Monday 12th August - Friday 16th August 2002
Prague, Czech Republic

Session 7: Gender, Dating and Legal Violence

Alan Bougere - Physical Aggression in the Context of Dating Relationships

Studies show 20% to 50% of American college students have experienced physical aggression in at least one dating relationship. A wealth of research has suggested that a complex of variables are related to courtship aggression. Heise (1998) proposed using an ecological model for conceptualizing the etiology of gender-based violence. Using this framework the researchers studied African American college students using eleven predictor variables and five criterion variables. Many predictor variables were found to have a moderate to strong correlation with several criterion variables in each canonical root. This lends support to the ecological perspective and the systems notion of equifinality. The researchers are again collecting data on this population using 22 variables, as a part of the International Dating Violence Consortium study with Dr. Murray Straus, and should have preliminary analysis completed by this summer. Finally, we are completing a research proposal to collect data this summer, using the same variables, but on an African American sample of housing project residents between the ages of 18 to 25 years. It is our plan to compare the two populations seeking similar and non-similar characteristics and plan to complete analysis of that data by the end of the summer. These projects hope to culminate in an instrument for high-risk individuals for dating violence that can be used to measure success with dating violence prevention programs.

Bill Munro - The Concept of ‘Dangerousness’ and Sex Offenders
Research & Information Officer, Criminal Justice Service, Perth

The paper will highlight some of the social control themes currently emerging within penal and policy debates in America and Britain. In particular it will focus on the heightened significance given to the concept of ‘dangerousness’ and the appearance of the category ‘dangerous, violent and sexual offender’. A category of offender, as the paper will argue, where the all-encompassing concept of ‘dangerousness’ is both contentious and ambivalent. It will illustrate how this renewed emphasis on dangerousness has been accompanied, not only by a transformation in both the conceptualisation and regulation of deviance but in the social understanding of violence itself.

This transformation or shift in penality has taken the forms of both an essentialising of violence within the individual - epitomised in discourses of the dangerous ‘other’ - and in the professional rationalisation of risk. The paper will outline the rise of these transformations, from the attempts to understand the relationship between social structure and deviance in the late 1950’s and 60’s, to the current actuarial methods that seek to inform the assessment and control of a problematic individual. The paper will trace the history of this development and by using Anthony Gidden’s notion of ‘ontological insecurity’ attempt to situate the debates within the context of ‘fear of crime’ and the social normalisation of anxiety.

Lastly, I will argue that the concept of violence, as it appears in the risk management literature, with its focus on a common sense, efficient and practical interpretation, is problematic, and must be re-examined in the context of broader social and cultural transformations within society, in order to retain its usefulness as a critical or genuinely explanatory concept.

Download Full Conference Paper -

Jennifer Suchland - Public Morality and the Impossibility of a Violent Act
Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin, Austin, Texas USA

Various forms of violence against women have been politicized. That is, certain behaviours have been deemed violent, recognized as wrong/harmful and addressed as a policy issue. This politicization is represented in the phrase “violence against women,” which exhibits a societal and state awareness/categorization of a phenomenon. The issue that I want to raise in my presentation relates to how certain behaviours get recognized as forms of violence against women. Why is it that certain actions are deemed harmful while others are not? What are the political and cultural mechanisms at work when an “act” of violence is recognized as such?

In my paper I address what I call the politics of emergence. I first discuss the theoretical question of juridical categorization. The bulk of the paper analyzes the specific emergence and development of rape laws in Russia. I focus on how cultural ideas about sexuality and political divisions between public and privates spaces have contributed to the “impossibility of a violent act.” I also address international standards regarding violence against women and the limits of those “standards.”

Download Full Conference Paper -