Handbook on Sexual Violence (2 page)
Read Handbook on Sexual Violence Online
Authors: Jennifer Sandra.,Brown Walklate
Sheila Coates
Conclusion: taking stock –
plus ¸ca change, plus c’est la mˆeme chose?
485
Sandra Walklate and Jennifer Brown
3.1 Self-reported behavioural intentions if raped 80
5.1 The process for victims who report to the police and the role of
16.1 The pyramid of sexually abusive online contacts 368
C.1 Different outcomes of sexual behaviours 490
Tables
I.1 Police and CPS data on numbers of domestic violence
incidences and rapes 2006–2009 5
Prevalence of sexual violence among adults aged 16–59 in the
Police-recorded crime statistics on sexual offences, England and
Police recorded crime statistics on specific forms of violence 2002/03–2008/09, England and Wales 96
Reports, prosecutions and convictions for rape, England and Wales 102
Rape crime: pre-charge decisions and completed convictions by outcome, England and Wales 103
all courts, England and Wales 106
19.1 Summary of rape figures quoted 421
Acas Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service ACPO Association of Chief Police Officers
BCS British Crime Survey CA Children Act 1989
CBT Cognitive behavioural therapy
CDVP Community Domestic Violence Programme
CEDAW United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women
CER Campaign to End Rape CJS Criminal justice system
CLAA Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 COSA Circles of Support and Accountability CPAG Child Poverty Action Group
CPS Crown Prosecution Service CRB Criminal Records Bureau
CWASU Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit
DASH Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Harassment and Honour based Violence Risk Identification Assessment and Management Model
DSPD Dangerous and severe personality disorder EHRC Equalities and Human Rights Commission EVAW End Violence Against Women
FGM Female genital mutilation FME Forensic medical examiner FMU Forced Marriage Unit
FSS Forensic Science Service
GEO Government Equalities Office GLM Good Lives Model
GUM Genito-urinary medicine clinic
IDAP Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme IDVA Independent domestic violence adviser IO Investigating officer
IPPC Independent Police Complaints Commission ISVA Independent sexual violence adviser
JCHR Joint Committee on Human Rights LGBT Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual
MAPPA Multi-agency public protection arrangements MARAC Multi-agency risk assessment conference
MPFSL Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory MPS Metropolitan Police Service
NGO Non-governmental organisation
NPIA National Policing Improvement Agency
NPS National Probation Service (England and Wales)
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development PACE Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
PCL-R Psychopathy Checklist Revised PHA Public health approach
PIP Professionalising Investigation Programme PTSD Post-traumatic stress disorder
SANE Sexual assault nurse examiner programme (USA) SARA Spousal Assault Risk Assessment
SARC Sexual assault referral centre
SARN Structured Assessment of Risk and Need SART Sexual assault response team
SDVC Specialist domestic violence court SIO Senior investigating officer
SOA Sexual Offences Act
SOE Sexual offences examiner
SOIT Sexual offences investigative techniques SOLO Sexual office liaison officer
STD Sexually transmitted disease STI Sexually transmitted infection STO Specially trained officer
TDI The Derwent Initiative
UKHTC United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre VAW Violence against women
VES Victim examination suite
WNC Women’s National Commission
YJCEA Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999
This Handbook is the product of the research and scholarship of our contributors. We are grateful to them for sharing their enthusiasm for this project and for addressing their very considerable intellectual talents to the problems arising from sexual violence. Our practitioner commentators rose magnificently to the task we set them in looking at the practice implications of chapters in the various sections of the book. We very much wanted this to be an interdisciplinary text with a unifying thread connecting the chapters. We chose the continuum of violence conceived by Liz Kelly as the common element. Liz has worked tirelessly in the area of women and children’s sexual victimisation and her research achievements go well beyond the boundaries of these pages. Scholars and those affected by sexual violence have much to appreciate from her endeavours. We wish too to thank Julia Willan for her assistance in preparing the book. We hope that the chapters will interest, provoke and contribute to more understanding, better policies, and full implementation of recommendations concerning interventions to prevent, investigate, prosecute and support those involved in sexual violence.
Standing the test of time? Reflections on the concept of the continuum of sexual violence
1
Liz Kelly
Meet Liz Kelly
Liz Kelly holds the Roddick Chair on violence against women at London Metropolitan University, where she has been Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (
www.cwasu.org
) for almost 20 years. The Unit is recognised as a ‘world leader’ for its policy-relevant research and also runs the only MA in Women and Child Abuse in Europe. The concept of the ‘continuum of violence’ was developed during Liz’s PhD research, and has been used – sometimes in ways not intended – by many around the globe since. It is perhaps the most satisfying contribution one can make as an academic to bring something into language which stands the test of time.
It seems appropriate in this preface to locate the concept of the continuum of sexual violence
2
(Kelly 1987) in my own and wider feminist thinking. In the 1980s the knowledge base and theoretical frameworks available were considerably less developed than today, and for much of the twentieth
century violence against women was considered rare, committed by deviant men and/or in dysfunctional families, with a focus in theorising – academic and populist – on how the victims contributed to their own fate. Much of what we knew as feminists, therefore, originated not in research, but consciousness-raising (CR) groups and/or working in women’s services, especially refuges and rape crisis centres. Both were spaces in which women told stories about their lives, and in the process questioned clinical and research constructions, which in turn led to making links between what in traditional discourses were considered disconnected events/experiences. There was not at this point, however, a strong sense of just how common violence was in women’s lives, and many key feminist texts continued to differentiate men who used violence from the majority of ‘normal’ men (see, for example, Brownmiller 1975).
This was the context in which I began my PhD, within which the continuum concept emerged. The impetus to explore the range of forms of violence in women’s lives was twofold: my own encounters with ‘minor’ intimate intrusions as an adolescent and listening to women in CR groups and workshops tell similar stories, including how they changed their behaviour as
a consequence; and a young Finnish au pair who sought out the refuge I worked in as a place to ‘be’ on her day off. She was the first to recount to me a story of sexual abuse by her father, and saw connections between her story and those of the women living in the refuge, which in turn raised new questions for me. The first issue raised the fundamental question of who decides what is abusive, what matters, what should be counted; the second, what is it that connects violations that take place in different relationships/ contexts/points in the life course? The concept of the continuum, and the thinking that informed it, was an engagement with both, and extended existing feminist analysis of particular forms of violence. Judith Herman (1981) had defined incest as an exaggeration of patriarchal family norms rather than a departure from them and Scully and Marolla (1985) argued that rape was the end point of a ‘socially sanctioned continuum of male sexual aggression’. Both located sexual violence within the structures of patriarchy, and what would later be theorised as heteronormativity (Jackson 1999) and constructions of masculinity (Connell 1995).