Around 30% of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. In Europe, one in 20 women over the age of 15 has been raped. Meanwhile gross misogyny and sexual violence against women is becoming more normalised in society. When women have been victims of physical, sexual violence, emotional abuse or coercive control the impact on their mental health can be severe.The sense of shame can be overwhelming. Mental health problems are not an inevitable consequence of IPV but anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, self-harm, substance misuse and getting a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) are all more common. Domestic violence can also result in suicide and is linked to murder-suicide and ‘honour’ killing. However, women who have killed abusive men have been repeatedly denied justice. Mental health services need training about IPV and sexual violence and to make strong links with organisations in the community. Each of us needs to ensure that we would know what we would do to help a friend, family member or colleague who is experiencing domestic violence or sexual assault.

Bitch lurked in the English language for centuries, but then it emerged as an everyday word. Why? Bitch changed along with the changing social roles of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the mid 1900s, the use of bitch had exploded; its meteoric rise was a backlash against feminism. In response it was reclaimed by feminists – to some extent, that is. In modern times, bitch is still an insult for a woman who is considered to be unpleasant, disagreeable, or malicious. But in the word’s evolution it has also come to mean a woman who is revered (or reviled) as tough, strong, and assertive. For better or for worse, bitch is interwoven with the history of feminism. It is a word that represents both feminism and anti-feminism at the same time.

This chapter picks up the discussion on gendered violence and gendered order established by the Nazarbayev regime. Never before did any movement pay so much attention to this agenda. Never before in the contemporary history of Kazakhstan did protest movements call out openly on double oppression of the regime – through its patriarchal and authoritarian nature of governing. In this chapter, I also focus on the ideas of class, inequality, and transnational dialogue of Oyan, Qazaqstan and Qazaq Koktemi with other protest movements in the world. Dwelling further on my argument about Qazaq Koktemi representing the fading of the post-Soviet era, I also analyse in detail the 8 March 2021 Women’s Rally in Almaty and the many actors united behind its call for de-Sovietizing and de-stereotyping this vital day of mobilization. I believe that the 2021 Women’s March opened many eyes to the fact that there is a vibrant plurality of views and activist forms within Qazaq Koktemi and that these forms are no longer chained by the old paradigms of the ‘gender’ question in Nazarbayev’s terms, with the tokenization of female politicians and persistent sexism in the political domain.

Domestic violence is a major cause of social exclusion and human rights violations affecting millions of human beings around the world, making them victims of murder, physical, sexual and psychological violence, subjected to humiliation and various types of abuse.The vast majority of these acts of violence are committed against women in intimate relationships. In recent decades, the reflection produced by multiple studies has challenged and encouraged international organizations and governments to develop measures to prevent and combat the phenomenon. However, despite some important steps taken and innovative legal frameworks, there is still a large gap between the law and practice. This chapter presents a critical analysis of the phenomenon considering three dimensions: the contribution of theoretical approaches to its social and political unveiling and to the development of new conceptual paradigms; the evolution of the international political and legal agenda; and, based on the experiences of two countries, Portugal and East Timor, the challenges to public policies and the role of the courts in preventing and combating domestic violence against women.

Efforts to respond to women’s risk of domestic violence in India have resulted in two kinds of systemic responses. First, the formal or institutional response has focused on systems reforms to better meet the needs of survivors. Second, nongovernmental and grassroots responses to domestic violence have emphasized supporting survivors through survivor-centered and empowerment-based approaches. These include primary prevention through community activism aimed at transforming community norms, survivor empowerment, capacity-building, and community mobilization. This chapter describes an exemplary effort by “Shakti” (pseudonym), a grassroots agency based in India, to engage in community mobilization that facilitates psychological empowerment of survivors and community empowerment processes to respond to domestic violence in rural communities in the Delhi National Capital Region, India. The case example draws on data collected by the authors in 2017. Community organizing efforts like those described in this chapter along with individual-level work with survivors can together play an important role in fueling counter-narratives that facilitate disclosure of violence and support survivors.

The Epilogue links the book to Black Lives Matter activism and engages the work of Richard Hofstatder to explain the importance of thinking through American violence in a systemic manner.

What explains why these groups take on the practice of intersectional advocacy? In Chapter 5, this question is answered from an organizational perspective. Drawing again from the qualitative analysis of interviews with organizational leaders, the chapter presents the features of organizations that practice intersectional advocacy. There are four constitutive features of their organizations that were related to their engagement in intersectional advocacy. Despite a commitment to intersectional feminism, one of these organizations did not have all of these features and it also did not fully participate in intersectional advocacy. By discussing this case, the chapter demonstrates how an analysis of the four organizational features also help identify why groups such as these do not fully take on this practice. It then ends with how organizations with commitments to intersectionally marginalized groups but have not actualized them through intersectional advocacy, can change their varying organizational structures to take on this approach. This chapter is written in a way that scholars and organizational practitioners can both understand and appreciate the practice of intersectional advocacy.

