Everyday Violence Research Articles

Locating the stigmatisation of children born of wartime rape on a continuum of violence

ABSTRACT Children born of wartime sexual violence remain a marginalised group whose lives and needs have largely been overlooked. Over the past two decades, scholarship has emerged addressing some of the multiple issues they face. This research shows that stigmatisation is central in the children’s lives, but rarely provides a deeper definition of stigma that interrogates its structural and political dimension. Bridging feminist peace scholarship and new streams of stigma research, this article sets out to conceptualise stigmatisation as a complex form of violence that concurrently reflects and reproduces gendered power dynamics across the peace–war spectrum. Drawing on narratives by children born of war in the Central African Republic, Uganda, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article examines how stigmatisation materialises as different forms of ‘everyday violence’ that intersects at a personal, social, and structural level. By untangling their stories, the study shows how stigmatisation profoundly impacts the children’s experiences of peace and sustains the ‘conditions of war’ in the everyday space while perpetuating structural cycles of gender-based violence that persists in transitional and post-conflict environments. The article highlights the importance of placing the children’s perspectives at the centre when analysing stigmatisation and offers new insight on how stigma operates as violence.

Class, migration and masculinity among Syrian and Turkish youths in working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul

ABSTRACT This article describes the masculinity narratives of working-class Syrian and Turkish youths in Istanbul on their lived experiences of socio-economic inequalities, everyday violence, and discrimination. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2020 and 2021 with male youths in two districts, it emphasizes the common experiences of Syrian and Turkish male youths shaped by their working-class predicaments, but also demonstrates that certain forms of masculinity performances emerge as strategies to tackle the difficulties in their lives. Turkish youths’ masculinity narratives display nationalism and anti-migrant discourses, whereas Syrian youths seek to affirm their dignity against racism through performances of masculinity.

Hating Women: A Constitution of Hate in Plain Sight.

In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime stating that this "may prove more harmful than helpful." This article argues that before and beyond hate crime, misogyny, understood as the hatred of women (from the Greek misein [hate] gynae [women]), is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women's bodies by the institution of white men through making women the object of the "colonization of the everyday." This exhausting hatred is enacted through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained through violence against women. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society but rather is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight. Misogyny ensures the precarity of women's bodies and women's status as trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately always already misogynistic. Given the foundational nature of misogyny, did the government have a point in excluding endemic violence against women from hate crime as "more harmful than helpful?" Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny? This paper enacts a decolonial feminist prism to disrupt the cultural condition of misogyny by thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. The paper explores violence against women set against the historical emergence of misogyny from Greek dehumanization, to medieval persecution of "witches," the muzzling and banning of women from public spaces, Shakespeare's "Taming," to contemporary femicide rates. Interrogating hate crime through this prism offers nuanced routes for how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new. Misogyny is enduring.

Counteracting Everyday Violence at the Border: A View from Peacebuilding and Border Art

This article presents an overview of the potential for integrating specific peacebuilding strategies with the practice of border art as a tool for addressing various forms of violence in border regions. The specific peacebuilding strategies considered are nonviolent intervention, reduction of direct violence, transformation of relationships, and building capacity. It is proposed that the combination of these strategies with border art provides avenues for counteracting specific forms of violence. Artistic expressions denounce negative social conditions and convey a sense of peace, portraying questions of social justice. Border art can re-politicize border spaces by strategically positioning shared values such as peaceful coexistence and hope. The proposed combination of peacebuilding strategies and border art can be a means of counteracting the normalization of violence and social exclusion in social contexts that are not associated with armed conflict but are permanently affected by everyday violence. This work also aims to facilitate a constructive dialogue between the disciplines of peace studies, critical border studies, and border art.

Shattering event: The sensory mechanics of infrastructural breakdown in Kolyma, Russia

ABSTRACT Recent debates in anthropology and sociology have focused on non-events, with the difference between everyday violence and abrupt life-changing events disappearing, though abundant studies on disaster memories demonstrate the significance of collective shattering events even in lives characterized by immense ordinary suffering. This article uses the historical example of the large-scale breakdown of public utilities in an industrial community in Kolyma, Russia, in 1993–94 to bridge the gap between these two poles by describing the sensory mechanics of shattering. Based on insights from the cultural theory of modern senses, I argue that, in Kolyma, shattering involved the restructuring of the inhabitants’ sensorium shaped by the ecology of effortless modern amenities, particularly centralized heating. It occurred through redressing of attention and transformation in the shared materiality, with new substances, such as wastewater or bodily heat, coming into sensory exchanges in defiance of previous social conventions. I conclude by demonstrating the importance of collective shattering for local history, even in the absence of a discernible political turning point.

