The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention

Abstract

70 Reviews documentation. I found one oblique refer- ence to hospitalization (p. 101), but it is not clear from the context whether this refers to a hypothetical or an actual case. However, Atkinson’s last chapter is the strongest in the book. Based on research he conducted with his colleague Michael Kehler, he explores boys’ P.E. classes as an arena of somatic dominance and humiliation, but also of resistance and resilience. While the other five empirical chapters are plagued by too much theoretical throat-clearing (both of the authors exhibit an encyclopedic knowl- edge of social theory that too often over- whelms the data), here there is a better bal- ance between theory and data. This chapter also provides the most vivid evidence of embodiment, as the boys speak with surpris- ing candor about their bodies and the strate- gies they use to deflect ridicule and body shaming from their bullying peers. This is the sort of thing I was hoping to find more of throughout the collection. While several passages earlier in the book acknowledge the still-problematic legacy of Cartesian dualism for embodiment scholars, the analy- sis from both authors often stays too much in the head. Only rarely, as in this last chapter, do they deliver evidence of the body’s pecu- liar eloquence. As a general observation, I found this ten- dency toward abstraction also encouraged some stylistic habits that may tax readers. Especially in the introduction and first chap- ter I felt overwhelmed by a continuous bar- rage of parenthetical inserts, italicized text, overuse of the slash, and a surfeit of scare quotes. I also longed for a concluding chapter, wherein the authors could bring the sociological insights gleaned from their many collective years as masculinities scholars to bear on these specific empirical cases. What did they learn from their collabo- ration? What does challenging these various myths suggest about the future of masculin- ities and gendered embodiment? Informed readers are likely to draw a variety of conclu- sions from these stimulating cases; it would be nice to have the authors weigh in as well. This book is appropriate for graduate-level courses in gender studies, masculinities, and embodiment studies. At this writing it is available in hardback and electronic form. The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention, by Sameena Mulla. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 277 pp. $26.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479867219. S IMON A. C OLE University of California, Irvine scole@uci.edu The way sexual assault victims are treated in hospitals in the United States changed beginning in the 1970s. In response to a vari- ety of social forces, a specialized expertise known as ‘‘forensic nursing’’ has arisen, and forensic nurses now very often have ‘‘jurisdiction’’—in the sociological sense— over the medical examination of sexual assault victims. This development seems at first glance to be a positive one. It arose through a conflu- ence of good intentions. Feminists demanded that sexual assault victims be treated with greater care and dignity and that sexual assaults be prosecuted with greater vigor. Law enforcement agencies saw valuable evi- dence being lost or discarded. And nursing, a feminized, caring profession, seemed the right fit for the job. ‘‘Having witnessed sexual assault interventions in their role as chaper- ones’’ when gynecologists were in charge of sexual assault examinations, anthropologist Semeena Mulla notes, ‘‘nurses were among the loudest critics of the haphazard response and treatment rape victims received in the health care system’’ (p. 12). However, recently a number of scholars, while by no means condemning the rise of forensic nursing, have begun exploring some of the unintended consequences of the institutionalization of forensic nursing. The Violence of Care is a contribution to this body of work. Sameena Mulla obtained training as a rape crisis counselor in 2002, and she performed participant observation at the Baltimore city hospital designated to conduct forensic sexual assault examination. She observed more than 40 sexual assault examinations through 2006. Her observational eye, howev- er, was trained not on her fellow rape crisis counselors—about whom we hear relatively Contemporary Sociology 45, 1 Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on January 4, 2016