Handbook on Sexual Violence (3 page)

The continuum concept

In the original formulation two dictionary definitions of continuum were drawn on (Kelly 1987): ‘a basic common character that underlies many different events’ – that the many forms of intimate intrusion, coercion, abuse and assault were connected. This is the meaning that has been most commonly used since. The second dictionary definition was ‘a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another and cannot be readily distinguished’ – that the categories used to name and distinguish forms of violence, whether in research, law or policy, shade into and out of one another. This meaning has been less understood and/or used, but remains a challenge at both the level of women’s experience – that they may name the similar experiences differently – and with respect to legal reform. The strongest example used in
Surviving Sexual Violence
(SSV) was the way in which women named unwanted sex, with many unwilling to use the concept of rape. Given that this was a qualitative study, seeking to explore the ways in which women made sense of their own experiences, this led to the concepts of ‘pressurised sex’ and ‘coercive sex’ being used for non-consensual sex which women did not name rape. This issue continues to trouble us in research and practice, as many chapters in this book illustrate. It is central to a debate in quantitative prevalence research – whether incidents which fit the legal definition of rape should be coded as such when the respondent does not themselves define it this way (Koss 2005) – and more recently in how non- consensual heterosex should be conceptualised (Gavey 2005). In my more recent work on trafficking (Kelly 2005) this meaning of the continuum has been explored in terms of the ways in which migration, smuggling and trafficking shade into and out of one another in complex ways in the lived experiences of women and men, while being constructed in law and policy discourses as mutually exclusive categories.

There was in the original formulation no implication of linearity or

seriousness, with the crucial – and sometimes forgotten exception – of violence that results in death. The only ‘more or less’ referred to prevalence: that most women recalled encounters with harassment while sexual and physical assaults were less common. It is here that I think that much has been lost in the intervening years, as a focus on crime has meant that research, policy and practice has concentrated on intimate partner violence and, to a lesser extent, sexual assault. The everyday, routine intimate intrusions which were so key to the continuum have dropped off many agendas – leading to the oft-quoted cliche´ that domestic violence is the most common form of violence against women. It is without question the most researched and counted, but where prevalence surveys include a series of questions on harassment, as recent French and German studies did (European Commission 2010), it emerges as considerably more common in women’s lives. A further example of this loss involves a current Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU) PhD student who is revisiting the continuum through the lens of street harassment: in the first draft of her questionnaire neither she nor I noticed that key questions which might illuminate ambiguous experiences were missing.

There are further consequences for the extent to which the continuum within forms of violence is attended to, and understood in terms not only of behaviours, but also their consequences. Here one of the original interviews stands out, of a woman whose father was a lawyer and never did anything that would constitute a crime (at the time), but sexualised his relationship with his daughter throughout her adolescence, including requiring her to dance with him so that his erection pressed against her body. The consequences of this for her, including understanding as an adult the deliberateness through which he orchestrated his own safety while endangering hers, were so similar to those other women talked about where their experiences included repeated rape that it led me to question simplistic notions of seriousness. I still stand by this, but the evidence base on sexual abuse in childhood and its links with subsequent elevated risks of revictimisation (Messman-Moore and Long 2000) does suggest that repeated penetrative assaults are especially harmful. That said, the consequences of the extent of violence and everyday intrusions mean that women, far more than men as a social group, have to factor personal safety into their routine decision-making (Stanko 1990), limiting their ‘space for

action’ (Kelly 2006). We have yet to adequately document the continuum of impacts and consequences
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– physical, psychological, financial, social and cultural – of violence against women (VAW) in the lives of individuals and with respect to gender equality (see the final
section of this preface), although some chapters take up this challenge.

Limits and potentials

Subsequent critiques of the concept have raised a number of issues, some of which are valid, others are a matter of ongoing contention. Sexual exploitation in the sex industry and forms of VAW often referred to as ‘harmful traditional practices’ (female genital multilation/cutting, forced marriage and honour- based violence) were not included in SSV, but there is no reason in principle why the continuum concept cannot accommodate them and, arguably, recent discussion of the overlapping of arranged and forced marriage with respect to

consent and coercion (Anitha and Gill 2009) does precisely this. It could also be used to explore women’s accounts of prostitution: that women within, and having exited, define and understand similar experiences differently along the continua of choice and coercion, agency and exploitation. Current debates on the sex industry tend to work with these concepts and contexts as binaries, and in the process do a disservice to the complexity and ambiguity in many women’s accounts (see also Coy 2009). Using the continuum in diverse national and regional contexts would undoubtedly require adjustments in which forms of violence were more or less common.
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It is undoubtedly the case that there is little exploration of intersectional issues in women’s experiences – especially the ways in which ethnicity inflects with experience and meaning – in part because the sample in SSV was drawn from an area of England which had a homogeneous population, and because of my uncertainty, at that time, about interviewing minority women and interpreting their experiences. Again, there is in principle no reason why the concept could not be developed to embrace intersectionality, but doing so would require a sophisticated layering of data and analysis.

