

The gendered continuum of violence extends from private and personal violence between intimates to sex trafficking, militarism, and wartime rape. In fact, there are connections between private and public violence. This chapter explores various points along the continuum of violence and their connections to each other. Eisler distinguishes a dominator model that rules hierarchical societies such as that of the United States and a partnership model that is more common in marginalized indigenous societies that are more sexually egalitarian, more peaceful, less hierarchical, and less authoritarian. Nearly all societies today fit into the dominator model, which is characterized by hierarchy, violence, and dominance by men. The epidemic of violence is connected also to hierarchies of race, class, sexuality, and nation, as well as to gender. Both women and men suffer within these societies as victims of violence by the men who dominate.

Some Statistics on Violence

This section demonstrates that gendered violence is widespread. Women experience violence most often as victims, so often in fact that violence against women should be seen as a human rights scandal. The perpetrators of violence are most often men, and violent actions are intrinsic to the social construction of masculinity in many cultures. Violence is part of a systematic pattern of gender dominance and control, but lesbian and gay battering shows that violence is a matter of power over others, not simply a matter of men’s power over women.

Street Harassment: A Geography of Fear

Although the perpetrators of violence against women are most often well known to the woman, fear of violence by strangers in public spaces is common. Street harassment and street violence contribute to a context of fear, distrust, and feelings of danger that destroy sociability and divest citizens of their ability to assemble and pursue civic life. The fear of crime and public violence is gendered. Harassment tells women that the streets belong to men. Street harassment is worldwide and there is worldwide tacit approval of this practice. Street harassment and assault in India are particularly troubling. The intensity of the problem may be a result of changes in Indian culture where women are making gains in jobs, education, and independence. Street harassment is more pervasive in low-income neighborhoods, where it is part of a more dangerous setting that includes drugs, gangs, and weapons as well as slum landlords and government officials who do little to create or maintain safe housing and neighborhoods.

Lately, women have been encouraged to “holler back” by posting photos of harassers and stories of the harassment to websites.

Men’s Personal Safety and Gender Violence

Masculinity requires that boys and men confront violence and be skilled in the use of violence in those confrontations. Most boys and men, of course, are not accomplished fighters and they are victimized by those who are. Violence against men and boys by other men and boys is often sexualized.

Rape and Domestic Violence

Most violence against women and girls is perpetrated by men and boys the women know well. Age, race ethnicity, and social class make some women and girls most vulnerable. Men and boys are also victims of rape but less frequently than are women and girls. Acquaintance rape refers to rapes perpetrated by people known to their victims. Date rape refers to rape in dating contexts or contexts where victim and perpetrator had a romantic relationship.

Accounting for Rape: Social Theories

The Caveman Mystique

Sociologist Martha McCaughey (2008) argues that we live in a time of pop-Darwinism, in which we explain away men’s “bad behavior”—including rape and sexual assault – by invoking pseudo-scientific understandings of evolution and men’s supposedly “baser instincts.” The belief that men are naturally prone to sexual violence is the caveman mystique. The mystique tells us that men are unable to control their sexual and violent nature and are biologically programmed to “spread their seed.” The mystique is not well founded by scientific evidence but the ideas are prevalent in popular media and are part of the popular discourse on masculinity. Evolutionary ideas about rape and male violence often fail to consider that societies can appear anywhere along a continuum from rape-free to rape-prone. Societies on or near the rape-free end of the continuum are less male-dominated and have more sharing of jobs between men and women.

Power Inequality

Kimmel reasons that gender is the outcome of inequality, not its cause. Power differences between women and men produce gender domination that leads to men’s sexual entitlement and rape. Gender legitimizes these inequalities by naturalizing them.

Ending Rape Breaking the silence has been the first step toward ending sexual violence. Organizations have also been built to recognize violence and create ways to end it.

The Discovery of Domestic Violence

Like rape, domestic violence was invisible until feminists began to name it in the 1970s. Feminists, furthermore, began to question the myth of the family as a haven in a heartless world. Besides questioning the institution of family, feminists also challenged the organization of the police, the laws, and the courts and led a successful social movement throughout the 1980s that led to the implementation of laws, procedure, and social services in the United States. After a long struggle, laws that criminalize battering are now in place in many nations.

