 All right, I think it's time to get started. So welcome all. Tonight's seminar is titled, Towards Zero Violence, Putting Gender into a Theory of Violence and Society. Our speaker tonight is Sylvia Wolby, who is a professor in the Department of Sociology at City University London, and leading a center on violence and society. She has been a distinguished professor of sociology, UNESCO chair of gender research, and the director of the Violence and Society, UNESCO Center at Lancaster University between 2005 and 2019. She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and chairs the Sociology SAP sub-panel for REF. Her books include Crisis, published by Politi in 2015, Globalization and Inequalities, Complexity and Contest in Modernities, published by Sage in 2009, The Concept and Measurements of Violence Against Women and Men, published with colleagues in 2017, Stopping Rape, again, written with colleagues, published by Politi Press in 2015, and The Future of Feminism, published by Politi in 2011. Our discussant tonight is Colette Harris, who's sitting over there right now, who is a reader in gender and development here at the Department of Development Studies at SOAS. She has worked in issues such as violence and conflict, governance, post-colonial state building, Muslim societies, sexualities, reproductive health, migration, and community development. Prior to joining SOAS, she was in the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia and a fellow at the Institutes of Development Studies. Her books include Muslim Youth Tensions and Transitions into Jikistan, Westview Case Studies and Anthropology, published by Westview Press in 2006, and Control and Subversion, Gender Relations into Jikistan, published by Pluto in 2004. If you'd like to tweet during the seminar tonight, please use the hashtags SOAS-DEV-STUDIES and ESRC. So, over here. Thank you. Thank you for the introduction and welcome. Towards zero violence, a bit optimistic? Or is that our goal? And why not have such a goal? Violence varies enormously. Why shouldn't we think about how to understand, explain, and theorise violence with a view to ultimately ending it, or at least producing it? One of the questions in the field is whether violence is increasing or decreasing. Seems a really simple question. Extremely controversial. The government in Britain says it's decreasing. Is it? What do we mean by violence? That is so contested. Where do we draw the boundaries? What are the implications as to what we include within the category of violence and what we exclude from it for answering that question about whether violence is increasing or decreasing? How do we think about it? Your social science students, where is it in your social theory? Where is the theory of violence in contemporary social science theory? And what about gender? Obviously, violence is gendered. But how? And what are the implications of taking different ways of thinking about it? Is this violence against women? Because women are the political subject of the politics of ending violence. Or is that too narrow? Is this violence which is gendered and we should be mainstreaming gender throughout the analysis of violence? And we should be including men in the analysis so that we can make some of those comparisons? So, asking the question of how the violence is gendered has at least two strategically different answers. So, those are my questions and starting points. Everybody, of course, says it matters. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals has got some wonderful goals and targets. Goal five, target 2.2, is to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls. And they're going to measure it in order to measure progress. And in a few years' time, is it 2030? We're going to end all violence against women and girls. I like it. That's the gender one. And then we have the gender-free one, which is goal 16, target 16.1, which is to significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere. So, that's in goal 16, where gender isn't very visible. So, within the UN, you've got these two different ways of thinking about this. When gender is there, it's about violence against women, which should be ended. And the other way of thinking about violence isn't to mention gender at all. Is that good enough? The European Union has a different strategy through gender, and we'll usually discuss gender in terms of gender equality and gender mainstreaming rather than violence against women. Council of Europe has got a hybrid. Istanbul Convention talks about combating and preventing violence against women and domestic violence. Let's have both. So, it's both got the gender-pacific term of violence against women and the de-gendered concept of domestic violence. So, while each of these transnational bodies, international bodies, identifies the importance of ending violence and notices usually that gender is relevant, they address gender in quite different ways, even in their goals and targets. So, ending violence is gendered in different ways. What about social theory? I'm going to divide Western social theory into two groups before and after 1945. Before 1945, sociological theory, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Elias, talked about violence. Violence was relevant. Contemporary social theory has tended, not to talk about violence as something which is separate and specific form of power, but rather to disperse and fragment it, integrate it into other forms of power and lose its separate identity. That's not to say that they don't use the term violence, but they lose the specificity of violence as a specific form of power with its own rhythms, modalities, effects, logics and consequences. It's disperse. So, one of the challenges is to make violence visible in social theory, so we can ask about theory and as U.N. and DFID would say, their theory of change. Let's make the violence visible within the theory so we can do that. And the root theory that I'm going to argue for is to treat violence as a specific form of power, as a specific institutional domain in its own right. And when we've done that, and we've made violence visible empirically and theoretically to address that question of whether violence is increasing and decreasing and the best way to think about the gendering of that violence, whether it should be separate or mainstreamed. So why has violence disappeared in sociological theory? Classic sociological theory, social science theory, took for granted that violence was part of the world. After 1945... Let's give you that. After 1945, the hope was that violence had been vanquished. There was peace in Europe in 1945. There was the assumption that there was peace and that violence was no longer a primary target. And the new institutionalising of the disciplines of the social sciences didn't treat it as a significant object of inquiry in the way that they had before. So the move today to put violence back into social science theory has come as a consequence of the pressure from a variety of