Under what conditions can we expect international courts to be progressive? The introduction begins with a discussion of why it is compelling to answer this question by looking at the case of the European Court of Human Rights – a court that is not unambiguously progressive. It then lays out the theoretical and empirical foundations of the book, presenting the key concepts of forbearance and audacity – strategies that courts employ to adjust their sovereignty costs while maintaining a good institutional reputation. The theoretical framework explains why the Court needs to oscillate between forbearance and audacity, and how this oscillation has shaped the norm against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. The empirical analysis, in its turn, combines social science methods and legal analysis to reveal the extent to which the Court has resorted to forbearance and audacity when interpreting the norm against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, and how such episodes influenced the norm’s developmental trajectory. The introduction concludes by explaining the determinants of forbearance and audacity and putting forth the book’s key contributions to the existing debates.

Since the 1950s, there has been a substantial shift from long-term institutional mental health (MH) care to community-based services. The introduction of specialist community-based teams and a 70 per cent reduction in MH beds in the UK since the late 1980s means that people with greater acuity of illness and complexity are being treated in the community. As a consequence, MH services are more likely to need to manage violent behaviour in the community. Within MH services, successful management of violence is predicated on a range of factors/interventions. These include management of specific conditions, most notably schizophrenia, personality disorder and substance misuse. Multidisciplinary team working, effective communication and collaboration across services play important roles, arguably more so than the service model. Key clinical risk factors for violence in mental illness, how to modify these risks in community MH services, different service models that may help achieve this, domestic violence and lone working are discussed. Liaison with the police, the role of AMHPs, MHA assessments, and law and guidance on personal safety in the community are also discussed. The criminal justice system has an important role in addressing violence, and there is mention also of the Code for Crown Prosecutors and MAPPA arrangements.

Chapter 1 presents the theoretical framework used throughout the book. We argue that the federalist system creates varying layers of inequality for women in their human security. We argue that it is crucial that we understand how and under what circumstances domestic violence policies are adopted so that we can better assess what the laws are intended to fix and how reformers can utilize these pathways in the future to address domestic violence. We provide an overview of the scholarship on federalism as well as descriptions of domestic violence offenses, the rates of domestic violence , and a roadmap for the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 presents the federal response to violence against women. We begin the chapter with a brief overview of the history of domestic violence in the United States. We then analyze the response of Congress to the domestic violence epidemic as compared to the Supreme Court’s response. This detailed presentation reveals the gaps that federal laws havr created by leaving states the option to enforce them and relegating nearly all of the enforcement of domestic violence law to local authorities. This chapter underscores the role and limi, of federal policy in remedying the inequities among women in their personal protection from domestic violence. The lack of a cohesive federal response contributes to all four levels of gender inequality in domestic violence policy.

We explore the policy feedback process and describe how state policies have evolved or devolved in the specific issue area of firearm laws and domestic violence. This chapter demonstrates how and when states respond to the need to reform their domestic violence laws and shows how key actors in that process, including legislators and interest groups, affect the content of the policy that is adopted. The chapter includes examples of states whose definition and scope of domestic violence laws vary and contrast them with each other and with federal law. We present six studies of states that differ in their legislative histories on domestic violence laws to identify key factors that can explain this variation; we test these factors in the quantitative analysis presented in Chapter 4.

We conclude our book by summarizing our findings and discussing their implications. We circle back to where we began: violence against women remains a significant and serious impediment to achieving equal status for women in all dimensions of their lives. We offer suggested reforms for improving domestic violence laws and policy implementation at the federal and state levels while recognizing the limits of the federal government in dealing with what is essentially a very localized problem. The reality is that federalism creates unequal conditions for the human security of women across state lines. We end this chapter with proposed avenues of future research that explore more holistically the ways that communities deal with domestic violence. In expanding attention to domestic violence as a source of suppressed citizen participation by women in the United States, we hope to encourage the discipline of political science as well as policymakers and practitioners to address it more consistently and effectively.

Using quantitative data, we construct an explanation of the adoption of policies that address the intersection of firearms and domestic violence. Removing guns from perpetrators of domestic violence, including domestic violence among unmarried couples, decreases intimate partner deaths. Beyond the very positive effects that laws on DV gun ownership by domestic violence perpetrators can have to make women safer, the sponsorship and passage of these laws over the last thirty years have increased. Using our original dataset of domestic violence firearm law (DVFL) enactments, we analyze the circumstances under which states adopt these laws. We find evidence that state and federal factors that influence policy adoption employ a set of political and demographic indicators as independent variables, particularly, the number of gun-related homicides, legislative partisan control, citizen ideology, federal legislation, and election years influence the likelihood of DVFL enactments. We also find support for the effects of vertical policy diffusion but not for horizontal policy diffusion across states. We found no effects associated with support for gun ownership or the percent of women state legislators.

We analyze the gap between public policies regarding domestic violence and the prosecution and defense of such policies in the courtroom. The prosecutors and public defenders we surveyed are on the front lines of domestic violence cases as they enter courtroom; nearly 25 percent of their caseloads involved domestic violence cases and of those, about 50 percent involved repeat offenders. We utilize the information from the public defenders and district attorneys to understand what types of domestic violence cases they see, who the victims are, and what happens to those who are convicted of domestic violence crimes. We also analyze the reported outcomes of domestic violence cases to see whether specific domestic violence laws have any influence on the punishment of domestic violence offenses. We present the first-hand perspectives of some of the individuals who are involved with domestic violence cases on a daily basis. We find that the implementation of public policies regarding domestic violence, such as mandatory arrest and gun removal, is implemented inconsistently across states, and we demonstrate that different policies and implementation practices lead to diverse outcomes of domestic violence cases in the courtroom.