Violence against women has become an omnipresent phenomenon. Advocates, researchers, politicians, corporations, media outlets, and artists raise awareness and work to eradicate it and often reach large audiences with their messages. And yet, as Alison Brysk makes clear in her thoroughly researched book, the problem of violence against women (VAW) not only persists; it adapts to changing social circumstances, and in some societies, it is on the rise. Concrete manifestations of VAW differ, but their cumulative occurrence creates a global structure that keeps women insecure. In the author’s view, this “systematic, persistent acceptance of women’s second class status is history’s greatest shame” (p. 2).
In a nutshell, The Struggle for Freedom from Fear provides an explanation of the root causes of VAW and its most prominent manifestations, and documents responses in the form of legal regulation, gender-sensitive public policies, and work geared toward normative change. While it does not offer new solutions, the book’s strength lies in its massive stock taking of scholarly contributions in the field, read in combination with a large collection of applied strategies and policies across many countries.
The book starts with a reading of VAW into the human rights framework. Brysk deems this framework insufficient because of its emphasis on public participation rights. She argues that this focus has not been useful in recognizing sources of insecurity for women that lie in private constellations of socioeconomic and reproductive control. Despite this criticism, it is important for the author to think of women as rights holders; in fact, Brysk argues that it is the most important strategy to eradicate VAW. Accordingly, she believes that the rights framework needs to be expanded to address all obstacles to full personhood status that women experience. As the first three chapters elucidate, many intergovernmental efforts, as well as civil society mobilization, have gone into creating institutions, laws, and policies that aim at this type of expansion.
To elucidate the causes for VAW, Brysk follows the established framework of multilevel factors (state, community, household, and individual; p. 18) but argues, in addition, that manifestations of VAW depend on different levels of development in societies. She distinguishes three broad groups: patrimonial/traditional societies least affected by modernization; semiliberal, rapidly modernizing, and changing middle-income societies with high levels of inequality; and developed democratic societies. VAW is prevalent in all three types because societies are based principally on gender dominance that enables men to control female reproduction (p. 8); violence against women is therefore functional, not an aberration. However, male dominance manifests itself differently: It is most pervasive and viewed as legitimate in patrimonial regimes, and therefore becomes a normal feature of life that is often not recognized as a problem. In semiliberal contexts shaped by rapid change, social conflict, and instability, gender roles have become battlegrounds, and as a result, VAW is on the rise both in public and private forms. In developed democracies, male dominance has become less functional in public, but private life is still affected by it, and that is where VAW continues to occur. Brysk is most interested in the dynamics “in the middle” because most of the world’s women live in semiliberal societies and because it is here where VAW is both blatantly manifest and fiercely contested.
The three dimensions of VAW that the book focuses on are the denial of sexual self-determination, the right to life, and the right to bodily integrity. These fields overlap considerably;– for example, intimate partner violence falls potentially into all three. The selection, while reasonable, is not the only possible one. Brysk states in the introduction that she focuses on manifestations and causes of direct violence, not on the broader structure of exclusion and vulnerability (p. 3). Also, she opts against a broader embedding of VAW into structures of gender-based violence. These choices are not openly discussed and justified, except in a footnote that points to manageability (p. 3). However, throughout the book, the author develops the idea of the relational character of VAW, which suggests that a broader focus would have been useful. This becomes most noticeable in the chapter on normative change that deals not only with the idea of framing women as agents but also with imagining men as protective rather than domineering and violent. The chapter suggests that a promising way to reduce violence against women is to make it a less central feature in men’s lives, or in other words, to create different, less rigid, less heterosexist masculinities.
The coverage of diverse phenomena such as female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), child marriage, sex trafficking, feminicides, honor killings, public and publicly condoned private rape, and intimate partner violence, as well as strategies of mobilization in response to these policies, is so detailed that it seems impossible not to learn something while reading the book. Only a few noteworthy lessons can be highlighted here.
First, women’s claims for self-determination work best for public sphere goods, not when aiming to change private practices such as FGM/C or marital rape. Parallel to this trend, state protection typically applies first to issues removed from the private sphere and only slowly assumes responsibility to protect women from threats in private life; for example, stranger rape tends to be criminalized much earlier than domestic violence, let alone marital rape.
Second, where states act to protect women from violence, they often do not conceptualize women as rights holders, but have broader societal benefits in mind. A particularly drastic example of this is the sluggish reaction of the Indian state to prevent sex-selective abortions. The driving force was to enable the needed supply of wives, not the right to life of the aborted female fetuses (p. 144).
Third, there are lessons to be learned from bringing together general claims for women’s safety with gender-sensitive public policies. Brysk describes cities in semiliberal regimes as both attractive and particularly unsafe spaces for women. Concrete measures that make a huge difference for women include safe and affordable transportation, access to sanitation (the absence of which is a massive but often unrecognized security threat for women and girls), and responsive policing that knows how to deal with VAW.
Fourth, the ways in which manifestations of VAW are framed are crucial for finding effective answers. Advocates often talk about the victims of violence as “daughters” or otherwise innocent and worthy of protection. In the case of the Mexican feminicides, this frame finally trumped that of state agencies that described the women as “prostitutes or runaways,” and hence, unworthy of state protection (p. 88). As Chapter 10 on normative changes makes clear, there are several potential strategies to trigger attitudinal change, for example, by pointing out contradictions within a set of beliefs that includes sanctioning violence. In other words, persuasion needs to work with existing beliefs. It does not work when “a coherent localized community tradition” is confronted with “an abstract global principle articulated by outsiders” (p. 249).
The Struggle for Freedom from Fear covers a great deal of ground. It clarifies the need to touch people both emotionally and intellectually in order to change their attitudes regarding VAW, and it shows how this can be done. It does justice to the truly “remarkable repertoire of responses to VAW” (p. 273) that activists across the globe have developed. Because of the many cases presented, often back-to-back, it is sometimes difficult to follow the general thread of the argument. And as much as the attempt to provide big-picture explanations may be enticing to some, it may appear simplifying to others. In particular, the grouping of the world’s states into three categories seems a bit questionable. The upside of this choice is Brysk’s strong commitment to the study of non-Western realities. Overall, her integration of scholarly concepts and contextualized practice makes for an insightful book that emphasizes what works and what does not in the struggle against gender-based violence. It will appeal to a broad range of political scientists and perhaps help lead to a mainstreaming of VAW research into the discipline.