social movements and political projects, from feminists, from anti-racists, from activists in the global south who have argued for the significance of violence, who have documented it empirically and raised the question then as to how should it be integrated into the canons of contemporary global social theory? So the early writers, Marx treated violence as instrumental power, just assumed that power could be used by the state to crush the revolutionary movements and that revolutionary movements had to use violence as part of their revolutionary struggle, which was taken for granted that violence was relevant. Weber's account in sociology was that the state would develop in modernity a monopoly on legitimate violence in a given territory, was called to his theory of the state that violence would be concentrated in the state instead of being dispersed throughout society and this was part of his theorization of modernity, this concentration of violence in the state, so it was a really important part of his theorization of the modern state. Merton in 1930s would argue that violence was from the disadvantaged, though people would use violence and criminal activity because of the structures of inequality and this was from the disadvantaged. Elias, another classic social science theorist, assumed that what he called the civilizing process, his words not mine, was a process in which violence would reduce and contemporary writers like Pinker draw upon Elias in their large scale theorizing which claim that the civilizing process has reduced violence in modern society. So what about some contemporary writers? Those are really old classic writers. Foucault, where's violence in Foucault? It's in the past. For Foucault, violence was part of the brutality of the old kind of state. Hung, drawn and quartered was what the state did to criminals to make an example of them to do them in public. The modern forms of power were governance through the soul, not through brutal displays of violence. Modern forms of power for Foucault didn't involve physical violence. Really? Bordier uses the term violence but he calls it symbolic violence. He disperses this into the symbolic. Violence is part of the habitus and victims of violence are complicit, Bordier's words, in the violence because they have absorbed the practices as part of the habitus. What, no protest? Really? Zizek, discusses subjective and objective violence. Yes. But for Zizek, violence is the violence of the capitalist system which causes the economic inequalities which cause hardship and suffering. And the physical contact violence which is domestic violence, violence against women is merely subjective and not as important as the structural violence of capitalism. So he uses the terms but the physical violence he thinks is unimportant as compared to the class dynamics of capitalism. So the significance of the feminist claim of the significance of violence is lost on him. Rather, we have the accounts of the significance of class inequality of capitalism as being really important and physical contact violence such as violence against women, domestic violence, rape is not as important. So those are our contemporary social theorists of Foucault, Bordier and Zizek who have been challenged by the scholarship from the margins. Gender-based violence against women has been documented worldwide. Abraham Dawson, Ray, Pandran Agawal, Hanafi Grinberg, Donna Von Holt, lots of writers have documented the significance of gender-based violence. Hate crime based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, disability is documented in multiple forms. Ray, Iganski, Baldurston and many others. Colonial violence. Fanon is still the classic writer on this, Von Holt, Hanafi Grinberg, the significance of colonial violence. And what about warfare? Warfare is endemic, sure, heart-neckery. And the state, unlike Foucault, is understood by writers like Wakant and Tilly who are as coercive. Engaltong's theorization of violence is that violence breeds violence. So, a challenge to some of those major canonical theorists. So what does this mean? It means that physical violence matters. And the physicality of the violence matters. Collins, I think, is particularly interesting in how he describes this. Violence is significant. It shouldn't be reduced to something else. It's got a very specific kind of effect as a form of power. It's not like other forms of power. The pain and suffering it causes, the modality of it, its rhythm, its temporality, the consequences, the long-lasting consequences, the fear that it generates are very specific forms of power. They're distinctive and worthy of distinctive conceptualization of analysis. Contra Elias, this is an argument that violence is instrumental power, not the consequence of lack of soft control. So Elias's theory was that violence occurred when people didn't have self-control and that with modernity, you would have an increase of self-control and therefore you get a reduction of violence. But if you see violence as actually a form of instrumental power, then the self-control argument is irrelevant. Power is a form of instrumental control. Then Elias's argument that an increase of self-control will reduce violence is voided. If violence is understood as instrumental power, and we recognize the significance of gender-based violence from men to women, hate crime from dominant ethnic sexual able-bodied groups to those with less ability and minoritized sexual and ethnic statuses, then we're seeing violence from the dominant groups to the less dominant groups, Contra Merton. This is a contradiction to the fundamental theorizing of most contemporary criminology, which assumes that violence comes from the disadvantaged upwards. This is a challenge to much contemporary criminological theory, which assumes that the violence is bottom-up because this is a claim that it's top-down. Let me not over-generalize about criminology. There are plenty of criminologists out there who understand this as a tension within criminological theory, but it's certainly a challenge to the criminological theory inspired by writers like Merton. And states use violence for governance. They still do, Contra Foucault. So this is an argument that violence is a very significant part of, especially, non-class forms of inequality. Regimes of inequality, of gender, ethnicity, disability, have violence as a significant part, is a significant institutional domain in these regimes of inequality. And it is hard to understand these regimes of inequality without understanding, documenting, and theorizing violence. Violence matters. So those are the challenges from the new scholarship. So the conclusions I draw from that are that we should treat violence as a social institution, an institutional domain, a field of power, and that it should be understood as parallel to other institutional domains such as the economy, polity, and civil society. That is, there are four major institutional domains, economy, polity, violence, and civil society. They're