Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective

Sally Engle Merry

Sep 2011 · Sold by John Wiley & Sons

About this ebook

Taking an anthropological perspective, this comprehensive book offers a highly readable and concise overview of what constitutes gender violence, its social context, and important directions in intervention and reform.

• Uses stories, personal accounts, case studies and a global perspective to provide a vivid and engaging portrait of forms of violence in gendered relationships
• Extensively covers many forms of gender violence including domestic violence, rape, murder, wartime sexual assault, prison and police violence, female genital cutting, dowry murders, female infanticide, “honor” killings, and sex trafficking
• Examines major approaches to diminishing gender violence such as criminalization, batterer retraining programs, and human rights interventions
• Highlights the role of social movements in defining the problem and mobilizing reforms in the US and internationally

Ratings and reviews

A police chief said he knew what was responsible for a tsumami of violence: Sarah Palin. And don’t call them flash mobs. “That is just another way to deny and marginalize what is happening,” he writes. The cases are too frequent too ignore. And it is not just Philadelphia and Chicago and New York. That’s what makes it strange: it is also happening in some very unlikely places. In Iowa, more than 100 black people roamed the grounds of the Iowa State Fair beating and stealing. A police report said some of the black people had declared it was “Beat Whitey Night.” In Wisconsin, a group of almost 100 black people looted a convenience store, then beat up a group of white teenagers. One of the black people stood over a victim and said “White Girl Bleed a Lot.” The list goes on: Indianapolis. Denver. Rochester. Boston. Miami. Houston. Atlantic City. Rehoboth Beach. Dover, Delaware. Charlotte. San Francisco. And on and on and on.

About the author

Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Law and Society Program at New York University. Her recent books include Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (2006), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Local and the Global, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; 2007). She is past president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.