In a strong critique Lynne Segal in
Slow Motion
(1990) argues that the

continuum blurs boundaries so much that all heterosexuality is problematised, all men are deemed guilty, and violence is presented as inherent within masculinity.
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The latter two points are cliche´d, while endlessly recycled, responses to any radical feminist perspective, which invariably misrepresent the position of the author and deny that feminists of many hues share a social

constructionist epistemology (see also Cameron and Scanlon 2010). I make no apology for questioning ‘heterosexuality as usual’, of having played a minor part in developing a critical gaze which was deepened subsequently (see, for example, Richardson 1996; Jackson and Scott 2010), theorising the intersections between the construction of gender and sexuality. Lynne Segal revealingly develops her argument for a differentiation of men and violences, stating explicitly that ‘violent rape’ and those in relationships (p.248) should be separated. Here she reveals limited knowledge of the evidence base on rape – that those by ex/partners are among the most likely to involve weapons and result in additional levels of injury – and reproduces the ‘real rape’ stereotype which, as several chapters demonstrate, has proved so difficult to shift in policy and practice (see Kelly 2002 for a review of the research and discussion of stereotypes of rape and Munro and Kelly 2009 for how they are implicated in the attrition process). Much of the sound and fury surrounding the Julian

Assange case,
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which continues as I write, turns on precisely these issues –

what counts as rape/sexual assault in law and life, and whether it has to be ‘violent’ in order to qualify. Few commentators have used the ideas underpinning the continuum, nor registered that it was one element in the reforms of recent sexual offences law in Sweden, where violation of women’s bodily integrity, rather than force, became the underlying principle.

What counts and what we are measuring

One of the implications of the continuum, which was only clear in retrospect,

was the potential to move beyond the drama and trauma constructions of violence which suffuse media representations, and are at times reproduced in some feminist discourse. To borrow a phrase from Dorothy Smith (1990), it was the everyday and everynightness of violence that was foregrounded, that these more mundane encounters with gendered power relations were connected to the extremes which are deemed worthy of legal regulation and media attention. The loss of this interest in the fabric of women’s everyday lives has already been noted. In this
section some of the consequences for research and measuring violence are explored.

Prevalence research requires the creation of a methodology which can measure and analyse events in ways which make clear distinctions between what is included and excluded from analytic categories, and in crime victimisation surveys this has always been organised around documenting ‘incidents’. In terms of VAW this has been most strongly developed with respect to domestic violence (European Union 2010), which is arguably the least amenable to this approach. Domestic violence tends to be repeated and most definitions of it emphasise the combination of physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Measuring it as ‘incidents’ of crime fails to capture this reality, which is more accurately defined as a ‘pattern of coercive control’ (Stark 2007), not least because from a policy and practice perspective, it is those subjected to ‘abusive household gender regimes’ (Morris 2009) who need

– and seek – protection and support.

It is possible to analyse data in ways which are closer to lived experience – combining, for example, frequency, injury and fearfulness
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– but even here the questions currently used in surveys are rarely sufficiently nuanced since they tend to be constructed to reflect existing crime categories. Psychological abuse is the clearest example here, since it does not constitute a crime in the nations of the UK,
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although it does in other EU member states (European Commission 2010). Yet in qualitative studies women invariably speak of it as not only commonplace but undermining and more difficult to move on from:

as one of the women interviewed for SSV commented, ‘bruises heal but a broken spirit is another thing.’ Again the questions arise of who decides what counts, what is ‘serious’ enough to be worthy of measurement, not to mention protection and justice. Similarly, few surveys, even when they are cast as on VAW and/or health, ask about the everyday intrusions in which women’s personal space and being with their self is intruded upon: what is measured counts, and not counting means the everydayness of violence is again hidden, minimised and trivialised. This ‘normalisation’ has been a strong theme in Nordic theorisation of violence against women (see, for example, Lundgren 2004).

There are profound challenges here for prevalence research, if it is to have a better fit with what we know from qualitative studies and from practice, with respect to questions which ask about a wider range of behaviour, its meanings and consequences, and developing more sophisticated analysis. This is not an argument for collapsing the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research; they are different approaches to knowledge creation and there are philosophical and practical defences of each. Rather, in recognising that the underlying argumentation of the continuum is more difficult to integrate into

prevalence research, without more reflection on how it could be better accommodated, measurement will be skewed in ways that move further and further away from lived experience.
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Law, crime and harm

Just as there is tension between the continuum concept with measurement, so there is with the concepts of law and crime. The structure of law has been rooted in strict demarcations between what is and is not permissible, and in the case of criminal law, therefore, what constitutes a crime. Law with respect to violence, throughout most of Europe, is built through gradations of seriousness framed in terms of behaviour (and in some instances levels of injury) applied to discrete incidents. These fundamental building blocks of law and crime sit uneasily with those underpinning the continuum concept, not to mention that wider concepts of harm and how repetition contributes to this are difficult to accommodate. That said, however, there are legal reforms which are more attuned, with the most obvious being the ‘course of conduct’ offences which have developed to address stalking and/or harassment (see European Commission 2010 for a discussion of legal responses across the EU). Here there is recognition of an accumulation of intrusions, some of which, in and of themselves, may appear innocuous and would certainly not constitute a ‘crime’. Sending someone a red rose is normatively viewed as an act of affection; it becomes an act infused by malice only when its meaning can be discerned through prior threats or unwanted interactions.

Sweden has gone a step further through the ‘gross violation of integrity’ offences, which have some direct connection to how the continuum concept was understood and adapted by feminists lobbying for legal reform, and more accurately reflected the realities of both domestic violence and child sexual abuse. Here the repetition and compounding nature of experiences of violence was linked to human rights concepts of harm and physical integrity, with explicit recognition that this progressively erodes the agency and fundamental freedoms of the victim. The charges can be made separately, or alongside more traditional offences linked to specific incidents.