distinguishable, even as they have effects upon each other. Of course, they have effects upon each other, but they're analytically distinguishable and not to be reduced to each other. So this is rejecting the reduction of violence to culture, as in Baudier. And it's rejecting the assumption that the state has a monopoly of violence as in another set of writings. So this is saying that violence is an institutional domain in its own rights, that the different forms of violence are interconnected and that we understand violence as a specific field. That violence shouldn't be reduced or dispersed to anything else and that the different kinds of violence are interconnected. Okay, so that's the theoretical claim, that's the direction in which I'm wanting to move the intellectual debates about the place of violence in social theory. I'm now going to go a bit more empirical. So what does it mean? Well, violence varies enormously and it really matters why it varies. Understanding the reasons for the variation in the violence create the basis of understanding how violence could be reduced in the future. You understand that the causes of the variations, you can understand and build a theory of change. So, race of violence do correlate with economic and political inequality. There's more violence in countries that are more unequal than countries that are less unequal. One of the examples which I use in globalization and inequalities is a comparison of the European Union with the United States of America and Americans kill each other at a five times greater rate than Europeans despite being richer. They are much more unequal and the greater inequality in the US is part of the cause of the greater amount of violence in the US as compared to the European Union. The rate of femicide also varies around the world. Here, one of the few correlations which we can identify from the very few data sets that we've got is that where there are more women in parliaments there's a lower rate of femicide. The more women are in the institutions of political representation, in the parliaments, the lower the rate of femicide. The rate of femicide doesn't vary in a simple way with rates of economic development. It does vary with levels of gender democratization. So here I'm making the argument that the concept of inequality should be extended to political inequality and not just economic inequality. That's between countries. What about overtime? Is violence going up or is it going down? Pinker, drawing theoretically on alliance has made an argument that violence in Europe, at least, has been declining over centuries. He's making the claim based on some empirical work on changes in the rate of femicide which are contested by writers like Mlesovic. So the data, the empirical data on changes in the rate of violence are quite complicated and quite controversial and the methodology is really quite contested. And it's that contestation over the methodology that I kind of want to move into next. So it matters how you exactly define violence and what exactly you mean by it and how you measure it in order to answer that question about whether violence is going up or if it's going down. And with some colleagues, Towers and Francis, we took on how the Office of National Statistics was measuring violent crime in Britain in order to challenge the government accounts that violence has been declining. And for that we drew on some data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales and some very detailed analysis as to how you should measure violence in Britain. And we argued that it wasn't going down in the same way. In particular, it went up in the economic crisis. Between 2008 and 2012, we argued that violence went up. And it wasn't just violence in general which went up. The violence which went up was repetitions which is domestic violence in particular and because it's domestic violence which is disproportionately against women, this was an increase of violence against women. But you can only see that if you're willing to count repetitions. Now you might think that's not very controversial. It's incredibly controversial as to whether you count repeated acts of violence or whether you say if it's once that's enough or maybe you counted up to five and that's enough. And we are arguing that if people are reporting to a survey that has happened to them lots of times, then you should record it and use it in your estimates. And that has been extraordinarily controversial and we're still involved in a public debate with the Office of National Statistics as to whether or not we should be including all the incidents of violent crime reported in the crime surfaced in Wales or whether it should be capped. The Office of National Statistics used to cap it at five. We argue they should include them all. They've come back saying they're going to cap it at the 98th percentile. For the statisticians among you, that means they're going to include up to 98% of it. For the rest of you, it means they're capping it at 12. They've increased the cap, but they're not including all. The argument we had with them was that they argued that it changed the trend. We argued that if victims were reporting to the crime survey that this violence had occurred to them, it should be included. So this debate continues. So the methodology affects whether or not you say violent crime is going up or going down and the proportion of violent crime, which is against women, and the proportion of violent crime, which is domestic violence. So that's our argument with the Office of National Statistics and you'll notice in that there's an issue of capping at one. This is to my friends in the violence against women service sector who want to count victims, who want to focus on the number of victims because they want to treat victims as a whole person and treating them as a whole person really matters. But if you count them only as one, then you've reduced the amount of violent crime against women and if you've reduced the amount of domestic violence, you've ended up capping it at one. So if you count all the multiplicity as a single course of conduct, for example, coercive controls, a course of conduct, then instead of you counting as 20 crimes, it's one, which has implications for how much of the violent crime the government recognizes as being against women. So methodology matters. So let me move to a focus now on that issue of gender, which I keep flagging. How should gender be thought about in these analysis? In police-recorded crime, crime of assault, you can't find the amount of domestic violence, you can't find the amount of violence against women because violence against women is not recognized as a crime code in its own right. So none of the official police statistics will record the amount of violence against women or the amount of domestic violence because it's not a crime. Another set of statisticians, fundamental rights agency, for example, in the European Union, argued that when we collect data, what really mattered