Session 4: Changing Roles and Challenges
7th Global Conference
Monday 12th March – Wednesday 14th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
Intimate Partner Femicide against Ethiopian Women in Israel
Arnon Edelstein
Kaye College, Be’er-Sheva, Israel
This article suggests an integrative theoretical and empirical model to explain IPH (Intimate Partner Homicide) against Ethiopian women, as an example of IPH against women from patriarchal cultures in general. The basic point of view emphasizes the fact that psychological explanations, as well as socio-cultural ones alone, are insufficient for an understanding of this phenomenon. A full analysis requires the combination of the different points of view of all the parties involved.
Risk factors to IPH among immigrants from patriarchal cultures are mainly the changes in power relations between couples. Role and status reversal threaten the man’s status and identity. As a respond, he turns to “legitimate” violence against the woman. But he may find himself in a new surrounding which criminates his traditional conducts norms.
Among Ethiopian immigrants to Israel, there are some more risk factors. The Ethiopian woman became the main or the only breadwinner of the family; The Israeli society empowered Ethiopian women while leaving the Ethiopian men to their destiny; Ethiopian women are higher than Men in the acculturation process; the traditional mechanism for conflict resolutions among couples (“the elderly men”) was destroyed during the absorption process.
IPH among the Ethiopian community in Israel is twenty fold their ratio in the general population. In studying all the verdicts of Ethiopian men who killed their intimate partners, three main triggers are salient: When a woman complains about her violent husband to the police and social welfare agencies; Sexual jealousy of Ethiopian man regarding their intimate partner; the willingness of women to leave their intimate relationships. Forty percent of the killers committed suicide after the killing, but not as a result of guilt or remorse.
One of the main conclusions is that only the emergence of triggers together with risk factors can explain IPH.
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Sense of Self and Sense of Place in a World of Increasing Movement of People.
Mahni Dugan
University of Tasmania, Australia
Much sense of place discourse insists that people can have strong sense of place with concomitant care of the environment only when they stay in one place. Yet, millions of people relocate each year, voluntarily, or as a result of coercion or necessity. Such movement warrants asking how those transitions can be made with resilience, wellbeing, and environmental stewardship. Often inquiry is approached from a perspective either of sense of self or sense of place. In research on which this paper draws, I explore both, and relationship between these two in light of people’s ability to handle relocation. Drawing on more than thirty years praxis in the human potential field, I take lived experience as the ontological ground for numerous qualitative case studies and autoethnography. I examine the lives of several people who have moved many times and who come from diverse backgrounds and experiences of poverty, ostracism, exclusion, displacement, war, challenge and success. By exploring their experiences I seek to discover what can be learnt, and ask how that learning could be more generally applied to promote social wellbeing and environmental care in an increasingly mobile social order. Here, I outline current migration trends, and describe what happens when relocation is experienced with distress, in order to share emergent understandings of how wellbeing might best be supported when people make such transitions. I then summarise one case study, and consider what it contributes to those understandings.
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Being South African and Belonging: The Status and Practice of Mediated Citizenship in a New Democracy
Herman Wasserman and Anthea Garman
School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa
Democratic South Africa, with its highly inclusive constitution and embrace of all races, creeds and colours, could be understood as having an ideal form of citizenship to be emulated by other nations. At the heart of the 1996 constitution is the eradication of apartheid separation and the provision that all South Africans have shared humanity (“ubuntu”). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission entrenched three founding critical ideas in public life: the right to talk, the recognition of shared humanity and the impulse to speak out about the horrors of the past. As a result the public sphere is filled with a great outpouring of personal stories and experiences in both the mainstream and popular forms of media. But South Africans continue to be preoccupied with the status of their citizenship; who a South African is and who belongs is uppermost in many public conversations. Recently, in the elite public sphere, a number of columnists and public figures have launched attacks, often racist, on sections of the South African population or on high-profile members, calling into question their loyalty and belonging. And characteristic too of the New South Africa, is an increase in protest action on the streets and violence against protesters by police and state agents, calling into question whether the practice of citizenship is possible for the impoverished, unemployed majority who are marginalised from formal political processes and the elite public sphere. We ask whether these features of our public life are indicative of a crisis in citizenship; whether the effect – in both public sphere and on the street – is to not only silence a variety of voices and paralyse participation in building a new democracy, but also to exclude certain kinds of identities and subjectivities from the definition of who an authentic South African can be.
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