Global Issues, Women and Justice. S. Pickering and C. Lambert, eds (Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology Series, 2004, 378pp. $Au 63.00)

Abstract

As Sharon Pickering and Caroline Lambert explain in their introduction, this edited volume brings together women’s accounts of struggling for justice locally, nationally and internationally. The focus of the book is not on defining justice; rather, the book engages with methods by which women seek justice, identifying and exposing the multiplicity of ways in which justice is compromised, and subsequently challenged, by women. Throughout the text, theoretical understandings are inextricably intertwined with women’s activism, and this fruitful combination reflects the background of the authors. The book foregrounds women’s resistance, strategies and struggles for securing and preserving justice in three spheres, i.e. through the nation state, through global processes and through international criminal justice. Unlike some edited collections, the book is thoughtfully structured, each of the three sections being prefaced by an editorial introduction. Section One, ‘Domestic Justice: Negotiating with the Nation-State’, explores women’s experiences of accessing justice from within the nation-state, through focusing on questions of exclusion, militarization and colonization. The choice of these aspects is explained in the introduction. Exclusion frames the experiences of people marginalized within the state, or excluded therefrom. As the editors perceptively point out, global militarization ‘has been synonymous with systematic human rights abuses’ (p. 10). Colonization has resulted in Eurocentric justice systems being forced upon peoples from diverse cultural backgrounds, gender being central to the process. These three threads run through the subsequent chapters, beginning with Lyn Graybill’s analysis of women’s experiences of exclusion when they sought to gain access to justice via the South African Truth and Reconcilation Commission. Graybill discusses not only the abuses of women during the apartheid era, but also critically assesses the response of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to gender issues. She documents how women’s voices were silenced and their experiences downplayed, but identifies how a partial account of their suffering emerged during the TRC’s hearings.