was to understand the amount of violence against women. Count the number of victims, but they didn't count the violence against men. So you can't compare what's happening with women with what's happening with men. You can't ask the question of what proportion of violent crime is against women because you've only got the figures on women. The third position, which you can see I'm arguing for, is to ask the questions of both men and women to always gender disaggregate and always report on it. So you've always got the gender profile of the victims, the crimes, at all of the different levels so that you can identify the different nuances of the gender profile of each of the different forms of measurement. That is always gender disaggregate. Simple. So the strategic alternatives have been to collect data on women only, which is where UN Women has gone, about a rights agency has gone. Or, as we're arguing, to collect on both men as well as women and then gender disaggregate. What do I mean by gender? I mean the sex of the victim, the sex of the perpetrator and the gendered relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. And one of the gender-saturated relationships is whether there's a domestic relation in particular whether there's an intimate partner or other family member which is different from whether that person's an acquaintance or a stranger. In the sense the whole world is gendered but these are differently gendered categories. And if we're to understand the gendering of violence we need to understand the extent to which it takes place the intimate partnerships, other family relationships as compared to acquaintances and strangers. We also need to understand whether there's a sexual aspect of the violence, for example rape, is a form of violence which may not be domestic it might be but it might not be. So those are the different aspects which we need to collect if we're going to properly gender the data. Just quickly, most surveys will collect the data on both women and men, not all, some will, some won't. Most administrative data collects it but doesn't publish it. They've got it buried in their files so please know the sex of the victims they just don't publish it. Could they? Of course they could. What would make them publish it is if it were statutory that is if you gendered, disaggregated the offence of assaults they would have to report on violence against women and violence against men and we would have official numbers of the numbers of violent crimes committed against women and against men and the precedent for that is rape. Once upon a time, rape was understood as a crime that only men could commit against women and then in 2003 they widened the definition so that it became something that men could do to men indeed something that women could do by widening the number of objects and orifices but what they did in order to be able to keep track of the extent to which rape was against a woman they separated the offences into rape of woman, rape of a man so you can still see it in the official statistics you could do exactly the same for assault but we haven't. So why include men? It's needed to address what is currently a very live debate about the extent to which domestic violence is against women or is against men it's really controversial half the world argues that it's overwhelmingly against women another half of the argument says actually men are a significant part of the victims the data needed to be collected so as to produce the proper scientific basis on which these arguments can take place rather than to collect the data which fits your argument so this is an argument for collecting the data so we can test these positions which are held. If we include men then in the data that we had which did collect the information on both women and men then you can see that almost half of violent crimes are violent crimes against women that's utilizing a very conventional definition of violent crime that is physical contact crime and half of violent crime is against women it's not tiny it's not minority it's not the case that most violent crime is men against men it's not the case that most violent crime is a stranger nearly half of violent crime is against women and most of that is from men that the women know it's not minority at all but you can only make this argument if you constantly ask for the gender disaggregation of this data as we go through it so the data that we've got is an argument that we can then see the changes if you collect the information on both women and men and you collect the information on the victims and the perpetrators but also on every single incident every single repetition we just have counting repetitions matters repetitions are gendered to omit repetitions means that you can't see the gender of violent crime so those are our different trends if I your left this one this is the violent crime going up if you include all of the violent incidents reported then in this column you can see it's going up particularly domestic violence these are the petition which government figures this is what happens so it makes a massive difference as to whether or not you think that violence is going up and whether it's disproportionately domestic and against women if you count all the repetitions so if you count all the repetitions then the pattern is that we've got a narrowing of the gender gap in the victims of violent crime because the rate of violent crime against women has been going up we've got more crimes but not more victims because certainly during the economic crisis it was the repetitions which went up and that data has implications for how we think about the causal pathways is the causation to be thought about in terms of what the perpetrators do their motivation or is it to be thought of changes in the resilience of the victims the resources that the victims have two quite different ways of thinking about the explanation of these changes one is to focus upon motivation in the offenders the other the political economy of the resources attached to the victim do you think of violence as linked to changes in culture or as part of resources and political economy is violence to be thought of as a distinctive form of power or are you going to think of it as absorbed back into your concept of culture see I'm making the argument for keeping it distinctive and not absorbing it back into your notion of culture so one of the questions there is well is it the case that victims have different levels of economic resource and it's that which adjudicates between the different theorizations of domestic violence we know that the greater repetition and seriousness is gendered and what we investigated was that correlates with lack of economic resource not only earned income which is the classic way in which this has been analyzed but also access to property into housing this is learning from our colleagues from the global south who focused on property and applying this lesson back to the global north saying what about property