{"id":509,"date":"2017-12-03T19:29:56","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T00:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/?p=509"},"modified":"2017-12-03T19:29:56","modified_gmt":"2017-12-04T00:29:56","slug":"nothing-but-a-broo-ha-ha-state-responses-to-gender-based-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/cities-and-society\/nothing-but-a-broo-ha-ha-state-responses-to-gender-based-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing but a “Broo-ha-ha”: State Responses to Gender-Based Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Presenting violence against women as an urban issue examines this form of violence as a\u00a0spacial, location-based issue rather than a systemic one. Violence against women occurs at high rates regardless of location, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status,\u00a0and\u00a0therefore\u00a0operates as a systemic issue. I took issue with assigning gender-based violence an urban brand, because of the way that hierarchies of power and control that feed violence against women exist on individual levels as well as societal ones, regardless of physical location. Additionally, posing rape and sexual assault as an urban issue suggests that these crimes exist because of the structure of a city, that there\u00a0are\u00a0more dangers to women and more rapists in places with higher populations and more anonymity.\u00a0This feeds\u00a0into the\u00a0false\u00a0narrative that a person is more likely to be a victim when exposed to circumstances like dark city alley ways, when in reality most rapes are committed by an\u00a0acquaintance\u00a0or intimate partner. I do not think that the existence of an urban setting\u00a0enables the act of rape more than a rural or suburban setting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, our discussions in class proved that\u00a0there is value in examining\u00a0violence against women from the urban\u00a0lens\u00a0to see the ways in which the state fails to\u00a0resolve\u00a0such a widespread crime\u00a0and\u00a0perpetuates the social control that rape and assault\u00a0create. Asking the question of whether cities are safe for women\u00a0proves\u00a0useless\u00a0because women aren\u2019t fully safe anywhere, but it\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0useful to ask\u00a0what ways are\u00a0cities\u00a0marginalizing to women specifically. Based on our conversation in class, the existence of the slut\u00a0walk\u00a0movement\u00a0in response to victim blaming by authorities, and the widespread mistreatment and neglect of rape evidence, it is clear that the urban structure marginalizes victims of assault.\u00a0While this could certainly mean men and non-gender conforming individuals too, a high percentage of sexual assault victims are women, making this widespread neglect by the authorities a gendered issue.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I use the term “neglect” intentionally. In response\u00a0to my\u00a0own expert question of whether the untested rape kits\u00a0were\u00a0an act of neglect rather than a resource problem, I believe\u00a0that it certainly represents state perpetuation of violence against women and is deliberately neglectful.\u00a0Of course, the department in Detroit “did not see the accumulation of untested rape kits\u00a0as a problem<\/i>”\u00a0<\/i>(Campbell, Shaw,\u00a0and\u00a0Fehler-Cabral,\u00a0157), meaning they did not publicly recognize their complicity in the act of neglect. One police officer commented that the uproar following the discovery of the rape kits was\u00a0“just a big\u00a0broo-ha-ha about nothing”\u00a0(Campbell, Shaw,\u00a0and\u00a0Fehler-Cabral,\u00a0157). This impression\u00a0differs dramatically from the conclusions of the investigative team, which stated that,\u00a0“Based on their analysis of 400 randomly sampled kits, it appeared that the overwhelming majority of the SAKs in police property had never been adequately investigated, the survivors had been treated in retraumatizing ways by police personnel, and the community needed a long-term plan for change”\u00a0(Campbell, Shaw,\u00a0and\u00a0Fehler-Cabral,\u00a0154). While the existence of such a problem is in itself a form of neglect and systemic violence against the victims of these assaults, it is also\u00a0distinctly\u00a0problematic that the department did not even recognize the issue. Perhaps they were simply\u00a0deflecting\u00a0the criticism by diminishing the issue. But the possibility of the department genuinely failing to see the problem in neglecting the evidence of 11,000 cases of assault speaks to a hegemonic violence against women that is thoroughly normalized in society.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I also think it is important to look at the difference in response to crime against women versus other forms of crime. The police department in\u00a0Detroit blamed the problem partly\u00a0on a lack of resources.\u00a0As\u00a0JP Hughes commented in class, it is surely possible to gather enough resources to test rape kits regularly, as exemplified by the police department\u00a0in Georgia that he mentioned,\u00a0who\u00a0mobilized the resources to test all their kits after a backlog of kits.\u00a0Thinking back to the ways in which police departments in cities handle other forms of crime, particularly crime associated with low-income, Black and Latinx men, the excessive use of resources to incarcerate these men discredits the argument that the authorities are hurting for resources.\u00a0Sociologists Victor Rios, Alice Goffman, and others demonstrated that the\u00a0hypercriminalization\u00a0of these men meant that extensive amounts of resources were expended by urban police departments across the country to enable the\u00a0mass incarceration of men of color. Regardless of the triviality\u00a0of the offenses\u00a0committed by these boys and men, the system called for punishment, in\u00a0ways that appear deliberate. Why do the authorities treat gender-based violence so dramatically differently?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, does the state have interest\u00a0in the continuation of gender-based violence?\u00a0This is a radical statement, but it is important to examine how the established neglect of the state could be completely intentional.\u00a0Is the widespread neglect of evidence\u00a0for assault cases a similar political act as the\u00a0hypercriminalization\u00a0of low-income Black and Latinx men? Are the authorities mistreating rape cases deliberately?\u00a0This posits that the state is actively engaged in perpetuating gender-based violence, rather than passively aiding in its existence. If this is the case, how do we fight back against a culture of violence when\u00a0the\u00a0state is deliberately supporting it?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Presenting violence against women as an urban issue examines this form of violence as a\u00a0spacial, location-based issue rather than a systemic one. Violence against women occurs at high rates regardless of location, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status,\u00a0and\u00a0therefore\u00a0operates as a systemic issue. I took issue with assigning gender-based violence an urban brand, because of the way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":495,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cities-and-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/495"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-2202-fall-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}