Studies of Domestic Violence

Scholars who study families were part of the movement to make violence visible. Some early studies argued that women and men were equally responsible for domestic violence. These studies were criticized because they ignored the social context, which included personal and institutional power differences between women and men.

Institutional change became the focus of research, which concluded that police departments and criminal justice systems needed to change. Important changes have been made, but violence against women is still a critical problem all over the world. So-called honor killings are a particularly critical problem. 

From Universality to Intersectionality

Changes in criminal justice systems have been important successes in addressing violence against women, but they have been limited because of their “one size fits all” approach. Relying on the criminal justice system can have unintended negative consequences for some women for whom police intervention can cause additional problems. In addition, legal protection is not enough for women who have few economic resources that would allow them to live independently from abusive men.

Beyond Criminal Justice: Marginalized Battered Women at the Center

A second cluster of institutional changes developed around services to help women become independent. The movement against violence stood up against not only domestic violence but also police and prison violence.

State Violence Against Men

The fight to stop domestic violence required changes in the criminal justice system making it more cognizant of violence against women and capable of protecting women. The criminal justice system also needs alteration to prevent it from perpetrating violence against women who bring charges, against communities of color, and against men in the prison system.

The Prison-Industrial Complex

The U.S. has the largest proportion of incarcerated people in the world. Prisons have been a booming business in the past few decades. Corporate involvement in prison construction and management has created vested interests in maintaining and increasing incarceration. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander suggests that the U.S. criminal justice system functions much like slavery, as a contemporary system of racial control.

Sexual Violence in Men’s Prisons

Sexual violence is prevalent in men’s prisons. Prison rape is an aspect of “doing gender” where men are required to “act like women” as part of their degradation and subordination. Sexual violence and torture, familiar to Americans from what they have learned about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, may also be routine in American prisons. This violation of human rights links domestic terror in prisons to the gendered terror of war in conflict zones.

Gendered Violence in Conflict Zones

War is a form of gender and sexual terrorism. The result of international conflicts over scarce or valuable resources, war is a form of institutionalized violence that takes gendered forms of rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy.

Guatemala: A Case Study

At the end of a brutal 30-year civil war in Guatemala, the rape and murder of thousands of women continued the wartime aggression against women. Militarism and war intensify the vulnerability of women and the epidemics of violence against them and others.

What Is to Be Done? CEDAW, the International Criminal Court, and Security Council Resolution 1325

The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), often called the bill of human rights for women, in 1979. The bill has been effective in many places at helping to stop violence against women. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has now sentenced some perpetrators of wartime rape and genocide to prison. UN Resolution 1325 gives women the right to participate in conflict-resolution and peace-building efforts. The U.S. is one of a handful of countries that has not signed these UN resolutions, giving U.S. citizens a special responsibility for changing our country’s role in perpetuating violence around the world.

Placing women and gender at the center of peace-building and antiviolence activities helps to promote the partnership model of society described at the beginning of this chapter.
 

Gender Matters

This chapter teaches that inequalities of wealth and power depend on force and violence, that inequalities of race, class, religion, ethnicity, and nation shape the fate of men and women, and that the various forms of violence, from personal to global, are connected. It teaches that gender is a central feature of violence and gender must be taken into account if we are to end violence.

Short-Answer Essay Questions

1. List some statistics from the chapter that demonstrate the way violence is gendered in the U.S.
2. Briefly explain the social history of domestic violence in the U.S.
3. What flaw in research methodology has been offered to explain the decline in rape in recent decades in the U.S.? 
4. How is intersectional analysis important to understanding and responding to battered women?
5. What is the “prison-industrial complex” and how has it changed in recent decades?
6. What is CEDAW?
7. What is UN Resolution 1325?