housing and whether or not you had your kind of housing tenure is also part of your economic resource not only your earned income and the less economic resource you've got whether earned income or housing capital the more likely you were to have suffered repetition and serious injury in the domestic violence so we've got a correlation here between the violence and the issues of political economy so this is an argument about the significance of the interconnection between violence and forms of economic and political economic inequality and that changes in the wider political economy have implications for rates of violence we've seen an increase of violent crime in Britain in recent years in the crisis during the period of the crisis it's been disproportionate against women disproportionately from domestic perpetrators and disproportionately against those with least material resources you can only see it if you count the repetitions and your gender disaggregate all of your data so as to make these comparisons between women and men and the claim here is that the explanation of this increased rate of violence against women lies in gendered political economy and the changes in the economic crisis so the wider theoretical implication of that is that we need to is that violence matters that the empirical research has the capacity to change how we theorize and we think about violence and to underpin the theoretical developments in which we think of violence as a distinctive institution and form of power but nonetheless interconnected in a wider theory of society with issues of economy, quality and civil society but nonetheless having a distinctive place Sylvia, that was such an interesting presentation and really convincing I think in the ways it looked at what's going on and how the theorists in a sense refuse to deal with a lot of what's going on and therefore have in a way hidden the issues and perhaps one could say then facilitated the way our governments seem to be totally refusing to to deal with these things if the theorists on the academicians are not dealing with violence how can anybody else deal with it so I think that shows that theory it may seem obstruous and something that has nothing to do with real life but in fact it has a lot to do with real life so the way the theoreticians then discuss violence then has as Sylvia showed a clear explanation for how that affects what governments can actually do with violence and also that gender is absolutely connected with violence I think a really important issue that perhaps would be interesting to hear more about is the connections between the whole structural issues that you talked about at the start and where you ended up with the ideas about the people at the bottom so you did connect it with a political economy but perhaps it could have been connected more with some of the structural issues that go on in terms of racism in terms of the way that despite the equality laws gender and women's issues at any rate are still a serious issue in this respect and I wonder how much the whole issue of not just gender equals men or women but gender in terms of the norms of gender then apply because if we look at the way the international community treats conflict related violence or the gender kind of sexual violence we can see that there's a great reluctance of the international community to think be outside the box of quite narrow gendered norms so that they can fairly easily accept notions of men in masculinity as being violent and women in femininity being victims but anything else is really a problem to deal with and I wonder how much any of this thinking inside refusal to see outside the box of the norms influences some of the ways in which violence is being sexualized or refusing to conceptualize it I think it would be interesting to explore more in terms of what you're looking at in the UK how much this plays a role how much one thing I've noticed that there's a lot of reluctance on the part of men in really high positions in the UN and governments etc to accept masculinity as an important issue because I think they don't want to interrogate their own masculinity at least I feel that that's the way men at the bottom seem to be more more willing to look at masculinity issues and even examine their own masculinity than men in the positions of power how much does that relate to the almost willful blindness towards issues of violence I wonder and also towards issues of structural violence that cannot I think be separated from the direct physical violence that you talk about here it's not just the political economy of course that is very important but all kinds of other ways in which in this neoliberal world we live in have structured societies that try to make invisible the gendered ways in which power is being applied not through men and women but through notions about prior to privileging what is associated with masculinity and inferiorizing or taking less note of what is associated with femininity making that into principles of governance and then forgetting about the fact that it came from a gender perspective so I wonder whether those things could be something to be added to what you're doing and would be in any way helpful but I just think that we all of us in this room realize that we've learned a great deal today from Sylvia's presentation and that it is really a very very useful contribution to our thinking about violence, thank you Alright, so we'll open up two questions, would you please raise your hands yep, just do we have microphones easier, sounds better on the recording thank you for your contribution I was particularly interested in one in the correlation between the feminicides and the representation of women in the decision making structures is this a pattern that characterizes developing countries do we see that in developed countries as well because for example in my particular experience in the country in Albania we've never had so many women representatives in the parliament but on the other hand we never had so many feminists like at least 10 cases mediated the last two months of women killed by the intimate partners or family members because on the other side we have this it's become more clear that the head of the executive is this authoritarian misogynist figure which uses the gender to kind of tick the boxes of some kind of European house works that we need for the integration process so does this correlation do you think that it can be found on the other side of the world as well alright, any others yep, just right next to me yep thank you hi thank you very much I'm going to do my dissertation on violence so this was extremely interesting and useful I was just wondering more about war because you were talking I think on crime and on GBV I'm studying women peace and security in LSE and I'm Israeli so I'm very interested in looking at the way that violence as you said operates as a power so I was just wondering are there researches or what do you think about war and GBV and other forms