Making Space for Peace in Contexts of ‘Non-war’ Violence: Challenging War-Peace Binaries Through Feminist, Spatio-Temporal, and Decolonial Approaches

ABSTRACT Peace is often represented as a matter of time, as a political state that happens after war. This special issue contests this linear and binary view by giving an account of being and thinking between the boundaries of peace and war. It challenges mainstream ideas, political discourses, and collective imaginaries about the location of violence, peace, and peacebuilding. It does so by providing empirical and theoretical arguments as to why Peace and Conflict Studies and Geographies of Peace should widen their scope of empirical sites to include contexts of non-war violence, such as military urbanism, counterterrorism, police violence, migration, environmental struggles, and continued everyday violence and peacebuilding in different locations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. To do so, the special issue presents four theoretical lines of inquiry: 1) spatiality; 2) temporality; 3) feminist phenomenology and; 4) decolonial thought. Collectively, the articles make a strong case, epistemologically, theoretically, and methodologically, about peace as a complex embodied experience that should be analysed in time and space. The special issue concludes by calling for ‘making space for peace’ through in-betweenness, care, and non-violent resistance.

Clandestine fashion amidst war and migration: Murat, trans Afghan women and politics of (un)belonging

Discourses around Afghan women’s fashion and beauty during the so-called War on Terror have been used to justify interventions and war. From the Beauty Academy of Kabul to Vogue’s Burqa series, Afghan women have lurked within the possibilities and impossibilities of the traditionally oppressed and modernly liberated. Trans Afghan women have remained invisible. Building on the feminist critique of the discourse of beauty in Afghanistan, this article brings into conversation the everyday performances of fashion and beauty in the lives of murat, trans Afghan women. Through a de/colonial ethnography of three murat/trans Afghan women in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Dublin, Ireland, I argue that clandestine fashion for some murat/trans Afghan women becomes means of belonging and sites of negotiations with home and exile. Some use fashion to escape the everyday violence of war and refugeeism, while others use it to disrupt the heterosexist gaze on the streets of metropolitan cities such as Kabul and Dublin and give visibility to trans women and their embodiment of fashion as political acts of resistance. ‘Clandestine fashion’ and beauty embodiment and performances of these trans Afghan women shed light on everyday security, friendship/kinship, joy and the complexities of trans refugee life during times of war and exile.

‘You feel it in your bones’: Mobility, animacy, and the everyday violence of incarceration in the American southwest

In this article, I explore how mobility, animacy, and ontology intertwine to shape everyday violence in the carceral American Southwest. I draw on ethnographic research that I conducted between 2016 and 2017 at the Desert Echo Facility, a state prison that holds individuals from minimum to high-security levels. Some incarcerated people feel supposedly inanimate objects, such as walls, rocks, paper, and floors moving, while others feel vibrations moving across the compound. For some of the incarcerated, physical movement signifies aliveness – meaning that incarceration forces them to question if they are less alive than the “inanimate” materials that confine them. Others understand these movements as the direct violence of the state that purposefully disrupts how they construct relations. In this context, incarcerated peoples’ alive status is no longer a given and their relations no longer assumed to be inherent and ongoing, but rather, processes to be negotiated within criminal punishment systems. I focus on what these movements mean to incarcerated people, and how they situate these movements within differing ontologies to make visible the often-hidden violence of incarceration in the United States.

From Jamestown to Bethlehem: Local connections of geopolitical violence

In this visual intervention, I demonstrate connections between Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and rural Jamestown, Pennsylvania, USA, through 14 photos of surrounding landscapes. This intervention demonstrates how local geopolitical landscapes between two settler colonial nations perpetuate violence in the occupied Palestinian Territory (oPT), specifically through photos of “less-lethal munitions” in the West Bank and the site near the Pennsylvania manufacturer. While many scholars have demonstrated how US media and broader geopolitical discourses shape violence in everyday, intimate ways on bodies and people, this photo essay demonstrates how geopolitical violence and rhetoric manifest in everyday, local landscapes. Photos in this essay come from Aida Camp in the occupied West Bank outside of Bethlehem and rural Ohio and Pennsylvania, USA, on the route to where Combined Systems, Inc. manufactures rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, and other “less-lethal munitions and launching systems” deployed by the Israeli Security Force (ISF) in Aida.