Long-Answer Essay Questions

1. What solutions would a theorist from each of the three main approaches to rape—evolutionary theory, individual psychology, and inequality—propose?
2. What are some of the criminal justice solutions that have been implemented to address the problem of violence against women, especially in families? What are some of the problems with this solution? Why might some battered women be unwilling or unable to use the police as a resource? What other resources need to be developed or have been developed to help all women, including those who cannot use the criminal justice system?
3. What does it mean to say that prisons are a form of institutionalized gender violence that targets men in particular?
4. What does it mean to say that war is a form of institutionalized gender violence that targets women in particular?
5. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta keeps data on interpersonal violence in the U.S. and around the world. Go to the website (http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/dvp/SV/default.htm) and look at the report they have made available on sexual violence from the World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/global_campaign/en/chap6.pdf). Prepare a presentation based on Chapter 8 about the problem of violence and some of the actions people are taking to address those problems. Center your presentation around the issue of gender. Where does gender fit into the experience of sexual violence? Where does gender fit into the solutions to sexual violence? 
6. Watch the YouTube video “Tough Guise” (http://youtube.com/watch?v=3exzMPT4nGI) with some friends. Ask them if they agreed with the video. What points were made that they thought were most important and consistent with their own observations? What points did they think were not part of their experience?
7. Look up the definition of human rights and civil rights on the Internet. Try a couple of different sites to see if you can find a variety of ways of describing these two ways of thinking about rights. Now think about various forms of violence against women such as date rape and battering. How do these examples of violence fit into the discussion of human rights or civil rights? Is freedom from violence for women a human right or is it a civil right? How do most people you know think about the problem of stopping violence against women? Do they think about it as a civil right? As a human right?
8. Interview some men you know about their experience in grade school. Do they recall that physical violence in the classroom and schoolyard was a part of their lives? What did they do to respond to the assaults by their classmates?
9. Look up the debate among scholars over the question of husband abuse by going to SocAbstracts in your library or some online electronic journal source. What was the original research that identified violence against men by women in families? (Check out the authors Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Suzanne Steinmetz.) What do other scholars, such as R. Emerson Dobash & Russell Dobash, Donileen Loseke, Elizabeth Pleck, and Richard Berk & Sarah Berk, say about flaws in the research? How have they criticized the definitions and measures of violence in families, the problem of self-defense, and the overwhelming data that show women as those who are injured in domestic violence cases?
10. Why has the U.S. refused to sign CEDAW and UN Resolution 1325? Go to the Internet and find organization sites that say that the U.S. should not sign the resolution. What are their arguments? What are the organizations? What other kinds of issues do they support or not support? 