of violence as you were saying about interconnections thank you just over there in the second row I've actually got loads of questions but I'm guessing there are loads of hands behind me so I'll keep it really brief to stick up a little bit for Foucault you can take pot shots at GJEC all day but I do think that Foucault has been used by feminists to theorise violence and particularly perhaps violence in war which perhaps makes it different to the specific cases that you're looking at but my question is about coercive and controlling behaviour that you mentioned and the effect that that's having on the stats I have the impression that there has been a big breakthrough in terms of legislation on violence against women in terms of recognising the dynamics that the victims of violence associate with the particular traumatic bonding that goes on in an intimate partner relationship and that's been reflected in the law and I have to confess that I was surprised I didn't know until you presented it that that had had the effect on the stats that you'd said I erroneously assumed that they'd be counting all abuse that is captured in that law and the assault separately so it wouldn't actually have that effect is it possible to have a middle ground in terms of keeping the stats on assault which should surely be kept separate and also recognising domestic abuse as a pattern of behaviour as encapsulated by that law yeah okay homicide and women's political representation the data on which I made the analysis was a global data set so it included countries in the global south as well as the global north and it was a correlation so it was a cross national data set and there was a correlation at that one moment in time between the countries which had high proportions of women in parliament having lower rates of hemiside the when I investigated whether or not there was an economic effect I couldn't find one so that meant that wasn't just a question of higher rates of economic development generating the lower rates of hemiside it was specifically associated with the political representation that work I published in 2009 that was the globalization inequalities so the data from that isn't yesterday and since then we've seen an increase in the use of quotas in getting more women into parliaments so I think there'll be an interesting question as to whether that changes that correlation or not and I don't know the answer to that but at the point where I did the analysis there was much less use of quotas to get women into the parliament so it had a different meaning than it might do today and underlying your question is picking up on two different theoretical models about the relationship between forms of inequality and violence against women one model is a kind of cumulative one that is the more inequality the more violence so if you reduce the amount of inequality you reduce the amount of violence it's a model in which all of these things just line up in a very linear fashion in that nature of the system there's another model which is a backlash model which is that if you reduce the amount of inequality in one area then you might get an increase of inequality in another in particular you might get the use of violence as a consequence of the reduced inequality in one area so that you have a backlash at a micro level you can think of that as at that moment for example if a woman gets sufficient independence that's one of the most dangerous moments and so just at that moment you might say there's a reduction in the gender inequality because she's about to then that's lethal so we've got two different theoretical models linking the systems of inequality with the rates of violence I think they both have validity and the question is which one is in play at that particular moment in time and the analysis that I presented to you which was about the correlation between rates of feminicide and rates of women in parliament are based on that simple notion of simple accumulation the more inequality the more violence the less inequality the less violence but I think the other part of it which is about a potential backlash sits there as well that we need to investigate and that might be something that you were trying to reach within your question war yes it's a form of violence all of these forms of violence are interconnected again one of the kinds of analysis I did was to see how many indicators of violence I could find and put in a data set globally and gender them and I used the extent of government spending on the military as one of my indicators and what we have is a correlation between the amount of expenditure on the military and rates of homicide that is rates of propensity to war if I take military expending as an example of that and rates of interpersonal violence as measured by homicide correlate so these forms of violence are interconnected it's exactly what you would expect and sits behind most of the intellectual agenda behind the women peace and security agenda which is to say that these forms of violence are interconnected it's a very complex web of interconnection I can give you a very simple empirical correlation but the nature of the theoretical interconnections between them is really quite complicated I do want to make the claim that this constitutes a single institutional domain in which these forms of violence are interconnected even as I also want to make the claim that they're connected with other institutional domain in society the polity, the economy and the civil society so I didn't give you much account of war in this particular talk but I could have done and you're quite right to bring it up Foucault am I too hard on Foucault okay let me congratulate feminist ingenuity in the utilization of Foucault to make an analysis of certain kinds of power I think there's been extraordinary feminist creativity intellectual creativity in the utilization of that body of work in order to understand forms of power so yes I was more concerned here with his macro theorization which I think implied that there was a reduction in the utilization of violence by the state and I think he's empirically incorrect and I think almost in terms of agenda analysis is almost the reverse that we're now seeing the ability to utilize the state to engage with issues of violence that weren't there in the past so I think Foucault's temporality is particularly problematic I think Engelmeri is also interesting in this and has also got some intriguing arguments about the temporality of Foucault on these issues of gender violence so on that level of the changes over time I think Foucault really is wrong even though I want to congratulate feminist ingenuity and coercive control all violence is coercive and controlling domestic violence is war is terror is the point of violence is often to control through fear of the violence rather than the actual violence and that's part of the nature of the power that violence generates it's got this big kind of penumbra this great big lurking hinterlander power which