Content area
Full Text
This collected edition covers a wide range of issues pertaining to violence against women. It begins with an examination of the continuum of violences experienced by women and then turns to social structural supports for violence, institutional responses to it and finally to research implications. Like many collected editions the individual papers are of varying quality. The papers are united in adopting a pro - feminist position on violence and in attributing its roots to patriarchal society. The general line of argument is that patriarchy is inherently anti - female and that patriarchal societies, institutions and individuals act out this misogynist sub - text in legitimating certain types of violence against women (with some historical changes in the extent of acceptable violence), in depicting rape as an erotic experience for women (see "The Imperishable Virginity of Saint Maria Goretti"), in legal responses that deny the damage violence does to women, and in the wide range of violent acts that women experience everyday at the hands of men.
The reader is left with an impression that misogyny operates in a non - problematic way at each of three levels: the cultural (macro - level), in institutions (intermediate level), and individual experiences (micro - level). The links between these three levels are not fully developed nor are they adequately problematized. Rather the connections are made out to be obvious and easily understood. But these linkages are not as simple as the editors would have us believe and they result in several problems for a reader struggling to understand not simply the nature of violence against women but the activities that a variety of institutions have undertaken to address the issue. The individual pieces...