Critical Thinking Exercises

1. Rape on college campuses has been an area of great concern in recent years. Investigate your own college’s response to rape on campus. What kind of educational materials does your college provide? How does the college respond to incidents? Analyze the material you collect using the lenses this chapter offers.
2. Discussions of prison often include mention of prison rape between men. What role do you think homophobia plays in popular rhetoric about prison?
3. If women’s peace movements are able to transform violence and gender in the world, how might you offer your own local peacemaking effort? Devise a plan that would be centered at your college, based upon the information this chapter details about the workings of violence in the U.S.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How is sexual violence gendered?
   1. Almost 91% of the victims are girls and women, and 97% of the perpetrators are men and boys.
   2. Whereas almost 90% of the victims are girls and women, men and women are equally likely to be the perpetrators.
   3. Whereas 99% of the perpetrators are men and boys, the victims of violence are equally likely to be male or female.
   4. 99% of the perpetrators are men and boys, and 75% of the victims are women and children of both sexes.
2. What is the caveman mystique?
   1. A popular belief that men have evolved to be naturally violent and sexually aggressive and that they cannot control these instincts
   2. A masculine persona that sexually aggressive and violent and does not value verbal communication
   3. A trend whereby men who feel entitled to dates and sex with women lash out violently if they do not get these things
   4. The romanticization of violent, sexually aggressive men in popular culture
3. Black Americans make up about 13% of the U.S. populations. In 2017, they made up ______ percent of unarmed Americans killed by police.
   1. 13%
   2. 21%
   3. 35%
   4. 50%
4. What group commits the highest percentage of sexual assaults and rapes of women?
   1. Strangers
   2. Partners and acquaintances
   3. Soldiers
   4. Relatives
5. What is Kimmel’s alternative to evolutionary and psychological explanations of male violence?
   1. The claim that male violence is a result of biological male differences
   2. The theory that power differences between men and women produce gender domination and subordination, leading to men’s sexual entitlement and rape
   3. The argument that any explanation for male violence excuses it, so instead of explanations, programs to eradicate it are needed
   4. The idea that both evolution and psychology that account for male violence: men’s psychologies have evolved to extremes of violence
6. What happened when women began looking to the criminal justice system for safety and protection from domestic violence?
   1. Juries took sympathetic views of battered women, and public awareness of domestic violence and sympathy increased.
   2. Legal protections arose to ensure that domestic abuse became a felony in most states.
   3. They learned that institutional practices and practitioners implicated women in their own victimization and excused violent partners.
   4. Self-defense courses for women arose in urban areas after the courts turned battered women away.
7. What other approach to violence against women has been successful, besides criminal justice?
   1. Housing for poor battered women
   2. Bicultural and bilingual services for immigrants
   3. Shelters that accepted lesbians and homeless women
   4. All of the above
8. How have crime and imprisonment rates changed in the U.S. in the past several decades?
   1. They have remained the same.
   2. Serious crime rates have been increasing for the past 20 years, and the number of prisoners serving life sentences has more than quadrupled since 1984.
   3. Serious crime rates have been increasing for the past 20 years, but the number of prisoners serving life sentences decreased by more than four times since 1984.
   4. Serious crime rates have been declining for the past 20 years, but the number of prisoners serving life sentences has more than quadrupled since 1984.
9. How does the United States compare to other nations in its proportion of citizens in prison?
   1. The United States has the highest proportion of citizens in prison worldwide.
   2. The United States has the lowest proportion of citizens in prison worldwide.
   3. The United States has more citizens in prison than developed nations but fewer than developing nations.
   4. The United States has more citizens in prison than developing nations but fewer than developed nations.
10. What is CEDAW?
    1. A declaration of equal rights for women that the U.S. signed into law in 1979
    2. A 1979 bill of human rights that calls on governments that sign the treaty to remove all forms of discrimination against women
    3. The International Criminal Court’s charge against femicide in Guatemala in 2012
    4. The name of the 2001 sentencing of three Bosnian Serb soldiers standing trial on charges of rape and torture
11. A successful social movement to address domestic violence took place in the U.S. in _________ and was responsible in large part for reforming police procedure, changing laws, and establishing resources and shelters for abused women.
    1. the 1960s
    2. the 1970s
    3. the 1980s
    4. the 1990s
12. _______ refers to the killing of women and girls out of gender-based hatred.
    1. Genocide
    2. Besharmi Morcha
    3. Honor killing
    4. Femicide
13. What proportion of incarcerated men in the United States are believed to be victims of rape in prison?
    1. 5-10%
    2. 8-17%
    3. 20-33%
    4. 40-45%
14. Hegemonic masculinity scholars identify war-making as a masculinity resource. What does this mean?
    1. War provides economic opportunities to men through military service.
    2. War disproportionately takes the lives of men, leaving societies with fewer men than women.
    3. Most wars are fought to protect economic interests. War primarily protects the fortunes of men.
    4. Waging war is a way that a leader can show his strength, dominance, and other masculine qualities.
15. In 2014, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowics began protesting Columbia’s handling of students’ sexual assault allegations by _________.
    1. carrying a mattress to class everyday
    2. creating an event called Take Back the Night
    3. organizing a SlutWalk, where victims of sexual assault challenge rape myths by dressing in lingerie
    4. drafting the language of the federal Violence Against Women Act
16. What is the Thomas Theorem?
    1. A formula for predicting the relationship between violence and unemployment rates
    2. The sociological idea that our ideas shape our realities and that we will act in accordance with what we believe to be true
    3. The idea that the likelihood of a domestic violence victim to leave a batterer is reliant on the resources she has available to her
    4. The idea that women and men are equally capable of committing domestic violence
17. Which of the following do domestic violence advocates cite as evidence that policing is an inadequate solution to battering?
    1. Resources offered by police are not useful if victims are unable to access them due to poverty, legal status, language barriers, or other social factors.
    2. Some victims who call the police on a batterer are arrested themselves causing others to fear police involvement.
    3. Many police offers still believe stereotypes about “learned helplessness” which may cause them to take victims less seriously.
    4. All of the above.
18. Which of the following refers to cultural ideas that blame women for sexual assault and hold women responsible for preventing victimization.
    1. Men’s rights logic
    2. Rape myths
    3. Gender symmetry arguments
    4. The caveman mystique
19. Among which of the following groups is perpetration of domestic violence higher than average?
    1. Police officers
    2. Lower-income men
    3. Wealthy men
    4. Both a. and b. are correct.
20. In comparison to heterosexual couples, rates of domestic violence among same-sex couples are _______.
    1. Much lower
    2. Two to three times higher
    3. About the same to slightly higher
    4. Unknown