is an intrinsic part of the physicality of the power but in some ways it's different from it I think the gender analysis here is really interesting which is to ask the question what is the relationship between the physicality of violence and all of these other forms of control now the way you posed the question you separated them and asked if we could have legislation on coercive control which didn't subsume the physical violence to it but kept it separate and I would agree with you and in a sense that was originally the trajectory of the legislation because we were developing legislation on harassment and stalking 1996 2006 or 2007 was when we've had the first harassment act which meant that if the same action was repeated two or more times and cause fear, alarm or stress then it constituted a crime even though one of those actions wouldn't have been so we got into legislation in the late 1990s exactly that kind of legislation which legislated for the coercive controlling implications of particular kinds of non-physical harassment it was wonderful legislation it was never applied to a cohabiting couple and why wasn't it well for whatever reason it wasn't and I think some of the early discussions about coercive control were about the removal of the cohabitation exemption you might say it was a bit like rape removed the marital exemption in the 1990s you couldn't be charged with rape of your marriage we removed the marital exemption should we have simply removed the cohabitation exemption on harassment and then that would have kept this legislation very clearly about non-physical things and recognised that the repetition of certain kinds of behaviours has a coercive and controlling effect which crosses a threshold of horror which it's appropriate to deem to be criminal and that would have been good but I think what we ended up with was a bit of a mishmash and a bit of a mixing of things and so the actual crime as it went on to the statute book put all of these things together and mixed up the physical violence and the non-physical violence and I'm not sure a wise mix in the legislation I think it would have been better to have simply removed the cohabitation exemption from the existing laws and harassments and then we could have kept it separate as a crime and then we could as social scientists have kept going with what is the relationship between them do you have the coercion first and the violence follows or does the violence have to occur first before the threats work as effectively that is I think that we have a question as to what is the nature of the interrelationship between the physical violence and the fear and the forms of control what is the interrelationship between them and I would like to investigate that rather than to make assumptions that they're all just the same package so analytically I'm always wanting to separate things so I can ask about the interrelationship between them rather than just lump them together let's take another round of questions over there hello thank you for a really good talk and for the work you do and for sticking it to the Office of National Statistics I cannot believe that bit I'm still reeling I as well have loads and loads of questions but when you mentioned the UN at the beginning I just wanted to ask has the development of human rights internationally been a useful tool for your work at all in your work as in we were told in the 40s that men and women both have equal rights has that been useful and all the systems around that thank you so I have a fairly technical question regarding how to record gender for all types of violent crime so how to desegregate the data that you gave that should be included in the measurement of different types of violence or different types of crime one of them was gender motivation and I'm sorry I'm sure I can find the answer by reading your paper but since we're here I was wondering if you could just expand on that and how that would be measured and just to contextualize that I'm linking that to the discourse on gender-based violence in a humanitarian space that's going towards we all have a gender there for any crime is gendered and so how do you retain a sense of a gender motivation within or against that any more questions thank you for a very interesting talk I wanted to pick up on your drawing of violence as a field of power and as an institutional domain and I was wondering how broadly you would draw that field whether you would just focus on interpersonal body-to-body immediate violence or whether you would extend that to for example a Nixon's concept of slow violence as for example environmental or destruction carried out by multinational corporations like the Bow Pearl Disaster or whether you would also extend it over time and space looking at intergenerational forms of violence and trauma as passed on through spaces and across time thank you was there a question there up there hi so the beginning of the talk the title was about going towards zero violence and I think it's very important that you've outlined all the ways that gendered violence needs to be kept separate and all these kinds of things to highlight that there is an issue but what kind of practical or structural changes initiatives do you think there needs to be in order to get towards reaching this ambitious goal of zero violence what you know I really like this idea of gender disaggregating the act of assault for example and getting that to make more visible the statistics on crime but where do we go from that towards actually practically implementing steps to reduce crime rates thank you the UN has long had two different routes through which it can engage with gender issues and violence issues one of them has been human rights and the other has been gender discrimination and they've sat there adjacent to each other sometimes mixed up as in the Beijing platform and sometimes they're separated CEDAW has focused particularly on gender discrimination but the human rights focus has more often been mobilized in relationship to violence so I think there have been two different legal and philosophical bases for mobilizing a kind of gender justice case within UN legal principles human rights has mobilized in very interesting ways it's enabled the kind of 1993 mobilization inside the UN to declare that women's rights were human rights which was a contestation of the notion that human rights were already available to everybody and it was a challenge and it was said no they're not yet available we have to name it specifically and it was an attempt also at the same time to get violence against women named as a violation of women's human rights so as a in Vienna in 1993 the declaration DIVOR that was a very important moment for the UN and the UN is a very important body in norm setting sometimes asked about norms the UN often works by norms and the mixing of what's legal and what's normative in the UN is a really interesting because quite often the legal has very little impact unless they can mobilize a kind of moral