Gender-based Violence: Case Studies from the Global South

Abstract

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a global policy issue with significant social, economic and personal consequences. The burden of violence against women and girls is distributed unequally, with rates of gender violence significantly higher in low to middle income countries of the Global South. Yet the bulk of global research on gender violence is based on the experiences of urban communities in high-income English-speaking countries mainly from the Global North. This body of research typically takes the experience of women from Anglophone countries as the norm from which to theorise and frame theories and research of gender-based violence. Our chapter problematises theories that the privilege women in the Global North as the empirical referents of ‘everyday violence’ (Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo, 2016). At the same time however it is important to resist homogenisng the violence experienced by women across diverse societies in the global south. This orientalist vision of oppressed subaltern Southern women is directly contrasted with an ideal rights bearing feminine subject from the Anglophone countries of the global north (Mohanty, 2012). This binary discourse exaggerates the differences and obfuscates the similarities of VAWG across Northern and Southern borders and reproduces images of women in the Global South as unfortunate victims of ‘other’ cultures (Durham, 2015; Narayan, 1997). This chapter contrasts three examples, the policing of family violence in Indigenous communities in Australia; Image Based Abuse in Singapore; and the policing of gender violence in the Pacific as a way of concretising the argument.