Everyday violence and care: insights from fictive kin relations between madams and sex workers in India

ABSTRACT This article intervenes in the globally polarised terrain of debates on violence and agency in sex work. With a critical eye on how developmentalism governs these debates, the article explores fictive kin relations between women in Sonagachi, a prominent red-light area in Eastern India. Through an analysis of ethnographic observations and life-history interviews among madams and sex workers across three brothel households, this article argues that the configuration of ‘family-like’ relationships needs to be understood against a backdrop of what ‘family’ implies for socio-economically marginalised women who sell sex in urban India. Specifically, experiences of choice and coercion within these relationships are predicated on how madams and sex workers respond to kosto, a vernacularised articulation of everyday violence in each other’s lives, through jotno or care. Through this, the article sheds light on everyday forms of harm and solidarity between women in a red-light area, challenging institutionalised exceptionalisms of violence within sex work.

‘Built on my B(l)ack’: racial capitalism and anti-Blackness in predominantly white institutions of higher education

ABSTRACT This article presents a qualitative analysis of Black student organizers’ experiences of racism at the University of Missouri, where they led a resurgence of campus struggles in 2015. Semi-structured interviews with former student organizers were conducted and, together with archival materials, subject to thematic analysis. Black students faced frequent racist aggression, wherein their presence in campus social and intellectual life was cause for white alarm and aggression. Analyzing experiences and impacts of everyday violence in relation to broader systems of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism, the article identifies educational, psychological, social, spatial, material, and political consequences of campus racism. Several broader impacts of anti-Black racism are delineated, including psychological harm, economic dispossession, and institutional maintenance. The findings illuminate the effects of varied but cohesive instances of anti-Black racism in higher education, making visible repetitive moments of everyday violence that universities both enable and erase.

Social media and the mediation of everyday violence: A study of Colombian young adults’ experiences

Social media is a critical element of contemporary ecologies of violence, especially in countries with a long-standing history of armed conflicts – such as Colombia, the setting of this study. In this context, this article explores how violence is mediated through and within social media platforms among Colombian young adults. More specifically, by drawing on Jesús Martín-Barbero, this study explores how violence is mediated on digital platforms across time (temporalities), space (spatialities), technologies and techniques (technicities) and our senses (sensorialities). Methodologically, this case study draws from the experiences of young adults from Colombia who were invited to collaboratively discuss the violence they engage with in their everyday uses of social media platforms. The results show evidence of destabilization of meaning-making practices in the territories of violence that young adults inhabit on digital platforms, as well as processes of normalization of harm.

Drawing Ambivalence

Abstract This article reflects on the significance of Melilla, a Spanish enclave and southern border of the European Union (EU), in the migratory experience of the Moroccan youth on the move to Europe who call themselves harraga. The methodology combines a multisited ethnographic approach (Marcus 2001), from Casablanca to Paris, with a multimodal one (Westmoreland 2022), collecting information through in-depth interviews, life stories, participant observations and a drawing workshop. Although the institutional violence in the governance of the mobility of this youth makes Melilla resemble a city-prison (Khosravi 2021), in my reflections I argue that this border has an ambivalent impact on the whole migratory experience of the harraga youth. On the one hand, frustration, everyday violence, and racism appear; on the other, friendship, autonomy and networking.

Conceptual Analysis of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005

When we talk about crime against women, the first thing that appears in our mind is heinous offences which were recognized under the criminal laws. What is often neglected and unrecognized is the offences that were committed within the family. Domestic violence is present in most of the societies but it often goes unrecognized as it usually happened within the family. It is often tolerated by the victims because most of them do not want to exposed it and take recourse to law due to fear of losing family reputation. A careful reading of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 clearly show that the enactment is a women welfare legislation which provides quick and effective civil remedy against different forms of violence by their relatives. The act is wider in scope than any other previous legislation relating to women centric provisions such as Section 498 A IPC, Section 125 CrPC. Section 498 A IPC which provide cruelty by husband or relatives of husband, the explanation appended to section which defined Cruelty is very limited, it applies only to violence faced by married women at the hands of their husband and relative of husband. The definition neglects everyday violence faced by married women at the hands of other relative and by an unmarried women and children at their home as they face violence at hands of other male or female relatives. Section 125 CrPC provides maintenance of wives, children and parents. It only concern with the maintenance allowance payable. The said Act, however, provides various reliefs like residence order, protection order monetary reliefs etc to the aggrieved person.

Everyday Violence: Immigration Enforcement, COVID-19, and Depression among Undocumented Young Adults in California.