a normative argument behind it so the human rights space has very often been mobilized in that kind of discursive and moral manner what does it actually deliver here you see me walk to this other body of kind of legal principles which is much more focused upon notions of gender discrimination and the mobilization and institutionalization of that within institutions and I think that's been more successfully institutionalized in legal institutions than has that to human rights now I think that's up for argument I think certainly within for example the European Union gender equality is institutionalized through notions of equal rights and human rights is kind of lurks in the background whereas I think at the level of the UN it's been much more mobilized through notions of human rights it only works in fact there's been a mobilization behind it so in and of itself it's not sufficient a note of caution while at the same time are kind of welcome for it gender motivation I'm deeply ambivalent about whether or not it's appropriate to write motivation into criminal law it sits there inside homicide law because it differentiates between whether or not some of these committing murder or manslaughter you have to intend to kill somebody for it to be murder if you didn't intend to kill them you might intend to hurt them but not kill them then it's manslaughter or you kill them in self defense or something the motivation matters for the distinctions which are made within the concept of homicide and it's probably right that that occurs for something as serious as homicide what we've seen is the mobilization of the notion of motivation behind some notions of hate crime where it's treated as an aggravation so assault which is racially motivated is regarded as aggravated and there's an additional penalty in criminal law if it's motivated on a racial basis there's been some arguments about whether some crimes of gender based violence should be treated in exactly the same way as hate and there's an ambivalence about that because motivation is really hard to prove really really hard to prove and should you have to prove motivation in order to prove that the assault took place and most of the time is probably difficult enough to prove the assault in criminal law without having the requirement that you prove motivation as well so I'm quite cautious about the inclusion of motivation within criminal law while at the same time recognizing that in some very specific circumstances it's been found useful to do so aggregated racial assaults and the distinction homicide and murder but I would be cautious about pushing for further crimes on which motivation has to be proved rather than simply the action and the effect of the action caution okay definition of violence you'll see I've been using a very narrow definition deliberately because I want to separate it from other forms of power and other forms of harm environmental degradation clearly leads to a lot of life leads to all sorts of suffering and harm I don't want to call it violence because I want to treat violence as something as a distinct form of power so it's not that I want to underestimate the extent of the harms economic inequality environmental degradation cause to human beings but I think they're different and I don't want to lose the specificity of violence I want to keep it specificity so I think in too much of social theory violence against women has been swept away and submerged into other categories and been called symbolic and called something else and we've lost the capacity to say it's important as a consequence of the lack of a recognition of it as a concept as a theoretical object in its own right and for that reason I want to hang on to a narrow definition of violence and not extend it in the way for example that Gull Tong does to kind of the way that social structures generates unnecessary death clearly economic inequality generates unnecessary death but I don't want to call that violence I want to recognize it as the harms of economic inequality cause in their own right and I want to separate it from the harms that physical violence intended physical contact violence cause I think there are different forms of institutions different forms of power and it helps our analysis to be able to separate them and then we can ask about the interconnections but I want to separate them before I do that how do we end violence is that your question okay so what's my theory of violence first of all I want to name it as a field I want to be able to make it visible I want to be able to treat it as an object theoretically and empirically and name it so it can become an object of analysis a political object a policy object and then you've also seen me engage with it as part of society and we change violence partly by changing it within the institution of violence and partly as a consequence of changing its relationship with other forms of institutional domains economy, polity and civil society so you'll have heard the discussion about the extent to which political representation reducing inequalities and political representation will reduce violence so democracy is a mechanism for reducing violence I don't think we'd ever reach zero violence without democracy without reducing gender gaps in political representation of women and men so inequalities in the polity matter inequalities in economy matter you've seen that discussion about the extent to which the resilience of victims changes the likelihood of the repetition of the violence economic inequality matters so the theory for the movement towards the ending of violence requires a theory which analyzes the significance of reducing economic inequality political inequality and also inequalities in civil society which change how we can make representations and think about it but it also means thinking about the relationship between the different kinds of violence war is part of this it's unlikely that you would stop into personal violence if there is still interstate violence and intergroup violence you're not going to stop one without another all of these different kinds of violence are intricately interconnected so I'm giving you a theory of society in order to give you a theory of the change in violence and it's predominantly a theory which connects inequalities in society in these different institutional domains of economy, polity in civil society and connecting that with the theorization of violence and then that potentially gives us a route to thinking about imagining the situation of zero violence alright any final questions a quick one how are you defining institution I'm a sociologist for me an institution is for me a taken for granted concept in which we're talking about institution that we're talking about practices which are replicated whether or not the individuals know that they're replicating them so an institution is a system it's a social system which is a self reproducing social system alright if there are no further questions please join me in thanking Silvia