The immigration enforcement system has significant effects on the health of immigrants, their families, and society. Exposure to the immigration enforcement system is linked to adverse mental health outcomes, which may have been exacerbated by sustained immigration enforcement activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study was conducted to investigate the association between exposure to immigration enforcement and the mental health of undocumented young adults in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data are from the COVID-19 BRAVE (Building Community Raising All Immigrant Voices for Health Equity) Study, a community-engaged cross-sectional survey of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on undocumented immigrants in California. A total of 366 undocumented immigrants between 18 and 39 years of age completed the online survey, which was conducted between September 2020 and February 2021. Multivariable logistic regression models were fit to examine the association between immigration enforcement exposure and depression. Almost all participants (91.4%) disclosed exposure to the immigration enforcement system, with most reporting an average of 3.52 (SD=2.06) experiences. Multivariate analyses revealed that an increase in the immigration enforcement exposure score was significantly associated with higher odds of depression (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]=1.24; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.10, 1.40), and women were 92% more likely to report depression than were men (aOR=1.92; 95% CI: 1.12, 3.31). Those who reported deportation fears were significantly more likely to be depressed (aOR=1.24; 95% CI: 1.10, 1.40). Researchers should consider the mental health implications of a punitive immigration enforcement system, and policymakers should examine the impacts of immigration policies on local communities.

Masculinities and the Lived Understandings of Bystander Responses to Everyday Violence

Among criminologists there has been an expanded contemporary interest in measures that encourage bystander intervention in the social settings of escalating and potentially violent incidents. These broadly include partner abuse and domestic disputes, as well as confrontational social interaction and other forms of targeted harassment and violence (racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist etc.), in everyday life. This article considers the likely success or failure of seeking to foster such measures as a core strategy of violence prevention, with discussion of the author’s Sydney-based study of the understandings of violence arising from young men’s lived experience of its various forms. It particularly concentrates on the results of focus groups conducted with a mixed sample of young men (aged 16-25 years) between 2018-2020. These participants had personal engagements with violence and potential violence, that shaped their reservations and doubts about regular intervention and general male anti-violence advocacy as reasonable and achievable social practices.

A Rhetoric of Everyday Violence: Embodied Slow Violence

ABSTRACT This article builds on the scholarship on violence at the nexus of rhetoric, philosophy, decoloniality, and human rights discourse to theorize what it calls a rhetoric of everyday violence. Moving beyond the focus on the politics of representation in slow violence, it brings a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic and a focus on the politics of recognition to illegible temporal violence, arguing that a rhetoric of everyday violence can help recalibrate human rights discourse to recognize temporal and gendered violence as human rights violations.

Violence and emotions. Towards a description of everyday violence

Violence and emotions. Towards a description of everyday violence

Explaining aversion to true crime documentaries: why do audiences refuse to watch them?

ABSTRACT Despite the widespread fascination with media content, scholarly attention often overlooks aversion, refusal, or resistance to it. This qualitative study explores the rejection of True Crime documentaries (TCD) by examining viewers in Colombia and Singapore, identifying reasons for refusal and exploring perceived effects, with emotional distress being a common factor. Notably, differences emerge between the two samples: Singaporean participants dislike TCDs due to a cultural disconnect tied to their low murder rate, and they lack precise notions about TCD effects. In contrast, Colombians cite the need to escape everyday violence and avoid glorifying criminals. These findings suggest that cultural context, including murder rates, influences viewers' aversion to TCDs, underscoring the importance for TV managers to consider localization in global content distribution decisions.

Covering Feminicidios: How Mexican Journalists Fight to Improve Representation of Violence Against Women

ABSTRACT In the last decades, there have been multiple calls to challenge the way Mexican journalists report on the everyday violence women face in the country, particularly the coverage of feminicidios (femicides). To better understand newsroom challenges, the present study uses the hierarchy of influences model to explore the different levels of influence that shape feminicidio news in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, one of the most violent states for women in the country. The findings, based on 20 interviews with journalists who covered feminicidios, indicate that routine (sources, available resources, crime formats) and organizational (newspaper sections and economic demands) levels continue to shape most of the initial news agenda, but that individual journalists are aware of this, and regularly try to find opportunities to push for stories that place the issue as part of a larger societal problem. This results in a reported increasing number of feminicidio news with a gender perspective and strategic attempts to make up for past biased reporting. Implications and recommendations for the coverage of the larger VAW issue in the Mexican setting are discussed.